I mean, the Roman Empire was an olive tree superorganism. Prove me wrong.
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
While I wouldn't say that's right, I also wouldn't come right out and call it wrong either. This very much engages with the "Selfish Gene", an heuristic model of thinking about evolution from the perspective of the gene itself instead of populations.
As an added amusement, the book "The Selfish Gene" came out in 1976, and is the source of the word "meme," used somewhat differently than it is now, naturally.
This idea comes from "sapiens a brief history of humankind". It's a play on semantics because domestication (domo=house) basically means put in house and the evolution of wheat to be more fit to human consumption in a way pushed us towards agriculture and houses.
The selfish gene ironically proves that gods exist. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-memetic-proof-for-the-existence-of-gods-e5d103234fc7
Utter nonsense. Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real. The logical conclusion there is that anything you can imagine is equally real. Bigfoot really is wandering around a forest, spaghetti absolutely does grow in trees, and the moon landing was definitely on a sound stage (but they also really landed on the moon because I can picture that too).
At best it proves the concept of gods exists and I doubt anyone disagrees with that, you can't really argue that a thought can't exist. What it doesn't prove is that God exists as some material or immaterial entity and that's what atheists claim, that there is no existence of any entity that could be considered a god.
Why it doesn't prove the existence of gods is simple. If the proof is that it exists because we thought it then dragons exist, faeries exist, even flat earth exists because there are people who think it exists. I don't think I need to bring more examples to show how ridiculous the premise is. Just because we can think of a thing doesn't mean that thing now exists.
Oh it's like touhou, I get it now.
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
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?
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
- Beer
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.
I wonder what kind of cats rich people tend to go for. Like, say, it's some kind of black long haired green eyed mini cat. It'll receive better healthcare than most humans on earth.
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I so want to befriend my local crows, been meaning to buy some seeds for bribing 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 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.
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.
I would say it's symbiotic to the continued survival and propegation of their genes, but not to their well-being as individuals.
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.
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.
Yeah, influence is rarely a one way street and things like agriculture or animal husbandry have definitely changed us as well
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.
How to tell someone is reading Sapiens.
Still, insane that "science/technology improvements" did not improve happienes at all. Just shifted the standards.
This makes me think of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael... is there a community for that?
Haha. I'm reading Sapiens right now, too
I've never actually read any Harari books for some reason. Is his stuff generally "reliable"?
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).
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)
Reminds me of The Botany of Desire
it's called "co-evolution"
Isn't this Michael Pollan's theory?
That plants make themselves Delicious/useful/whatever so we'll use them more?
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.
