It is certainly hard to swallow as an individual, but consistently rejecting natural selection through technological intervention does eventually create significantly greater crisis. It’s a very difficult problem with modern medicine, where we can always keep more people alive, but the resources required to do so increase exponentially without limit. Death is ultimately one way that the natural world self regulates when any particular species outgrows it’s environment.
Counterpoint: everything humans do is just an extreme version of other behaviors in the animal kingdom, therefore nothing we do is unnatural. The “natural order” is just doing whatever and following the laws of physics.
Certainly, and the consequences of such are also a part of the natural order. Unless you want to argue that free will is a myth, you ought to seriously consider working towards making better decisions rather than complaining about how things are.
That’s a very interesting subject to explore. If you want my personal opinion on it, free will is an artifact of our limited nature and the resulting inability to consciously perceive how everything fits together in the big picture. It may not necessarily be true, but we also have no other way to live than to assume we can make decisions about what is a good and a bad idea, such as deciding that jumping off a cliff is a very bad idea which will likely result in our death.
You’re confused. ‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean physical strength, it means those who fill their niche in the world and live to reproduce. A lion that kills a million deer but dies without reproducing is an evolutionary failure.
Our environmental niche is to invent and experiment. Back in the day, people thought that cities had reached their natural limit because you couldn’t have too many horses in one place. They thought people would never have heart transplants or IVF.
And I also don’t think the earlier person realises that evolutionary pressures still apply despite medicine and tech removing some of things that limited us before.
That is to say that because we don’t need to worry about certain things which used to be important, the pool of people now “competing” is larger, meaning that competition between needed traits is higher, making for “more fit” individuals.
In the sense that we don’t need to worry about being physically strong anymore, so we can focus on cognition, and looking at history, the speed at which our intellect (or at least level of tech) has grown — as a species — is pretty fucking insane.
we’re a few steps away from genetic manipulation on a wide scale
That actually happens to be within my specific area of study, and you may be overstating things. We’ve only just scratched the surface of genetic manipulation, and nobody really knows how long it will take before we can design effective genetic code deliberately. So far we have determined the nucleotides which build the basic structure of DNA, and found correlation between certain blocks and traits exhibited, but it’s not quite as simple as cutting and pasting those blocks like you’re writing computer code. We have also found further layers of ‘information storage’ within DNA which relates to how those nucleotides are arranged, called epigenetics, which we barely know anything about at all. As things stand with our current level of knowledge, we have established an extremely extensive testing regime for any novel genetic product which takes decades to complete, and which nearly every product tested so far has failed to complete, often due to unexpectedly resulting in sterility and death. It’s a very exciting science, and I have great hopes for what it can accomplish if we don’t kill ourselves first, but it’s a stretch to suggest that it’s just around the corner.
I didn’t mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard’s first rocket to Man on the Moon.
If humans aren’t separate from nature, then anything humans create falls within “nature”. Humans aren’t the first species to create tools and create farms. Even art have been observed in other species.
As far a “paying attention to the nature order”, I do have my concerns, but it has more to do with putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere that we cause runaway climate change. Not showing basic empathy to other humans is a departure from the “natural order”.
The part of the brain that governs “Empathy” has been narrowed down to a region called “mirror neurons”. It causes us to see ourselves in people we’re observing. It’s also directly responsible for how we learn tool use. Monkey 1 sees Monkey 2 put stick into anthill to get food, so Monkey 1 also puts stick into anthill.
I think people are getting their wires crossed by bringing prior bias into this discussion here. While I do agree with what you have said here, my personal understanding of the argument for respecting the natural order comes from seeing people make decisions which will naturally lead to their own inability to survive/procreate, then getting mad at others for failing to respect those decisions.
Define “Natural Order”. It’s often used to justify being shitty to other people by Social Darwinists/Libertarians/Manosphere types. If you use that term without elaborating exactly what you mean, you’ll get slotted into one of those types because that’s exactly what they do.
which will naturally lead to their own inability to survive/procreate
how so? you seem to have a lot of experience seeing these admittedly horrific sounding situations play out. i think we all would benefit from hearing what is going on so that we can save ourselves from a similar scenario!
Ants build large, elaborate and engineered structures and shape their environment to suit their needs by moving large quantities of earth, therefore ants are unnatural for not following the rules of nature and actively working to give themselves an evolutionary edge.
It is certainly hard to swallow as an individual, but consistently rejecting natural selection through technological intervention does eventually create significantly greater crisis. It’s a very difficult problem with modern medicine, where we can always keep more people alive, but the resources required to do so increase exponentially without limit. Death is ultimately one way that the natural world self regulates when any particular species outgrows it’s environment.
