Animals changed by proximity to humans
bbc.com
bbc.com
I am not being glib, but I wonder if this is what happened to humans. allow me to explain. As short as 5,000 years ago, our brains were 10% bigger, our jaws were bigger, and our size was smaller. The former 2 have been associated with diet, but the shrinking brain is still debated. Maybe its simple though. Maybe humans domesticated humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#...
I take your point on ravens and chimps, but surely whales are more intelligent than shrimps.
What happens, for instance, if they control for stamina (I'd predict the effect goes away)
(children vs adults)
This line of reasoning has really got a lot of geneticists concerned their findings may not be generalizable.
There is a lot of sequencing so you'd think they'd be pretty sure what is going on. I think its hard to measure fly intelligence, though the brain has been mapped https://www.hhmi.org/news/unveiling-the-biggest-and-most-det....
You can buy all sort of fly stocks with genetics you might need for your research. https://bdsc.indiana.edu/information/fly-culture.html
How much that matters depends on the nature of your experiments. Many cases it won't matter at all. Some experiments may entirely wrecked.
Who would have possibly imagined that creatures on this earth would evolve to endure their surroundings?
Flat Earth was ‘duh’ science at one point. Good thing we tested it.
This is probably a myth; anywhere you can see water, you can see things going over the horizon. We knew the Earth was round (and its size) well before circumnavigation.
Also, a flat stretch of land will do nicely, too. It doesn't take long to notice the discrepancy of hills… and we have the actual calculations of the ancients to prove that they knew; they're fairly accurate, too.
> Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period (323 BC), the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period (31 BC), and China until the 17th century.
Indian philosophy uses a spherical earth in 6th century BC as well as many thinkers in Ancient Greece like Pythagoras.
For a direct quote from that link: “early Muslims tended to also view the Earth as flat” In other words it was a common belief, but not universally accepted fact. So saying that culture believed in a flat earth isn’t true anymore than saying they believed the earth was round.
My mother had to actually explain to me that the world is an spheroid so I would stop having those terrifying nightmares where I fell off the edge of the world.
There are in fact many benefits to living next to a river or lake instead of the coast. A large one is that the water is mostly potable, instead of largely not. I would hazard a guess that most ancient coastal communities were actually ancient coastal river communities, and that rivers are actually the thing humans lived next to (there's some indication in the abstract here[1] that this is the case). If that's the case, proximity to water is a poor indication of how many people would have seen ships sailing over the horizon. As to how obvious bases of trees would be over large lakes, or how likely large lakes would be compared to the norm, I don't know.
Realizing it was evidence of a round earth is of course a different story. My guess is most people simply never considered it.
Also, I would guess that the speed and type of change being experienced as a result of human activity (that animals are responding to) is relatively rare and thus valuable to understand.
Take for example the mathematical journey of laying our fundamental axioms starting at Peano all the way through ZFC.
I wonder if something similar is also happening in amongst some humans in some selection process. Breeders with less cognitive material than others, the others being seen as less sexually attractive (like as seen in Idiocracy, and I posit: real life)
I wonder how long it will remain controversial to consider that
Is a belief in natural selection a negative selection pressure?
If you bring this up people who are rational seem to get upset.
Anyway, there's definitely something about the culture of contemporary developed countries that's not adaptive, but I'm not sure it's belief in evolution itself.
As well as sexual dimorphism to the point of physical features being debilitating.
Plus your point doesn’t even make sense on a more general level. There’s stacks of evidence that proves humans have changed nature from global deforestation, climate change, mining, farming and war, to even the innocent act of building towns on what used to be green spaces or flood plains full of wildlife.
Alright then, if humans are not permitted to consider themselves superior to animals, I have one question for you.
What is your view on the veterinarian profession ?
I get your point, but no, I refuse to "feel" superior to any other life form. We´re just different. I´ll like to rephrase my statement, I want to respect other life forms as I respect my fellow human animals. I believe changing such little things like the headlines of articles could permeate in a new kind of consciousness involving every living form as part of the world, not "us and them".
I don't see the harm in recognizing our superior differences; in fact, it's as important as recognizing our similarities and common bonds.
Certain other animals are very peculiar in their ways of living. I'd say that a headline like "Insects are affected by living next to ants" is more informative than the bland "Insects affect each other when live next to each other".
Best to get out of this line of thought before our understanding of genetics really takes off. To quote Gattaca "We now have discrimination down to a science."
It's already common to allow the oppression of inferior genes so long as they aren't human. What happens when we can measure human genetic inferiority? Will you be talking about superior differences then? Will you still dismiss the "differences" inferior to yours?
Besides, animal genes might not even be truly inferior anyways. I suspect they have better foundations and potential than we do. It's just not utilized yet. Maybe humans aren't so great, just first to market (and only by ~20k years, which is nothing at all). I personally wouldn't be surprised if humans are actually embarrassingly stupid on the cosmic scale of sentience.
The harm in "recognizing our superior differences" is in the unfortunate proclivity of humans to take that as justification for not recognizing any rights of the "inferior".
Our subjective experience isn't all that different. This is especially true if you consider humanity as a whole, not some 0.1%er who has inordinate access to the fruits of civilization.