people today with access to more raw information than any other period: the earth is flat
german artilleryman in 1916, who barely washes his own ass: I need to account for the curvature and rotation of the earth when plotting my firing plans
Eratosthenes, an Egyptian, in 3750 BC when fucking mammoths hadn’t even gone extinct yet: Oh hey I can use these two obelisks to calculate the earth’s entire circumference based on
the length of their shadows
and the Earth’s curvature. Neat.
Erastothenes was born in 276 BCE.
The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.
And as I’ve pointed out previously, the Coriolis effect was known even earlier than that, although it may not have become important to gunnery.
I find it utterly bizarre that humans saw these megafauna.
“
In fact, the Wrangel mammoth’s genome carried so many detrimental
mutations that the population had suffered a “genomic meltdown,”
according to Rebekah Rogers and Montgomery Slatkin of the University of
California, Berkeley.
Analyzing the Swedish team’s mammoth data at the
gene level, they found that many genes had accumulated mutations that
would have halted synthesis of proteins before they were complete,
making the proteins useless, they report Thursday in PLOS Genetics.
“
That
“genomic meltdown”
is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about – unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit – with incredibly damaged chromosomes.
Sex exists for a reason, and no, “because it’s fun” is not the answer,
sorry. It works better than reproduction otherwise. Which is why every
complex species uses it.
Intelligence requires a lot of things to be working correctly, and if you have an all female species that is over the tipping point of idiocy, then there won’t be enough people to maintain the technology to continue to reproduce. And humans will go the way of the
Wrangel
beasties.
Fortunately, feminists are horribly lazy bastards, so i doubt they’ll continue to get their way, but it does made for a decent plot for a dystopian fiction…
What …the fuck?
That went off the rails so suddenly like I thought I was just gonna learn something cool about mammoths and then WHOA.
I scrolled past this thinking “the earth is round, yes, something, something, mammoths…’
But the second time it came past I saw
That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal
And I think I got whiplash from that pivot. I also laughed so hard that I couldn’t breathe.
I’m????
Point and laugh at the MRA, kids.
How … does he think … mammoths reproduced …
Never mind, not sure I want to know.
reblog to support Mammoth Feminism,
ignore for G E N O M I C M E L T D O W N
I here af for my Feminist Mammoth ladies, bring the species back!
DOWN WITH GENOMIC MELTDOWN
I… what exactly is combining ovaries supposed to achieve? 400 lazy feminist babies at the same time?
Shhhh…you weren’t supposed to tell anyone.
FEMINISM KILLED THE MAMMOTHS
I feel like we’re getting away from the main point here, which is that the world is flat
the world is only flat because it was trampled by feminist mammoths
reblog if you support your army of genetically-melted feminist mammoths that trampled the earth flat
Don’t anybody tell this guy about that species of lizard where there are only females it might break him
That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about – unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit – with incredibly damaged chromosomes.
I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god.
Mueller’s Ratchet–which is what this chucklefuck is talking about, the reason that purely asexual lineages don’t last well in evolutionary time–does not apply to feminism. The hypothetical scenario of merging two eggs to create a baby? Yeah, uh, that’s fucking sex in this context, whether or not it involves a male.
There are zero feminists pushing for parthenogenesis for humans, mostly because the whole thing is basically impossible for mammals as a result of mammalian investment in genomic imprinting. Among other things. It’s the sort of thing that only works okay in species that don’t control their embryonic development anywhere near as closely as your basic placental mammal does, because it relies on a certain amount of flexibility about sex determination and placental mammals are kind of weird about that.
Even if there were, Mueller’s Ratchet only applies if you never ever sexually reproduce and reshuffle alleles, like the parthenogenetic whiptail lizards mentioned upthread. If we have the technology to induce parthenogenesis in a human woman, we have the technology to reshuffle some alleles now and again. Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad!
Furthermore, Mueller’s Ratchet is specifically a population genetics phenomenon that refers to the accumulation of deleterious mutations within an asexually/clonally reproducing lineage. It has dick fuck all to do with chromosomes.
