You must log in or register to comment.
I mean, the Roman Empire was an olive tree superorganism. Prove me wrong.
There’s a Pax Romana/olive branch joke in there somewhere
“We’re taking your country over. You should produce olives. If not, then grapes. Or like, wheat, I guess. But definitely olives.” - Pax Romana
Makes total sense: who’s working for whom? Is wheat making an effort to till the soil and find fertiliser to help us grow, or is it the other way round?
And here we have a typical specimen exhibiting capitalist realism: Observe how the subject is analysing everything they come across on a “who works for who” basis, projecting human modes of production onto the universe. Applying it, even in vain, this reductive universality ensures that they will never think beyond it and, not thinking beyond it, not question either working for a capitalist or being a capitalist who is worked for, thereby in either case working for capitalism, a form of human cooperation in which happiness, well-being, yes even human connection (that necessitating eye-level communication) is traded for hastened advancement of the economy to achieve post-scarcity.
Class war: wheat vs humanity
Don’t even get me started on cats.
I suspect cats. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9756-toxoplasmosis
one of the many reasons to keep your cats indoors.
This is like the question I’ve always asked about getting sick.
Do you produce extra mucous because your body is trying to get rid of what’s making you sick or does the illness make you produce more mucous in order to spread more easily?
I suspect the serious answer is that we produce mucus and sneezing as a natural response to microbes, and that’s the environment within which microbes have evolved to take advantage of the mucus and sneezing
Pretty sure this is exactly correct. I read the Kurzgesagt book Immune recently and it was a fascinating view into how our bodies are really the result of ancient warfare, with constant oneupmanship between us and the environment.
Survival of the fittest does not work with intent.
It does if I kill loads of stuff
Mucus is one of the bodies innate methods of protection, same with vomiting, same with crying same with sweating. The body knows something is wrong so it kicks the production of those into overdrive to hopefully force whatever was in it out. Its why we start sweating, salivating and sometimes vomit when we eat super spicy peppers despite the fruit being room temp amd full of water
While I wouldn’t say that’s right, I also wouldn’t come right out and call it wrong either. This very much engages with the “Selfish Gene”, an heuristic model of thinking about evolution from the perspective of the gene itself instead of populations.
As an added amusement, the book “The Selfish Gene” came out in 1976, and is the source of the word “meme,” used somewhat differently than it is now, naturally.
The selfish gene ironically proves that gods exist. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-memetic-proof-for-the-existence-of-gods-e5d103234fc7
At best it proves the concept of gods exists and I doubt anyone disagrees with that, you can’t really argue that a thought can’t exist. What it doesn’t prove is that God exists as some material or immaterial entity and that’s what atheists claim, that there is no existence of any entity that could be considered a god.
Why it doesn’t prove the existence of gods is simple. If the proof is that it exists because we thought it then dragons exist, faeries exist, even flat earth exists because there are people who think it exists. I don’t think I need to bring more examples to show how ridiculous the premise is. Just because we can think of a thing doesn’t mean that thing now exists.
Dragons certainly exist. They live in books and reproduce when someone reads a book about dragons and is inspired by it. Over time evolutionary pressures have caused the more successful of the younger dragons to become cuter and more friendly, and the most successful dragons even made the leap to film. That’s how Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon came to be. He is the result of a long process of evolution of dragons. You can trace his lineage from the Beowulf dragon, to Tolkein’s Smaug, through Eragon’s Saphira, to the Toothless of the HTTYD books, and finally to Dreamworks’ movie version. Each generation trying out new evolutionary adaptations that changed their fitness to survive and reproduce, and the niche they occupy within the ecosystem that is human thought. Toothless is the culmination of those thousands of years of evolution, purpose built to fill children’s heads up with wonderful dreams.
I don’t know if you have a wife but I’m now going to imagine you have a wife. You’re now married. Now I’m going to imagine having consensual sex with your new wife. Now I’m imagining you’re killing your wife because she cheated on you. I guess you’re a murderer now, it’s true because I thought of it. Actually I thought about a lot of way worse things about you but I’m not going to go into detail about all the vile shit you’ve done, I’ll just sum it up as you being the worst human being who has ever lived. Since that’s what I thought it must be true, right?
*You. I use capitalised pronouns. And My ex-wife uses it/its.
I couldn’t care less.
If you don’t care, then surely you don’t mind editing your comment to use My preferred pronouns, seeing as you have no preference and I do.
Oh it’s like touhou, I get it now.
Just like cats right?
Omni-Man’s red eyes make him look blazed, which fits what he’s saying pretty well. “Dad, what the hell are you talking about?”
- Beer
Isn’t this Michael Pollan’s theory?
That plants make themselves Delicious/useful/whatever so we’ll use them more?
Yup! The Botany of Desire. Good read.
Focuses on how apples, potatoes, tulips, and cannabis have all been vastly successful at being spread by humans because we find them useful.
Realistically the wheat lucked out that we thought it was delicious. I like the theory that it started as a three way symbiotic relationship between wheat humans and yeast, with accidental beer being the reason we started planting the stuff to begin with.
It really is a symbiotic relationship we’ve developed with the things we’ve domesticated (or that domesticated us)
Especially animals reserved for working instead of eating, because in those situations oftentimes the food being made with the work is shared between the symbiotes.
Yeah, influence is rarely a one way street and things like agriculture or animal husbandry have definitely changed us as well
I would say it’s symbiotic to the continued survival and propegation of their genes, but not to their well-being as individuals.
Depends on the situation, factory farming definitely, but for most natural raised situations I’d argue the animal’s well being is like 99% of the work being done.
How to tell someone is reading Sapiens.
Still, insane that “science/technology improvements” did not improve happienes at all. Just shifted the standards.
Haha. I’m reading Sapiens right now, too
I’ve never actually read any Harari books for some reason. Is his stuff generally “reliable”?
No idea, tbh. I’m nearly half way through it and I’ve yet to hear anything controversial other than religion is basically made up, but I already thought so. It’s really just super thought-provoking stuff.
If I were to describe it, I’d say it’s moreso an incredibly well thought-out narrative on the story of the human species and where we fit in time and space.
For example, the part this meme is from blew my mind. It’s a couple paragraphs and gets set up with the backdrop/context of the agricultural evolution and kind of comes out of nowhere.
Lastly, one interesting thought I had while reading it is how evolution doesn’t really “care” if we’re depressed, as long as we’re still reproducing the cycle continues (this was moreso a thought I had while reading the book than something explicitly said, I think)
Well, who’s living in the house? Certainly not the wheat.
You, a farmer, living in a thatched roof mud hut just alongside the field and spending 90% of your day - sun up to sun down - digging irrigation ditches, spreading fertilizer, and hauling around buckets of seed.
Me, a wheat grass, cozily settled into freshly irrigated mud, reaching towards the sun with my long fronds, spreading my seed between all my neighbors, and never having to worry about competitors because this dipshit ape-thing weeds the area for me every day in hopes of one day gargling my fermented plant-jizz until he blacks out.
Humans are an unfortunate by-product of the fungus’ colonisation of the planet. As soon as they’ve tricked us into heating the planet enough to melt the poles, their conquest will be complete.
it’s called “co-evolution”
Humans dont invent anything, they discover it.
Once you put enough things together so the parts do other things, I think it’s reasonable to call it inventing.
This makes me think of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael… is there a community for that?
