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You are assuming very human or even mammalian qualities and constructs like "parents/family/emotion" to invertebrates that have no problem cannibalizing their o

You are assuming very human or even mammalian qualities and constructs like "parents/family/emotion" to invertebrates that have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates. If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion.

edumucelli 5y ago
Many humans do that to other humans, so I do not see how different we are from them.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Oh come on.
bryans 5y ago
The largest spiders are almost universally docile toward humans, so your own assumption doesn't really hold water.
birksherty 5y ago
No species can come even close to humans in killing others without any hesitation. Have you even seen the documentary Earthlings? http://www.nationearth.com/ http://www.nationearth.com/
- Levitz 5y ago
  Oh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem. Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No. Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
  - AwaAwa 5y ago
    Human industrial slaughter where animals are trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) would beg to differ. Or how about male chicks being liquefied and fed back to the chickens? Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter. This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
    - kuraudoOishii 5y ago
      Please drop the antisemitism
    - phonypc 5y ago
      >trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) There is absolutely push/incentive to monitor and correct for failures in stunning. The stress response it entails in the animal makes for poor quality meat, or even inedible meat that would have to thrown out. Also, stunning is followed by slaughtering and draining. There is no situation in industrial production in which an animal would be dismembered and skinned alive.
    - swayvil 5y ago
      Forget the actual slaughter. They live their entire life in a torture cage, smeared in excrement, ears filled with the screams of their suffering family. We are clearly demons.
    - birksherty 5y ago
      People don't like hearing truth they don't like, so they downvote.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      > skinned while still conscious because the stun mechanism could, eventually, fail. And all those grand pianos falling over the poor cat again and again... Oh sorry, we were talking about the real life, or in terms of a cartoon possibility?
- nickpeterson 5y ago
  I think the horrifying thing about humans is we do understand what we’re doing and choose to do it anyways. Spiders kill things to eat them to survive. Humans do it for much more complicated or arbitrary reasons.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    Our whole intellectual/scientific/technological culture is founded upon our ability to focus our attention. And the flipside of focus is blindness. Ignorance. One thing is focused upon, seen and controlled with vast depth and clarity. While 1000 other things are obliviated away. That obliviated part. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. (And a lot of good stuff too, no doubt)
    - Retric 5y ago
      Attention isn’t binary. Stubbing your toe is a great way to pay a lot of attention to something you normally ignore, but conversely we are paying attention to the lack of pain without it diverting any effort. Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.
      - swayvil 5y ago
        Yes, distraction is a thing. And oblivious focus is also a thing. Both are aspects of attention.
  - resonious 5y ago
    I can't speak for spiders but there are plenty of animals that do horrible things for reasons other than eating and surviving. Seals come to mind (with what they do to penguins). Also cats. At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 5y ago
> If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion. That's how predators act. Yet, we have no lack of love for birds and cats. Anyway, don't group spiders on the "have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates". They are much more complex than that. Besides some vertebrates also have no problem doing that.
mellavora 5y ago
sorry, what? The claim that "parents/family/emotion" are constructs which are limited to (higher) mammals rests on the assumption that these constructs are dependent on i.e. a highly developed cerebral cortex-- and that somehow the cortex is the seat of emotions. Given that neurotransmitters (adrenaline?) are so instrumental to regulating emotional state, that claim seems highly unlikely. The most plausible possibility is that all multi-celled beings have some sense of family and parenthood. And here with the spiders you are presented with evidence of such. Does a mother spider feel distress with quite the same level of nuance as a mother human? Perhaps not. Is she clearly distressed? absolutely.
bugzz 5y ago
If they had "no problem" cannibalizing their offspring, they'd quickly go extinct! In reality, cannibalizing of offspring only occurs in particular circumstances - if conditions are poor enough that most of the young won't survive anyway, for example. In which case their instincts kick in to cannibalize as a way to recoup the energy and try again at a better time. If conditions are right there will instead be a strong instinct to protect the egg sack / young.
logicchains 5y ago
Humans in desperate situations will do similar things, sacrificing their children for resources: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/asia/afghanistan-child-marriage-crisis-taliban-intl-hnk-dst/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/asia/afghanistan-child-ma...
toss1 5y ago
Yes, and "Rugby players eat their dead" (true story, 1972 plane crash, subject of several books, etc. [1]) Just because you can't readily see the emotion, does not mean it is not there. True to say that 'we don't know if they regret having to eat their young/mates', but saying they don't care is just as much making assumptions as saying they do regret it, merely switching the polarity. It is also possible that eating the mate/being eaten is the most loving thing it can do, giving not only the DNA but also their entire stored energy for the good of the offspring. Or, they might be terrified. Or, they might not be sufficiently sentient to notice. Either way, what we know is that we don't know (tho there may be someone who's studied it enough, IDK). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571#Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571...
- Talanes 5y ago
  I've always heard that story as a soccer team, and I'm just now realizing it was probably because someone down the line didn't want to explain Rugby to Americans in the 70's.