Mueller’s Ratchet exists in order to explain why asexually reproducing lineages haven’t overrun the world, because frankly in the short term these lineages usually do way better than their conspecific, obligate sexually reproducing partners do. Furthermore, it’s really fucking common to see species that reproduce sexually at some times and asexually at other times, depending on context and who’s available, and that’s in and of itself a complex fucking phenotype you species-centric cortically starved ignorant dillweed
all of this is completely fucking irrelevant to the mammoth example that @brett-caton there chose to bring up, by the way, because mammoths don’t fucking reproduce asexually either
as you would know if you’d bothered to read the paper, you self-satisfied jellyfish fellator
or even the pop science article you cited yourself
which clearly and cogently explains that the fucking mammoths died of being inbred as all shit, much like yourself
the laziness inherent in jumbling all this pig-ignorant, overconfident and understudied bullshit together and claiming it’s a solidly built house rather than a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish is the final straw
you can’t even be arsed to read an article that you dug up and cited yourself, you shithugger
how are feminists supposed to be the lazy ones?
you obviate your own thesis with your own intellectual failure, you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge
To hell with mammoths or Flat Earters, I’m here for the PURE OWNAGE of fools trying to start somethin’.
I love when people with relevant degrees roll up into threads and drop science like Rock Lee dropping his leg weights.
The simple scenario many of us learned in school is that two X chromosomes make someone female, and an X and a Y chromosome make someone male. These are simplistic ways of thinking about what is scientifically very complex. Anatomy, hormones, cells, and chromosomes (not to mention personal identity convictions) are actually not usually aligned with one binary classification.
-Gasp-
This post, and the science it is based on, infuriates TERFS and Conservative bigots alike. It’s magical.
Cellulite is a female secondary sex characteristic and should be celebrated as a rite of womanhood, not despised or eradicated.
it’s really a secondary sex characteristic?!
It is. It has to do with the way our bodies network fat. Female bodies create sort of a mesh network to support fat (female bodies are MUCH more hardy in times of stress) and it can present as delightfully lumpy. More than 90% of women have visible cellulite, but all women store fat in this manner.
why did no one tell me this?!
You know why
Spread this. I only just started to see mine and I started to freak out a bit. More people should/need to know about this
Here’s an illustration of the aforementioned difference in fat storage.
Men’s lattice pattern collagen threads holds subcutaneous fat in a way that, when the skin expands because of the fat storage, it expands evenly. Women’s “pockets” expand unevenly when we accumulate fat, creating that orange peel effect. Our storage pattern means we can healthily store more fat than men. Like a woman with 25% body fat is average, a man with 25% body fat is chubby. Because of that, like OP said, women are hardier in times of stress or famine. It’s also one of the reasons why our bodies can survive pregnancy, which is a massive energy demand on our system.
And there’s absolutely NO “treatment” for cellulite that will work. They are all bullshit designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash. It’s a secondary sex characteristic, it’s perfectly normal and it’s not going away no matter what you do. Like I’m very lean myself and I work out 5~6 times a week, and I still have cellulite. Someone giving a woman shit for having cellulite is akin to giving her shit for having skin. It’s just a mixture of misogyny and corporate greed.
Love your lumpy skin, ladies. It means you are a badass surviving machine shaped by millenia of evolution.
I did not know this, and I pride myself on knowing shit like this.
the facts are, GMOs are the future and the key to increasing crop production for our increasing population if your goal is to keep up food production for more people. remember, the goal right now in agriculture- the key goal that we’re throwing everything into because big yikes fam- is to produce more food off less. so like, vertical farming? good, saves space. smaller plants with bigger yield? great, saves space, can plant more and get more food. plants that are resistant to drought? to high temps? to low fertilizer? amazing, it means you have hardier plants that you can put in places that regular plants wouldn’t be able to stand.
so are they agriculturally efficient? hell yeah, because remember, it takes about 10 years for a crop in testing- GMO or not- to reach a point in development where it can be submitted for approval by the USDA for the market (something I’ve learned in my current job). imagine doing all breeding without GMOs. you would literally be able to do one cross a year, maybe two if you’re in a warmer area (this is why a lot of soybean breeding has been moved to South America, where they can do twice as much breeding). with GMOs, you can develop and test stuff faster, so by a monetary standpoint it’s awesome.
lets not forget that GMO crops can withstand more because of the pure amount of precision put into them. like, lets say your corn breaks a lot. you can spend 3-4 years meticulously cross breeding your developing strain with a break-resistant variety to get that trait in, or you can just cut and paste in the gene. and get this: it doesn’t even have to be from the break resistant variety. you can pull it from another plant that might be better at not breaking, and get an even better resulting variety.
