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The wasp can choose to start integrating non-caterpillar food sources into its diet, reducing suffering at first while it evolves the necessary digestive system
by hypertele-Xii 3y ago
The wasp can choose to start integrating non-caterpillar food sources into its diet, reducing suffering at first while it evolves the necessary digestive system, ultimately minimizing and eliminating suffering.
Wasps are somewhat doomed that they haven't made this choice before. The pit gets deeper and deeper the more you dig. The climb will be longer and harder the later you start.
If fish can learn to breathe air, walk on land, and care for their young, wasps can learn to not eat caterpillars.
- tumsfestival 3y agoYou seem to think that evolution is both an intelligent and controllable process. It isn't.
- hypertele-Xii 3y agoIt literally is though. Sexual selection, emphasis on selection, is conscious. You choose half the genes of your descendants. Unless there's only one mating option. You also choose where you hang, and what you eat, which drives adaptations to that environment.
- jddj 3y agoYou might feel like you have conscious control over the process of acting on your preferences to select the candidate for the randomish splicing of the genes of your partner's parents and your own parents. Did you choose your preferences, though?
- hypertele-Xii 3y agoYes! I've consciously decided to learn to like many things in life that I used to hate, because they are good for me. I see no reason to assume animals aren't capable of the same. It just takes time.
- secstate 3y agoHow does this pattern of thought not lead to eugenics?
- hypertele-Xii 3y ago"A set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population"? That just describes sexual selection in general. Of course you think with your big head when choosing a mate, not the small one that's easily fooled. You make it sound like choosing good genes for your offspring is evil or something.
- antihipocrat 3y agoThe wasp hatchlings eat the caterpillar from the inside. The wasp needs the caterpillar as a vessel for its eggs. The wasp has a choice like a tapeworm can choose to exist outside of the gut.. that is, it doesn't have any choice at all.
- hypertele-Xii 3y agoIncorrect. The tapeworm can choose where and how in the gut it exists. It can choose how much it leeches from its host. There are always choices to be made that direct our evolution, for you, me, the wasp, and the tapeworm. Your attitude is fatalistic. You're saying we're all doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors until we die or get lucky. That's a belief. A false one at that.
- antihipocrat 3y agoThe tapeworm has no conception that it exists inside a larger creature and that its nutrition is obtained by leeching off its host. The tapeworm has no choice because it has no ability to comprehend the context of its own existence. A lot of human beings find themselves in the same predicament through no fault of their own.
- hypertele-Xii 3y agoThat seems so 100% wrong to me. Who are you to say what tapeworms do or don't comprehend? We don't even understand consciousness, yet here you are exclaiming that tapeworms are essentially robots fated to die of extinction. They are not. They are conscious beings in charge of their lives and evolution like any other being is. They might have less brain cells than us, but you don't know what they are thinking.
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoPretty sure they are not contemplating the problem of evil and whether they can make better moral choices. But, you know, who knows, right?