As I mentioned before, evolution is not a species vs. species battle, it's just a bunch of genes bumbling around mindlessly, with successful ones becoming more prevalent.Sadistic I Am wrote:and have no qualms using my superior intellect and evolutionary traits to dominate a less fortunate species and end their inferior lives.
There is no goal to subjugate or defeat other species, there is only replication and survival.
Rarely does that survival ever involve destroying other species directly or subjugating them, sometimes it involves working with them (symbiosis); most often it just results in outcompeting other organisms that are vying for the same ecological niche -- and that means resources.
If you actually wanted to promote the fitness of the human species, you would advocate veganism, not out of compassion, but because eating animals is inefficient.
You would advocate that cows and chickens just ceased to exist, and humans used all of the resources directly and efficiently.
With the same land, food, and water resources it takes to feed cows, then kill the cows and feed humans, you could instead feed MANY more humans.
The cow is the middle-man here, wasting resources.
It's basic ecology, and thermodynamics -- read about trophic levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_l ... efficiency
Being at the "top" really sounds like a great position, right?Wikipedia wrote:The efficiency with which energy or biomass is transferred from one trophic level to the next is called the ecological efficiency. Consumers at each level convert on average only about 10% of the chemical energy in their food to their own organic tissue (the ten-percent law). For this reason, food chains rarely extend for more than 5 or 6 levels.
Sure, to an idiot.
You're at the top of the cheerleader pyramid, which means not only are you the species most likely to crack its head and go extinct if ANY link below it is broken, but you're also the least numerous species by necessity of physics.
If there are a hundred large plants, there are ten herbivores, and one carnivore (if even that).
The carnivore is not the successful species here; it's a parasite that relies on the herbivores who are the real winners in terms of population and genetic success.
We are literally threatening our own survival on this planet with our habits. We're trying to sustain the huge population of herbivores with the behavior of carnivores -- something has to give. It's not physically possible.
Either we have to start eating plants directly (we've already killed off most of our predators, so there's nothing to worry about there, as if changing our eating habits would magically create predators for us), or we have to cull our population through mass genocide (and yet it continues to grow). If we don't do one of those, our species will go extinct and prove itself unfit.
There are species that do that in the wild. They're so absurdly "successful" for a brief period that they burn out their resources, the population crashes, and they go extinct. Humans would be one in a long line.
We humans are proving with our unsustainable actions that we aren't superior, as you say. Cockroaches will be around long after we're gone, and in evolutionary terms, they're the real champions here if there are any (at least among animals), and bacteria put us ALL to shame.
That said, your usage of the words "superior" and "inferior" are really nonsense, because you're assuming some kind of grand narrative that evolution just doesn't have. Real superiority only means thriving, and inferiority means extinction, and both of those depend on the environment and complex interactions.
Intelligence is not superior to being brainless; organisms can and do evolve to lose their brains (as Oysters have), and other traits, when they are no longer useful. Some have even evolved to do it in their lifetimes, like male angler fish that attach to a female and get absorbed, becoming nothing more than a pair of gonads. This process evolved because it was a superior survival and procreation strategy to carry those genes.
In evolutionary terms, superiority means nothing like what you think it means.
Now that humans have developed technology to think for them, maybe the species will move in that direction; we've effectively removed all of the selective pressures that used to keep our species healthy and smart. Infertile couples can have children, people can wear glasses to see when they're nearly blind, a number of genetic diseases are now treatable to keep the person alive, and to think of the direction our collective brain power may be drifting is just depressing.
And that brings me to the final problem with your assertion: you are not superior in any meaningful way on your own.
Not intellectually, not in terms of strength, speed, immunity. Chimps and other non-human animals can outperform humans on MANY specific cognitive tests that use visual metrics, thinking faster, more accurately, preserving working and short term memory better, etc. In terms of strength, humans are a laughing stock. We're also slow in short bursts, and we die easily from infection. You can't fly, you can't breathe under water, and you can only hold your breath for a couple minutes at most. You can't dig, you can't really fight, or even run or climb with anything better than laughable clumsiness. Even our best athletes are jokes.
As species, we have two relatively uncommon genetic 'gifts':
1. The ability to walk slowly over a long distance without burning very many calories (wow, what a super power).
2. Slightly more developed linguistic hardware.
These are things that are useless for an individual, or even a tribe taken on its own.
To borrow the popular phrase from Newton:
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants."
We are nothing without our heritage. It is the memetic foundation that we carry with us, and that has been contributed to for many thousands of years that makes us even passingly coherent.
You may stand in awe at what you pride yourself on as some great intellect, a quality of your superior DNA, but that's complete bullshit.
Most of what you are, and what makes up the largest part of any human IQ north of any other ape, is environmental and cultural.
See the Flynn Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
If I cloned you and threw you in a jungle to be raised by chimps, you'd be as stupid as the rest of them, and at best you might learn how to eat ants off a stick in your lifetime, if you didn't die of your human frailty first. Human potential is not defined by Disney movies like Tarzan and The Jungle Book. If you came back into contact with society, you probably wouldn't be able to learn any useful level of human language or even be able to learn the concept of how to use a toilet, regardless of how much tutoring and personal attention your received.
Look into Feral Children:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
It's considered unethical to experiment on children by depriving them of language and human interaction, so we don't have much data on it, but what we do know is sobering and demonstrates how much we are cumulative products of society, not little packages of magical raw potential that can be realized at any time.
Genetically, you are nothing, so stop pretending to be so special. You're mostly worm, as Zarathustra might say. Society: now that's something. And it's nothing of your doing. If anything, you're personally dragging society down and holding back social evolution by advocating inefficient practices like eating animal products for no good reason that only threaten our sustainability and survival as a species.Wikipedia wrote:Feral children lack the basic social skills that are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright after walking on fours all their life, and display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them. They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language.[2] The impaired ability to learn a natural language after having been isolated for so many years is often attributed to the existence of a critical period for language learning, and taken as evidence in favor of the critical period hypothesis.[3]
The way society evolves, and the way humans really advance (on the coat tails of that shared memetic cultural infrastructure), is by introducing new ideas that actually challenge the primitive practices of our ancient shit eating ancestors (literally, they ate their own shit).
Your homework:
1. Read all of the above, and try to at least skim the links.
2. Recognize that evolutionary competition is about resources, it's not a literal war for domination and subjugation.
3. Recognize that we are wasting resources on cows, and chickens, and the like due to unavoidable facts of thermodynamics, so true success in those terms would be going vegan and cutting the middle-man of animal agriculture out of the picture in terms of our food supplies and maximize human population with the available resources.
4. Understand that this is not just some bleeding heart liberal issue; we are on an extinction track. That's what "unsustainable" means. You can't populate like an herbivore and eat like a carnivore, it just isn't viable. Something has to give; You can advocate mass genocide if you want as a solution (a small population of human carnivores), but you should also understand you're just as likely to be a casualty in the war that would mean.
5. Stop being so full of yourself. You're genetically inferior in almost every way to the vast majority of species on the planet. Everything you are, you owe to society, and not to your innate abilities. Even your IQ (to the extent it is) is a product of society. Lacking the social framework that created you, genetically all you are is a particularly weak and fragile shit eating ape.
6. Understand that is it social, MEMETIC, evolution that is responsible for what and where we are now beyond the wild state, not genetic evolution. And right now, you're a pathogen in the system.
If you understand, accept, and comply with those points, I can move on to the other fallacies in your post.
