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HG Wells speculates about this in The Time Machine. The futuristic humans lost their revenge instinct and are helpless against their subterranean tormenters.
by tantalor 5y ago
HG Wells speculates about this in The Time Machine. The futuristic humans lost their revenge instinct and are helpless against their subterranean tormenters.
- cdrini 5y agoI don't remember the loss of the "revenge instinct" being a part of that book. The future humans had optimized for comfort/happiness so much that they evolved to be more and more docile and childlike. They lost their intelligence and evolved into stupid beasts again because they had no evolutionary pressure to become anything else. They didn't lose their self-preservatory instinct -- they just lost the only defensive tool humans have evolved that lets us compete/win against all other animals: our intelligence. Kind of like those birds in a New Zealand island that evolved to be too fat to fly, because the island had no predators. And then cats got accidentally introduced to the island.
- potatochup 5y agoNew Zealand has/had plenty of predators, they were just all avian [0], [1], which hunt by sight, and during the day [2]. Existing/nesting on the ground with good visual camouflage is a adaptation to avoid avian predators. Obviously it doesn't work that well against mammalian predators. - [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_falcon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_falcon - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_eagle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_eagle - [2] exception here being the Ruru (an Owl)