another thing that we can’t forget about is that new GMO tech helps us keep up with pests and diseases. at work, i’ve seen experiments involving root pests; plants infected had root systems destroyed down to a single tap root. imagine that happening to a farmer’s field. like, all of it. that’s the kind of thing we’re up against here; to stop infestations and to solve new challenges quickly by developing technology quickly, while still improving the plant to commercial level.
when talking to the breeders at work, they told me that the industry as a whole recently upped its goal from creating a crop that would give each farmer a 200 bushel harvest (200 bushels has been the goal for the past 30 years; they’ve recently reached it and exceeded it) to 300 bushels per harvest. they have to do this just by modifying the plants. they have no control over how much the farmer plants and/or how many fields they have.
to give some perspective here, one bushel is 60 pounds of grain. they’re aiming to have each farmer that buys their products be able to reliably harvest and sell 18,000 pounds of grain per year.
the moral of the story is that the breeding and agri industries are under a lot of pressure here, and they have to work fast, because the population is rising.
knock knock
whos there?
dwindling nitrogen supplies in farmland and unsustainable farming practices but im gonna save that for another time
are they healthier? it depends on what you believe. like, what we’ve found so far is that GMOs don’t hurt you. some of them have added vitamins that can help you (lets not forget the famous GMO golden rice, which uses a daffodil gene coupled with a soil bacterium gene to make a rice variety produce a huuuuuge amount of vitamin A. this has been so effective in solving vitamin deficiencies and health problems in 3rd world countries since it was introduced in 2005 that its won awards and been used as a universal case study for the whole “GMO plants” thing) but most are just like. idk. kind of there? they help the health of the plant and help the farmer bring in income, so???? idk???
are they better for the environment? i have no idea. i suppose indirectly, because like. if you have a heartier plant you have to clear less land for agriculture?? (can anyone weigh in here?). But if these got out into the wild, the effects could be DEVASTATING, which is why the USDA and related government organizations (depending on where you live) make it so you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that what you’re putting out into production won’t be crazy damaging if it magically gets out somehow.
ethically: i have no idea man. like im still super split on it. my scientist self says “you can literally buy everything to do it and modify plants to produce heat right in your own home right now” but then im like……………..idk man we just dont know. i dont want to hurt my plant friends. if this hurts our plant friends. idk
(hears the siren song, waddles into the fray)
Re: health – the only GMO plant bred for health so far (that I know of) has been the Golden Rice. and know that Golden Rice also faced a HUGE backlash from anti-GMO activists.
Golden Rice is just rice + beta carotene, that stuff that makes your carrots orange. Your body converts beta carotene into Vitamin A, which allows you to live and not be blind. People in developing countries with poor diets, especially children and pregnant women, can have huge difficulties getting access to enough Beta Carotene so scientists thought it would be super helpful to add it to a dietary staple – rice. Even Bill and Melinda Gates think that this is a great idea.
Wikipedia: “The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[24] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[25] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk.“
Anti-GMO activists HATE it though, so there’s currently a lot of difficulties for farmers in developing countries to get access to Golden Rice. They tend to prefer having people take supplements, which they can’t always get (they are provided – sometimes – by charities), and can’t make on their own (which leaves them dependent on others), instead of letting local farmers help solve this problem.
There are also projects to increase the amount of zinc in various cereal crops and increase the protein in sorghum and cassava. These are all called Biofortification, in case you want to research it more.
Something of a holy grail for agriculture would be to transfer the nitrogen fixing relationship/ability of Fabacea to say, corn. This means that you could enable the corn plant to do what Fabacea does – they make friends with things in the soil, are and able to use the Nitrogen which makes up 78% of the air we breathe. Nitrogen-fixing corn would be a world-changing nobel-prize winning kind of achievement. This would dramatically improve soil health and substantially decrease the amount of fertilizers needed.
Some plant scientists in the UK are working on this. It’s incredibly technically difficult.
Better for the environment: GMOs are used to do different things, so it’s hard to talk broadly. The plants that have Bt (Bacillus thurengenisis, a naturally occurring organism and is widely used in organic agriculture) with them ARE better for the environment, in that farmers use way fewer pesticides since they effectively produce their own. I read a study awhile back that certain water ways in China are cleaner thanks to Bt GMOs. There have been some concerns that this will end up with overuse of Bt, pests will evolve past it, and we’re back at the same problem of pests destroying the things we want to eat (or, more likely, animal feed… so much of what we grow is animal feed it’s pretty insane). The thing is, there’s lots of different strains of Bt, scientists keep running across new ones. But we’ll never get away from the arms race that is humans vs pests when it comes to this, it’s as old as agriculture itself.
