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it’s called “co-evolution”
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.
This makes me think of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael… is there a community for that?
Reminds me of The Botany of Desire
Haha. I’m reading Sapiens right now, too
I’ve never actually read any Harari books for some reason. Is his stuff generally “reliable”?
I think he’s a historian by trade, so no
His first book (Sapiens) does a great job of showing how frail is modern civilization, though. Its foundation is, like religion, only beliefs.
It’s a superb book - I was being mischievous.
He’s into meditation is a big way, as was I when I read it, although I have since lapsed.
The advantage I think this gave me at the time, was to deeply connect with his writing perspective - ie not human-centric.
Buddhism cautions against human exceptionalism in various ways and invites anyone to discover this through meditation.
The quote about wheat profoundly expresses this, with great concision.
My quip was about historians being vulnerable to artistic license to tell a story !
We don’t trust historians?!
Only entomologists are known for lying
I’m only half serious :)
They are Wonderful storytellers !
My personal difficulty is the grey areas between inference and speculation.
Ie “this is the area where they made a fire” vs “they would have discussed village politics while roasting meat here”
r/askhistorians on reddit always rails about it being, paraphrasing: too cut and dry for such complicated topics. I’ve the first half of the first one, and I don’t disagree, but I’m not a historian. Reductionism is definitely in play, and there’s certainly a narrative bias in there for entertainment.
It seems about as reliable as Isaac Asimov’s essays (as published in The Road to Infinity, or similar).
Thanks. So, interesting and generally reliable, but claims should be treated with caution?
His former supervisor disowned him. He’s not known for good science. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari As someone with a strong anthropology background, I’d urge you to take it with a lot of salt. Perhaps pickle it. He does not have the background for this work.
Yep.
When a historian complains that something is reductionist, I usually ask them “what is the temperature of the air in the room right now.” I don’t mind reductionism, particularly when ingesting materials from outside my field of expertise – because I don’t have time to become an expert in every field :)
I usually ask them “what is the temperature of the air in the room right now.”
What mean? I can’t brain good today
They’ll probably answer something like: around 20 deg/around 70 deg/room temperature/warm/etc
All of which are reductive, and the only non reductive answer would begin with our understanding of the concept of heat
I assume that if they answer with a simple number you can point out they are being reductionist too, because the temperature differs measurably between the floor and ceiling, and that’s not even accounting for any air currents. Most of the time it is reasonable to reduce that down to a single temperature.
Okay, so, temperature is a statistical measure of the kinetic energy of the atoms in a material. It’s useful, so we use it. But, I’ll try to handwave a lecture from Thermodynamics 300 – the actual lecture requires quantum mechanics, partial differential equations, and a dude named Maxwell.
So imagine you put at molecule of an inert gas (helium or similar) into a perfectly insulated box, and that box (aside from the single molecule of helium) is a perfect vacuum. Now, what temperature is that molecule of helium? The question is somewhat meaningless. What we can do instead is ask, what is its position, and its velocity/momentum. For an object as large as helium, you don’t really have to deal with the uncertainty principle, and can largely just treat it as a billiard ball bouncing around in there, boing boing boing.
But if you add a second helium, now you have interactions. They can both have a position and momentum, but occasionally they will bump into each other, and depending on the angles and velocity and such, they can transfer momentum into one another. Still a billiard ball scenario, and relatively easy to visualize.
As you start adding more balls though, tracking the position and momentum of each one starts to become crazy. You stop being concerned about the positions of the billiard balls, but start doing statistics – you sample a few of them, and get some new estimates: average distance between balls at any given time, average momentum of the balls at any given time. What we’re doing is moving from treating the atoms as discrete elements into treating it as a gas. For helium, it’s actually quite reasonable to work the math out from first principles because it behaves so ideally. But you end up deriving a quantity known as “pressure” – which reflects the average distance between the balls, and “temperature” which is effectively the average momentum of the balls.
But here’s the thing – just because we have an average, doesn’t mean it’s evenly distributed. In a real gas, there are big and small molecules all jostling about, and some are moving faster and some are moving slower. But statistically, we can treat it as a nearly uniform material because there are a lot of them.
We’ve reduced an incredibly complex thing to a single number or two.
