3 ms·
Also humanity has been functionally removed from natural selection for hundreds of years. That's not to say we can't die of diseases or such things, but how man
by ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Also humanity has been functionally removed from natural selection for hundreds of years. That's not to say we can't die of diseases or such things, but how many animals "hunt" or "forage" in a fucking Kroger, and pay for what they find with value credit slips? How many animals have access to firearms? How many other species have constructed vehicles that conquered land, sea, and sky, sometimes multiples of them even? We can't even comprehend the lifestyle, priorities and perspectives of a medieval peasant, let alone our ancestors who lived in caves and drew stick-animals.
The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous. Nothing we do is natural. Our food is either largely engineered or at the very least, bred selectively for maximum harvests. We can arbitrarily decide to travel thousands of miles from our "normal" habitat and be completely confident we will not only survive, but we do this for recreation. Hell, even the meat these weirdos are obsessing over is the result of millennia of selective breeding for the most meat per animal, and even some genetic engineering which is why factory-farmed chickens have tits so big they can't stand up correctly.
"Natural." I challenge anyone to find something in their home that is actually 100% natural.
- jamil7 3y ago> The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous. Not only ludicrous but also frequently used to prop up all kinds of biases.
- jondwillis 3y agoOnly thing I can think of: seeds that I sprout, grow, let flower, fruit, and seed again. Some are cultivars, but some are native. Some of the process isn’t exactly natural, but it could be.
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoYou know, that's fair. Didn't think of that.
- jfengel 3y agoThere aren't many completely wild plant foods, especially the kind you grow from seed. They've nearly all been bred to improve taste and yield. Ones you gather from the wild are more likely to be feral commercial varieties, rather than the kind hunter-gatherers would have had available.
- WalterBright 3y ago> humanity has been functionally removed from natural selection for hundreds of years. Evolution of humans is still happening. It's determined by how many of your children survive long enough to reproduce. If you don't have children, for whatever reason, your DNA is edited out of the future. The factors that drive this have certainly changed over the centuries, but they're always going to be in play (until people are able to customize DNA). See the movie "Idiocracy" for one take on this.
- im3w1l 3y ago> until people are able to customize DNA Replacing MtDNA with that of a donor is already a thing. We are also screening embryos' genes for diseases. Neither of these are true arbitrary-write modications I guess, but we are getting there one step at a time.
- WalterBright 3y agoOh, I think we're going to get there. The interesting thing is I doubt humans will do well living on other bodies in the solar system without deliberate genetic modification. The modifications would be things like being able to tolerate different gravities, different gas pressure, different air composition, radiation hardening, maybe seeing different light wavelengths, tolerance for various poisonous chemicals, etc.
- im3w1l 3y agoRepairing damaged genes, and putting already existing genes (especially human ones) in people I see us doing that fairly soon. But completely new genes for tolerating other planets. That seems very far off. Not in the next 100 years, I would think.
- hotpotamus 3y agoIf I'm honest, some overly-complicated molecule "living on" doesn't really do it for me. I'd rather go on living in my apartment. I'd rather achieve immortality by not dying.