Papaya ringspot virus – driving Papayas in Hawai’i to extinction
Ethically: People were upset that the terminator gene existed, the public threw such a shitfit that no plants were ever released with them. So now instead everyone freaks out that genes from the GMO plants could end up in the wild. Sometimes, you can’t win.
Scientists were able to save the Papaya trees in Hawai’i thanks to GMO technology. The Papaya Ringspot Virus came through that was wiping out the Papaya trees there to and destroying the livelihoods of many farmers. It was so bad that it was thought that Papaya trees might go extinct, until a few genes were inserted to make them resistant to the virus. There are still anti-GMO activists upset about this for some reason.
Cheese – cheese is made using a a coagulant called rennet. The main enzyme in rennet is chymosin. The old, traditional way of accessing chymosin was from the stomach lining of baby cows. Rennet was/is a byproduct of the veal industry. A combination of people starting to give a shit about animals, increased human population, and increased demands for cheese, meant that rennet prices were all over the place. Scientists managed to create a microbe that could produce chymosin by implanting certain bovine cells, and ended up with a purer product, at a cheaper price, with no baby cows slaughtered in the process. 90% of cheese in the US is made using GMO chymosin aka fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC). Vermont made all dairy products exempt from their non-GMO labeling. However, if you want dead baby cows (or dead unborn baby cows) as part of your cheese making process, insist on buying USDA-organic cheese.
There are tons of non-plant uses for GMOs. We have been using GMOs in healthcare since the 1980s, which has made things safer – no longer using dead animals and human cadavers to harvest certain things. The cadavers in particular were a problem, they were spreading
Creutzfelt-Jacob syndrome, which destroys your brain and takes your life, usually in the span of a year. Prions are a nasty business. Children needing human growth hormones were the ones acquiring and dying from it. Now we make hyper-specialized GMO bacteria and yeast to crank out things like insulin, human growth hormone (without prions), and antibodies to diagnose and treat certain kinds of cancer, among other helpful things.
GMOs are also used extensively in science, from breeding special mice to experiment on to creating special fish that will glow in the presence of certain pollutants. There’s new developments every day.
Could there be bad things done with GMOs? Yes, as with every technology, there can be bad decisions or unforeseen consequences and ethical conundrums. These are important conversations.
[goyische voice] either you’re an atheist or you think gravity is fake and live in terror of being flung off the face of the earth. one or the other
not to get serious on this post but I hate that people unfamiliar with Judaism assume that we have to underestimate god like that. Hashem is everywhere, so why on earth couldn’t Hashem be present in gravity, and evolution, and idk, cellular respiration? small minded! to respect god is to not underestimate god, and to understand that god is present in powerful and complex systems, as much as god is present in simple, mundane things.
and like, Rosalind Franklin was an observant Jewish woman.
The only possible way the original image is a valid question is if underneath it is additional text: “Check all that apply.”
there are only 2 genders
god and science
i guess the reason atheists think that it’s one or the other is because you either believe in science and, yknow, logic
or you believe there’s an all-powerful presence watching everyone and everything despite there being no evidence or literally any reason to believe that that’s the case
and it’s hard to imagine that someone could believe in all that shit and still be logical and reasonable enough to also give credit to science, especially considering this is one major area that totally proves why things exist and why they work and it has nothing to do with some omniscient being.
obviously i’m not a scientist but yknow i did go to school … AND a CATHOLIC school at that and they literally tried to teach us that science and religion could coexist and it was a bunch of nonsense because that is all religion is so? I don’t think I have to be a scientist to say that the reason things are the way they are has been explained whereas religious nuts seem to insist that ‘god created us all and He Is Responsible For Everything’
how stupid do you have to be to come on a Jewish post and explain that, since you went to Catholic school, you obviously know everything about “religion”
the reason i joked about you not being a scientist in the tags is because i am a scientist, and yet! here we are!
i literally never said i know everything about religion but i know enough to be sure it’s ridiculous and many many religious people are often too brainwashed to give credit to science so it’s not really unreasonable to assume that?
it’s really as simply as this:
there are two options
be logical and do not believe anything that doesn’t provide sufficient evidence.