Tangent: we lose some of our atmosphere to space every year, and this process is partially why. Some of molecules jostling about at the top of the atmosphere where the distance between them is quite large can sometimes bounce into one another in accidentally perfect ways such that single atoms or molecules can get to great velocities. If these exceed escape velocity, they will never return to earth. But it’s more likely that these collisions eject smaller molecules, like hydrogen and helium, than larger molecules, like oxygen or nitrogen. So we lose the light stuff preferentially. Imagine the box with billiard balls bounding around it it, but some ping pong balls are there too and they can get launched! See Jeans Escape for more details if you want a rabbit hole.
Ah, thank you for the detailed explanation on the mechanics. In hindsight it’s obvious what you meant, but like I said I’m cognitively deficient today 😅
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)
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?”
We have been played for absolute fools
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.
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.
It’s also a double-edged sword. The moment a domesticated species isn’t useful enough for us, its numbers (and therefore genes) will decrease dramatically. Plenty of livestock populations may be reduced to a tiny size if artificial meat production becomes cheap enough, or if it’s decided to be a necessity to fight climate change.
Just like cats right?
Just like cats.
Wouldn’t the cats have also been demesticated by the wheat? Since the wheat domesticated humans, stored the wheat berries in silos which attracted mice and is the whole reason cats were like… “I live here now.”
Aha, so it was all a plan by the feline overlords to assume direct control of both wheat and humans in a single swoop.
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.
The jays and crows around my house have domesticated us too
I so want to befriend my local crows, been meaning to buy some seeds for bribing them
They fucking love meatballs, the scavenger birds that they are.
I have the local crows as my friends. Just shared a pastry with them while coming home. They often fly besides me when I’m coming from the store to see whether I have anything for them.
Puck up the cheapest 40lb bag of dogfood you can find they’ll love it and its got the nutrients they need!
Huh I would never have thought to get dog food for them. I’ve done zero “research” though, just figured that unsalted seeds, nuts etc at least won’t kill them 😅
There’s some magpies near me, but I don’t have a predictable enough routine to befriend them. I had some crow friends once and they would knock on my window when I was late coming out to them.
They like unsalted peanuts
And grapes
Just definitely make sure they’re unsalted. You can even get unsalted boiled peanuts, which they adore.
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.
All realism is bullshit http://soulism.net
Fool. Allow me to show you truth: https://timecube.xyz/
Eris help us, the zoomers are here with lame humour.
That’s not humour, it’s postmodern political theory.
Have you read any postmodern theory? Check out cyborg feminism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto
Have you tried not being a cabbage?
Sorry, I’m not hip to all this gen z slang. Can you explain?
Gen Z my sides that’s pre-boomer stuff. You’re like 100-200 years behind the curve on absurdism and you’re not even doing it well.
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.
9 points out of 10, very good. Except that capitalism doesn’t want to ever achieve post-scarcity. They’re a dog chasing a car, without scarcity and demand their profit streams dry up.
Hence why post-scarcity is the natural death point of capitalism.
Your question is essentially the same as Freudians arguing among themselves about the existence of a death drive: How could it possibly benefit the individual? If it can’t in some way benefit the individual, how can it be a drive? How does it mesh with the pleasure principle? The answer is simple: It doesn’t benefit the individual. In certain circumstances it benefits the genome, that’s why us seed-pods can, in certain circumstances, enter states in which it is pleasurable.
And all-encompassing and all-powerful, indeed, religious, as capitalism may seem right now it, too, is a seed pod. It does not have to will its abolishment to bring about the material conditions abolishing it.
Of course there’s also nothing speaking against it not making things unduly nasty for us. But that’s mere politics, not fate.
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?
Idk about the mucous, but a fever is definitely an attempt at killing whatever foreign pathogen is there. Hopefully a pathologist or doctor can help us here.
Evolution is a loop of random mutations that get reproduced if they randomly happen to give the organism better odds at reproduction.
Some germ gets a little better at spreading via mucous, so it gets to reproduce more because humans make mucous when they get sick
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
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
Survival of the fittest does not work with intent.
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.
I mean, the Roman Empire was an olive tree superorganism. Prove me wrong.
I am pretty sure they were sentient, rotting fish guts.
Like in that sauce the whole mediterran had then?
Asafoetida
(Thanks, Max Miller!)
No, sauce, Asafoetida is a spice (thanks).
Found it, it’s Garum. The juice from salted fermented fish intestines.
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
Isn’t this Michael Pollan’s theory?
That plants make themselves Delicious/useful/whatever so we’ll use them more?
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.
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.
