Smoking a pipe on my back porch the other day I was thinking deep thoughts on evolutionary biology (not that I know squat about it but I do know about smoking pipes).flyingpylon wrote: ↑Fri Jun 26, 2020 4:22 pm Back to the original topic... I saw this posted by an acquaintance on social media:
When you combine that kind of statement with different opinions about the role of government in people's lives, things can get a bit crazy."Agree to disagree" is reserved for things like "I don't like coffee". Not racism, homophobia, and sexism. Not human rights. Not basic common decency. If I unfriend you during this, it IS personal. We do not have a difference of opinion. We have a difference in morality.
I point out to people that if we didn't give government so much control in the first place then each election would not feel like such a life or death matter and our politics would be a lot less contentious. But that argument doesn't usually go anywhere.
How is it that ants have been programmed to behave with such a singularity of purpose to survive? I mean think about how amazing this is. We think of ourselves as more evolved than they are but how in the hell do they communicate with each other? Did they invent some form of social media we can't currently begin to fathom? And there are many more examples in nature, like the salmon run that takes place every year in Alaska. Or monarch butterflies who require several generations to complete a journey, somehow passing on the knowledge of the ultimate purpose and destination.
Then you have the bears who are much more independent creatures who benefit from the predictability of the salmon.
Makes me wonder which direction humans are heading in. I guess natural selection will ultimately have the answer.