OR
be an idiot and believe in a higher power
One simply cannot recognize the advancements and discoveries of science while believing in a god, because science disproves the possibility of such a being. This is an absolute violation of basic science. They truly are incompatible.
anyways lots of religious jews are atheists y’all and @the-real-persephone are laughably ignorant and embarrassing. also the fact that you claim science disproves the possibility of a Jewish g-d proves that you have zero (0) idea about how jewish people even conceive of g-d
Do you mean ethnic Jews? You completely ruined your argument when you said “lots of religious Jews are atheists”. No credibility. Do you even realize what you just said?
It’s not ignorant. Judeo-Christian religions believe in a relatively new Earth. They also don’t address the universe outside of Earth. Science proves the age of the universe to be far older than these religions claim. So to be quite honest, it seems as if not only did you make a completely idiotic statement, you managed to ignore the basic principles of science that contradict religion.
Honey I’m a Jewish woman telling you that I know atheist Jews who practice and observe the Jewish religion. They are RELIGIOUSLY practicing Jewish people! I know at least one of them is on the board of my Synagogue! I know many Rabbis who are openly agnostic! The fact that you are trying to argue with me, a Jewish person, with the OP, a Jewish person, and with a LOT OF OTHER JEWISH PEOPLE about this is NOT something that makes me look like an idiot!
You say “judeo-Christian” as if that means something reliable and quantifiable that lumps Jewishness in with Christianity. Surprise! Many Jewish people observe their religion and do not believe in God! Judaism is not a religion that relies entirely on faith in belief, and that’s why the above screenshot is laughable. Judaism is a religion of PRACTICE, so belief in God alone does not make or break a religiously Jewish person.
Like you are so completely out of your depth here!
To go over this real quick
1.) judeo-xtian BZZZT. WRONG. 2.) a tiny minority of Jewish people ascribe to young earth ideas. The VAST majority do not. 3.) biblical literalism is far less common in Judaism and many argue that literalism is bad 4.) Again majority of Jewish thought is completely in line with an extremely old universe 5.) seriously our religious philosophers have argued this for quite some time. 13th century Ramban argued that time moved differently at the beginning of the universe before there was substance to be affected by time. When you consider that we didn’t know of the theory of relativity (also from a Jewish scientist!) at the time, that certainly gives us a precedence to understand that lots of Jewish people have assumed that we a.) did not have a literalist timeline in Genesis and b.) the universe was older than we could comprehend in the 1200s and we argued as such!
It’s your ignorance that is showing here.
Why are Christians.
I think that since the definition of “higher power” is being worked through so effectively and coherently, the discussion could use a definition of “scientific laws” to work with too.
I don’t believe that most practicing scientists would even say “the universe is ruled by scientific laws.” That is simply not what laws do. That is simply not what science does. The implication of “the universe is ruled by scientific laws” is that existence is deliberately reigned over, and further, the thing in charge of the universe is our own understanding of the universe?
The question is poorly worded, yes, hinging on a bad and unclear vocabulary – but it’s also very silly. It’s an interesting example of thinking, in that there is a belief that SOME ENTITY simply MUST be the undisputed divine boss of everything, whether it is “laws” or “a god”, this idea that there MUST be a leader or governor. “Something rules the universe!” the screenshot says with airy certainty, as if existence exists to be governed, and the only question is whether personal appeals to the governor will make any difference. As if the fact that existence exists means that there has to be a hierarchy with a ruler at the top. There’s a boss somewhere, this question implies – a scientific senate, a CEO of existence, an Indisputable Answer to the question. “Deity or scientific laws!” – that’s what you get – they are complete opposites, and there can only be one! Pick your master, you have 2 (two) choices… and here’s the catch: both of them are “higher powers.” Because, one assumes, any powers that “rule” the universe are, in fact, higher powers. The entire question is so circular it’s meaningless. It’s an ouroborous, but instead of eating itself it’s crawling up its own ass.
A scientist – worth their salt – would answer – SHOULD answer – “there is no evidence that the universe is ruled by anything.”
If pressed, the scientist could suggest that we have plenty of evidence for how the universe appears to operate, and we are collecting ways to help us understand that.
But those ways, which we discovered, are not our masters. We are not running around Doing Science in the hopes of naming our secret scientific overlords. We are not building a new god out of “laws” and setting it as the ruler of all that exists. Even having a third answer that is “check all that apply” doesn’t fit our current universe, because the first answer is “higher powers – monotheistic religion flavor” and the second answer is “higher powers – fake science boys vaguely atheistic flavor.”