edumucelli 5y ago

Many humans do that to other humans, so I do not see how different we are from them.

marcellus23 5y ago
Oh come on.

bryans 5y ago

The largest spiders are almost universally docile toward humans, so your own assumption doesn't really hold water.

birksherty 5y ago

No species can come even close to humans in killing others without any hesitation. Have you even seen the documentary Earthlings? http://www.nationearth.com/ http://www.nationearth.com/

Levitz 5y ago
Oh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem. Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No. Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
- AwaAwa 5y ago
  Human industrial slaughter where animals are trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) would beg to differ. Or how about male chicks being liquefied and fed back to the chickens? Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter. This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
  - kuraudoOishii 5y ago
    Please drop the antisemitism
  - phonypc 5y ago
    >trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) There is absolutely push/incentive to monitor and correct for failures in stunning. The stress response it entails in the animal makes for poor quality meat, or even inedible meat that would have to thrown out. Also, stunning is followed by slaughtering and draining. There is no situation in industrial production in which an animal would be dismembered and skinned alive.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    Forget the actual slaughter. They live their entire life in a torture cage, smeared in excrement, ears filled with the screams of their suffering family. We are clearly demons.
  - birksherty 5y ago
    People don't like hearing truth they don't like, so they downvote.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    > skinned while still conscious because the stun mechanism could, eventually, fail. And all those grand pianos falling over the poor cat again and again... Oh sorry, we were talking about the real life, or in terms of a cartoon possibility?
nickpeterson 5y ago
I think the horrifying thing about humans is we do understand what we’re doing and choose to do it anyways. Spiders kill things to eat them to survive. Humans do it for much more complicated or arbitrary reasons.
- swayvil 5y ago
  Our whole intellectual/scientific/technological culture is founded upon our ability to focus our attention. And the flipside of focus is blindness. Ignorance. One thing is focused upon, seen and controlled with vast depth and clarity. While 1000 other things are obliviated away. That obliviated part. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. (And a lot of good stuff too, no doubt)
  - Retric 5y ago
    Attention isn’t binary. Stubbing your toe is a great way to pay a lot of attention to something you normally ignore, but conversely we are paying attention to the lack of pain without it diverting any effort. Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.
    - swayvil 5y ago
      Yes, distraction is a thing. And oblivious focus is also a thing. Both are aspects of attention.
- resonious 5y ago
  I can't speak for spiders but there are plenty of animals that do horrible things for reasons other than eating and surviving. Seals come to mind (with what they do to penguins). Also cats. At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marcosdumay 5y ago

> If they were big enough they would kill you and your family without any hesitation or emotion. That's how predators act. Yet, we have no lack of love for birds and cats. Anyway, don't group spiders on the "have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates". They are much more complex than that. Besides some vertebrates also have no problem doing that.

mellavora 5y ago

sorry, what? The claim that "parents/family/emotion" are constructs which are limited to (higher) mammals rests on the assumption that these constructs are dependent on i.e. a highly developed cerebral cortex-- and that somehow the cortex is the seat of emotions. Given that neurotransmitters (adrenaline?) are so instrumental to regulating emotional state, that claim seems highly unlikely. The most plausible possibility is that all multi-celled beings have some sense of family and parenthood. And here with the spiders you are presented with evidence of such. Does a mother spider feel distress with quite the same level of nuance as a mother human? Perhaps not. Is she clearly distressed? absolutely.

bugzz 5y ago

If they had "no problem" cannibalizing their offspring, they'd quickly go extinct! In reality, cannibalizing of offspring only occurs in particular circumstances - if conditions are poor enough that most of the young won't survive anyway, for example. In which case their instincts kick in to cannibalize as a way to recoup the energy and try again at a better time. If conditions are right there will instead be a strong instinct to protect the egg sack / young.

logicchains 5y ago

Humans in desperate situations will do similar things, sacrificing their children for resources: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/asia/afghanistan-child-marriage-crisis-taliban-intl-hnk-dst/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/asia/afghanistan-child-ma...

toss1 5y ago

Yes, and "Rugby players eat their dead" (true story, 1972 plane crash, subject of several books, etc. [1]) Just because you can't readily see the emotion, does not mean it is not there. True to say that 'we don't know if they regret having to eat their young/mates', but saying they don't care is just as much making assumptions as saying they do regret it, merely switching the polarity. It is also possible that eating the mate/being eaten is the most loving thing it can do, giving not only the DNA but also their entire stored energy for the good of the offspring. Or, they might be terrified. Or, they might not be sufficiently sentient to notice. Either way, what we know is that we don't know (tho there may be someone who's studied it enough, IDK). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571#Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571...

Talanes 5y ago
I've always heard that story as a soccer team, and I'm just now realizing it was probably because someone down the line didn't want to explain Rugby to Americans in the 70's.