Counterpoint: everything humans do is just an extreme version of other behaviors in the animal kingdom, therefore nothing we do is unnatural. The “natural order” is just doing whatever and following the laws of physics.
Certainly, and the consequences of such are also a part of the natural order. Unless you want to argue that free will is a myth, you ought to seriously consider working towards making better decisions rather than complaining about how things are.
Wouldn’t a natural order imply a deterministic universe and thus no free-will?
That’s a very interesting subject to explore. If you want my personal opinion on it, free will is an artifact of our limited nature and the resulting inability to consciously perceive how everything fits together in the big picture. It may not necessarily be true, but we also have no other way to live than to assume we can make decisions about what is a good and a bad idea, such as deciding that jumping off a cliff is a very bad idea which will likely result in our death.
You’re confused. ‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean physical strength, it means those who fill their niche in the world and live to reproduce. A lion that kills a million deer but dies without reproducing is an evolutionary failure.
Our environmental niche is to invent and experiment. Back in the day, people thought that cities had reached their natural limit because you couldn’t have too many horses in one place. They thought people would never have heart transplants or IVF.
Correct.
And the “back in the day” you’re referring to was barely a hundred years ago, just to give people some reference.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894
And I also don’t think the earlier person realises that evolutionary pressures still apply despite medicine and tech removing some of things that limited us before.
That is to say that because we don’t need to worry about certain things which used to be important, the pool of people now “competing” is larger, meaning that competition between needed traits is higher, making for “more fit” individuals.
In the sense that we don’t need to worry about being physically strong anymore, so we can focus on cognition, and looking at history, the speed at which our intellect (or at least level of tech) has grown — as a species — is pretty fucking insane.
And we didn’t even get into the fact that we’re a few steps away from genetic manipulation on a wide scale.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/21/1239790816/first-pig-kidney-human-transplant
Pretty soon you will be able to grow an animal with transplantable kidneys, or hearts, or any organ.
That actually happens to be within my specific area of study, and you may be overstating things. We’ve only just scratched the surface of genetic manipulation, and nobody really knows how long it will take before we can design effective genetic code deliberately. So far we have determined the nucleotides which build the basic structure of DNA, and found correlation between certain blocks and traits exhibited, but it’s not quite as simple as cutting and pasting those blocks like you’re writing computer code. We have also found further layers of ‘information storage’ within DNA which relates to how those nucleotides are arranged, called epigenetics, which we barely know anything about at all. As things stand with our current level of knowledge, we have established an extremely extensive testing regime for any novel genetic product which takes decades to complete, and which nearly every product tested so far has failed to complete, often due to unexpectedly resulting in sterility and death. It’s a very exciting science, and I have great hopes for what it can accomplish if we don’t kill ourselves first, but it’s a stretch to suggest that it’s just around the corner.
I didn’t mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard’s first rocket to Man on the Moon.
That’s not how evolution or natural selection works. Its a very difficult problem if you completely misunderstand it yea.
If humans aren’t separate from nature, then anything humans create falls within “nature”. Humans aren’t the first species to create tools and create farms. Even art have been observed in other species.
As far a “paying attention to the nature order”, I do have my concerns, but it has more to do with putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere that we cause runaway climate change. Not showing basic empathy to other humans is a departure from the “natural order”.
The part of the brain that governs “Empathy” has been narrowed down to a region called “mirror neurons”. It causes us to see ourselves in people we’re observing. It’s also directly responsible for how we learn tool use. Monkey 1 sees Monkey 2 put stick into anthill to get food, so Monkey 1 also puts stick into anthill.
I think people are getting their wires crossed by bringing prior bias into this discussion here. While I do agree with what you have said here, my personal understanding of the argument for respecting the natural order comes from seeing people make decisions which will naturally lead to their own inability to survive/procreate, then getting mad at others for failing to respect those decisions.
Define “Natural Order”. It’s often used to justify being shitty to other people by Social Darwinists/Libertarians/Manosphere types. If you use that term without elaborating exactly what you mean, you’ll get slotted into one of those types because that’s exactly what they do.
I literally just did in the comment that you replied too.
No, you were being vague. Give examples of what you mean.
who?
what did they decide to do?
how so? you seem to have a lot of experience seeing these admittedly horrific sounding situations play out. i think we all would benefit from hearing what is going on so that we can save ourselves from a similar scenario!
You contradict yourself by saying that the natural order rules everything and humans have escaped it.
Besides, none of our technology has been around on a timescale meaningful to evolution. What your talking about is Social Darwinism.
what 💀 “we can always keep more people alive” no we cant, people die all the time the fuk is u talking bout homie 😭 😭
Ants build large, elaborate and engineered structures and shape their environment to suit their needs by moving large quantities of earth, therefore ants are unnatural for not following the rules of nature and actively working to give themselves an evolutionary edge.