Anyway, the screenshot is a picture of a radio button with two choices, that some people can happily press to feel like they have a tribe. I, like many of the people above, would not pick any of those buttons because they do not describe a working model of the operation of the universe.
If you dragged me and forced me to complete the sentence “the universe is ruled by…”, I would say “itself, probably,” and to further qualify the statement, I would write in front of the question, “I believe.”
People who took the news of feathered dinosaurs like this:
And those who took it like this:
I hate it when people say “science ruined dinosaurs” as though dinosaurs are just some pop culture monster invention and not real things that existed and that we are continuing to make new discoveries about
Amen
Listen I don’t care if you think feathers on a dinosaur look stupid if a 9 ton apex predator is coming at you at 25 mph, you’re not going to laugh at its feathers. YOU’RE GOING TO HAUL ASS
It just occurred to me that uhhh a lot of people have a really common and fundamental misconception about evolution.
You know the whole ‘survival of the fittest’ bit that always gets interpreted to mean ‘the strongest/bravest/smartest’
You see
that’s the wrong ‘fit’
The ‘fittest’ from the evolution PoV doesn’t mean ‘fit’ as in ‘good physical shape’. It’s fit as in ‘to fit’. Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean the strongest gets the crown, survival of the fittest means that the one who best fits the environment they’re in gets to survive. They’re ‘the most fitting’ aka fittest.
And I feel like if could maybe publicize this a little wider we could avoid so much bullshit from so many people including 99% of social darwinists (which btw, fuck social darwinists).
But being stronger and smarter increases one’s chances of survival in multiple environments across the board. Like a multitool for survival.
Natural selection can’t work as it was intended in the modern world though, because the environment is so completely artificial.
Congrats you’re exactly the kind of person this post was written for.
No being stronger and smarter does not automatically increase your chances for anything.
Case in point: tunicates. They start their life looking a whole lot like oceanic tadpoles and actually have a cerebral ganglion, meaning a proto-brain.
When as the larva matures it settles down, attaches to the ocean ground and *gets rid of its protobrain* and instead grows a proper digestive system. It literally does away with its brain in favour of eating. Because brains is expensive organs to keep and hey if you can make do without, why go through the effort?
And how long have tunicates been around? 500 million fucking years, at least that’s about the age of the oldest undisputed fossil, from the Maothianshan Shales in China. That’s pretty fucking successful for evolution.
Same for strength. That’s why you don’t see every predator out there being ripped af. or ever prey animal. Because strength is fucking expensive to have. All those muscles require upkeep. That requires energy. Energy you gotta take from somewhere. It might be much ‘cheaper’ to be well camouflaged, or poisonous, or pretend to be poisonous, or be speedy, or have keen senses that allow you to stop danger long before it gets to you.
There are so many evolutionary options that are not ‘muscles or brain’
And that’s just talking about the effects predation might have on a species. Because honestly? Environment is a factor. You can be a muscle loaded hulk, if you’re not insulated properly you’re going to freeze to death in the arctic cycle. You can be smart as fuck and dehydrate like a fish in the desert if you’re not build for it. There is no ‘universal’ adaption that works always, or even in most cases.
Or what about sexual selection? Look at male peacocks. Those huge, impressive tails are *awful* from a point of view of ‘does this make survival harder’ because yeah it fucking does, they’re showy and a drag. But the hens select for big showy tails because if a peacock actually lives to reproductive age despite the giant neon signs dragging after him? Then he probably makes babies with good survival chances.
And that’s just going after one specific influence each. The interplay is even more complex and there’s no reason why ‘strong’ or ‘smart’ would be the way to go. It’s not a multitool.
Or maybe it is because it makes it easy to pick out the tools among the humans who actually believe it though admittedly i am unsurprised that a school shooter rp blog would have opinions that stupid.
And while we’re on it… ‘modern world is too artificial’ have you fucking been outside in all your life? Or turned on the TV for a nature documentary? or looked out the goddamn window? There’s plenty of nature out there and evolution applies to it all the same it has since the inception of life. It still applies to humans (why hello there antibiotic resistance didn’t see you there) and don’t you fucking dare go the ‘but eugenics’ route. Don’t you fucking dare even think of going there because you will not enjoy my reply.
To put it in RPG terms and a way that might be more intuitive for people not well-versed in evolutionary theory: sinking stat points into Strength or Intelligence means you’re not spending them on other things. There’s a reason DnD parties aren’t made of nobody but fighters or wizards: there are a lot of situations pure brains or brawn won’t help you with. So you want to have a cleric. Maybe a rogue. Maybe a paladin or a druid or a ranger. Just as there are often multiple alternate ways to get past a plot obstacle (fighting your way through, sneaking your way through, bluffing your way through etc.), so too there are different survival strategies, each of them as viable as the next. You don’t want to spend all your stat points on Strength and Intelligence because they’re “multitools”, DnD doesn’t work like that and, amusingly enough, neither does nature.
But oh boy, now it’s rant time because the “evolution has stopped working for humans” misunderstanding is a gigantic pet peeve of mine.
Listen, it’s very simple. First of all, evolution is defined only as the change in gene frequency in a population over time. You’ll notice the word ‘environment’ or ‘predators’ or ‘fittest’ was nowhere in there. That is because the genetic drift that happens in a population randomly and does not serve any particular purpose qualifies as evolution too. So for that reason alone, evolution is inevitable and unavoidable. So let’s be clear here, when we mean evolution, we’re usually talking about a specific type of evolution, adaptive evolution, i.e. the change of gene frequencies in response to environmental selection pressures. And that is where the environment comes in.
It gets even simpler here:
The environment is always there. This is so simple I literally don’t know how else to make it clearer. Any living being is always interacting with and being affected by their environment. The misconception you have is that you think “environment” means “scary dark forest with a tiger trying to eat you” when it’s really not that complicated. The environment is everything that surrounds you. It’s as simple as that.
And logically, no, we can never stop evolving because the environment is always affecting us in some manner, it can never reach some abstract value of “zero”. And the “artificial” world we surround ourselves with is the farthest thing from zero. In fact, given how different it is from the world we spent MOST of our time evolving in, it’s a hell of a selection pressure.
To make a specific example: The high and constant availability of calorie-rich food (for well-off people) ? That’s an selection pressure. Our bodies are optimised for borderline starvation conditions, not food security conditions, so that’s something that’s going to influence our genes in the millennia to come, assuming our lifestyle stays the same. And because that has effects on our health – in fact, along with every single other thing that has an effect on our health (and thus indirectly on our personal reproduction choices or success) – because it has an effect on our health, it’s going to result in changing gene frequencies in us over time.
Travelling: hey, another thing that’s going to change gene frequencies. Less than a century of globalisation and the world is already a different place, genetically speaking. If it becomes fashionable for graduates from Denmark to move and work and live in Japan, tossing a chunk of Danish population genes into the Japanese population, that falls under evolution too, even if in this case it’s not adaptive.
There is literally no way for evolution not to happen, so long as there is a being with genes, and there is an environment, and the being with genes is IN the environment instead of just kind of floating around in hammerspace.
Evolution is like trying to run a software and optimise it to the operating system when the operating system keeps changing. And every time the OS changes, you need a messy patch to make the software compatible again. And oh god it’s not going to look pretty or work particularly smoothly. But as long as it works, that’s good enough.
I am loopy as fuck on allergy meds (3 are barely putting a dent in this shit) and now my inner history nerd is ANGRY.
Someone left a fic comment that illustrated just how little people are educated on exactly what we’ve LOST over the past two thousand years, things we can never get back. They were complaining that the MC thinks everything (not everything, not at all) was better in his day.
The thing is? A thousand years ago, there were a lot of aspects to life on this planet that we actually understood BETTER than we do now. Plants are only recently being taken seriously as medical treament again, and half the time that is STILL laughed off as “alternative” medicine and ignored…yet true periwinkle is where we get a great deal of our cancer treatment meds from. Turmerick really is used to treat inflammation and is in certain eye medications because it treats cataracts.
One hundred years ago, we didn’t know these things (in the West, at least).
One thousand years ago, we did.
We lost the Great Library of Alexandria, and any historian will tell you that there is history and medical documentation and just–fucking OODLES of knowledge that is gone. It is GONE and we can’t get it back because we lost one of the greatest libraries in history.
The Inquisition destroyed countless documents because they didn’t conform to their idea of what was Christian and proper. Those documents held knowledge we no longer have and have no idea where to begin regaining it.
The Holocaust destroyed so much that we barely have an understanding of where to catalogue it to recompilie what was lost.
The Church in Europe spent over a thousand years getting rid of people with medical knowledge, calling it witchcraft–especially if the person doing the healing was a woman. Midwives practically disappeared, along with what we used to know of childbirth and natural forms of birth control.
The Khmer Rouge destroyed Cambodia’s entire fucking heritage, and it’s taken over three decades just to put a dictionary for their own language back together–and that’s only for one of the very few surviving dialects in the region. That includes books, books that told us how to read what the ancient ruins had to say.
The Spanish invaders in the Americas are documented as having destroyed entire rooms full of actual written records. Entire oral histories were wiped out (including the knowledge they contained) due to epidemics of disease. We only just recently had a breakthrough that MIGHT let us read the only other recording system we have, the Chuchupuya strung knotwork.
The Chinese are one of the few peoples on this earth who still have documents from thousands of years ago, and those documents are ignored by practically everyone who isn’t Chinese because fuckin’ bigotry and racism-but those same documents are records of astronomical events (among other things) that do not exist anywhere else on this fucking planet.
Then there are the other genocides aside from the German Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge regime–Rwanda, Ghana, Bosnia, Nanking, Stalin’s Famine (and oh yes, Russia is also VERY guilty of the destruction of history and knowledge under the USSR), the Armenian and Ukranian genocides, the Greek genocide under the Ottoman empire, Bangladesh, East Timor, Berundi, Somalia, Guatemala, Namaqua and Herero, the Selk’nam, the ongoing genocide of the Yazidis. (These are only the ones for the 20th/21st century.)
Every time you destroy a people, you lose what they knew.
We have a lot of lovely advances under our belts in regards to vaccines, communications, technology, trade, distribution, acknowledgement of human rights…but we’ve LOST more than we’ve gained.
We have literally destroyed more of our knowledge in this age than we’ve gained.
Go chew on that for a bit.
EDIT: The British Empire’s determination to be the only RIGHT way in the world…and they covered ¾ of the globe in the attempt. The four Crusades that devastated Jerusalem and other cities time and time again. The Muslim documents of beautiful scientific advances that we’ve barely caught up to again. There were other libraries, ones that might have held the documents Alexanria made copies of–long gone, deliberately destroyed. We only just know vaguely acknowledge that they were performing survivaable brain surgery thousands of years ago with copper (antimicrobial properties!) tools.
I’ll just leave this handy wiki of DESTROYED LIBRARIEShere. The whole article is heartbreaking, but the ‘human action’ section makes me want to spit nails. The latest entry is from 2015.
Someone reblogged this with a Logical Fallacy argument, claiming one incorrect point on the list (not incorrect, merely summarized) meant ALL of it was wrong. Not surprisingly, they’re Islamaphobic.
Part of me is outraged, but the rest of me is just like…’And there is the Internet in a nutshell.’
Just a little note about the plants thing, I wouldn’t agree that it’s a recent resurgence. There’s a massive part of chemistry dedicated to natural product synthesis to try and isolate and replicate the individual components of plants that are helpful to us. It takes a lot of time, money and resources. Having a lot of the lost knowledge would help the process infinitely though. So sad that we’ve lost so much.
You misunderstand, as I was summarizing: the last century (because that’s when science finally began to take plants seriously again) is recent when compared to a millennia or two. I was not dissing on science, else I wouldn’t have mentioned vaccines (VERY IMPORTANT) and the like.
There are easy ways to find out how much of an “alernative medicine” to take–it’s called visiting a compounding pharmacist, who knows these things, or visiting a licensed practicioner of one of the varying types of eastern medicine–which one of my friends IS. This is harder to find in the U.S., but licensed practitioners exist. It isn’t just about waiting around for the FDA to say what’s safe, and they’re suspect anyway, as they have a long history of approving unsafe medications for money…oh, and wanting to make acetametaphin a prescription-only drug so they could charge us more for it.
(I’m putting alternative medicine into quotes because I was using the term in the last post the fuckin’ *mocking* way it’s treated in the West instead of the actual science iand history it’s based on…)
me trying to get comfortable in my covers at night
thats the kind of thing i would love to just have in a little jar on my shelf so that when people came over they would be really unnerved by the mysterious shifting blob i have in a flask and i would refuse to acknowledge its existence
There's a Mirror on the Wall 