orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Gonna take the chance to plug my own animal brain size graph. Brains need to fit the body therey're in (a larger body means more sensory data, more nerve terminations to manage, can supply more energy, &c), but most body structures don't scale linearly with the overall body size; it boils down to some variant of the square-cube law. I have some reflections on the data in that link; a brain can only become so small before it stops working at a brain at all, and presumably there are diminishing returns above a certain size.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The use of articles varies subtly even between languages who generally use them; Romance languages use articles in many situations in which English does not, and vice versa.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Indeed. By the nature of evolution, closely related species blur at the edges. Interfertility remains the main criterion to distinguish species, but it's neither binary (there are many degrees of non-interfertility: won't mate > will mate but not conceive > will conceive but not carry to term > hybrids are born malformed > hybrids are healthy but sterile > hybrids are fertile but have lower fitness) nor transitive (see ring species, where A is interfertile with B and B with C, but C is not interfertile with A). Besides, most species are named on morphological or genetical grounds, because checking interfertility with their relatives would be impractical. And of course many species are exclusively asexual and do not mate at all -- just look at the mess that is bacterial taxonomy, where populations of a single "species" can be more genetically diverse than mammals and fish.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
It's a lot less blurry at the edges, if nothing else -- at least ever since Neanderthals passed to the greater number. There's still ambiguity around the beginning and the end of life (e.g. fetuses, vegetative states) but there isn't much doubt on whether something is Homo sapiens or not.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I don't see how it's less blurry.
Diachronically, it's not, as you point out, and arguably even worse; but at the present time, all evolutionary edge cases are extinct. Just imagine the kind of culture-war discourse there would be about Homo erectus personhood, but we don't have to care about it, because they're all long gone. You're correct that it's not much an issue of rigor, but a pragmatic one.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Which trans men are not.
That's the whole point of contention, though. From how you're constructing the definition, I assume you don't think being capable of impregnating a woman is a necessary feature of being a man, since many people who cannot do that are generally regarded as men. So you, correctly, broaden the definition by stating that it's enough to belong to the same general "natural" category as people who can father children. But where are the borders of that category (assuming it even has borders and doesn't gradually fade away at the edges)? In a pro-trans perspective, trans-men are, indeed, members of the category that can impregnate women, even if they can't individually do that themselves. Your definition does not forbid this.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
AFAIK, the kind of grammatical gender familiar to speakers of European language (he/she/sometimes it) is a peculiarity of Indo-European (Hindi, Farsi, European languages except Basque, Finnish and Hungarian) and Afro-Asiatic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) languages. Most languages of other families either have very different "gender" classes (e.g. the prefix system of Swahili, the noun classes based on shape and appearance in Navajo) or none at all.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Use of he/she only resolves ambiguity when you are talking about exactly one man and one woman. If the goal is minimizing ambiguity, you might look into something more similar to obviative pronouns: something like I was talking to Alice(1) and Betty(2), then suddenly she(2) passed out.
When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative." Subsequent sentences that refer to previously-named entities with pronouns or verbal inflections can then use the proximate and obviative references that have already been established to distinguish between the two.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I don't think "destroying artistic representations of people in public is always wrong in any circumstance" is a moral standard in any culture, let alone all. And if we are to use them Commandments as a guide, the only one that specifically addresses sculptures and artwork says
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath
, and that was followed by quite a lot of divinely-approved "vandalism".
orca-covenant
1yr ago
It's articles like this that really make me embrace Idealism and express outright pro-anthroprocentrism.
Why jump from one extreme to another? Intelligence is a gradient as pretty much everything else in biology. Humans are most probably smarter (= more capable of abstract reasoning, choosing between courses of action, anticipating experiences, working with complex systems, etc.) than elephants, crows, and dolphins, which are probably smarter than non-human apes, which are smarter than monkeys and octopodes, which are smarter than dogs, which are smarter than lizards, which are smarter than fish, which are smarter than earthworms, which are smarter than plants, which are smarter than bacteria. You can then assign rights and responsibilities accordingly with whatever criteria you prefer.
Talking about "animals" as a block in general is not very useful. Chimpanzees are more like humans than like, say, jellyfish under the vast majority of aspects.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn?
One is strictly dependent from a specific, non-replaceable (with current technology) human body, the other is not. You can agree or disagree that this is morally relevant, but this is a significant difference between a fetus and a newborn. At the very least, it implies a very different distribution of costs.
Plus, birth as a Schelling point -- the development from a single cell to basically-a-newborn and from a newborn to a fully sapient human are both gradual, hazy, and complex, while birth is an unambiguous, easily observable discontinuity.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Crustaceans aren't even that close to insects phylogenetically
Hyperpedantry time: Insecta is, technically, included in Crustacea, so that some crustaceans are closer relatives of insects that of other crustaceans, and so that cladistically insects are crustaceans in the same sense that birds are reptiles. (Springtails are indeed still closer to insects than to any non-hexapod crustacean, though.) This of course has no relevance whatsoever to any cultural or gastronomic considerations, but I figured someone might want to know.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
High oxygen is useful but not sufficient -- arthropods have to molt their cuticle periodically, and when they have freshly molted they are short on mechanical support. You can get by with hydraulic pressure if you are very small or live in water, but if you weigh a ton and live on land you will be extremely vulnerable in many occasions. Also, there's the issue of competition with vertebrates, which are generally more efficient in large-sized niches. The giant arthropods of the Carboniferous owed their existence to the fact that large vertebrates were still few and sparse as much as high oxygen concentration.
"nobody is agitating for it and you are silly to agitate against it."
That's a perfectly coherent statement if you interpret "agitating for" as "wanting to mandate" and "agitate against" as "wanting to forbid" (or "keep forbidden"). Not that I think anyone in this thread wishes to ban the consumption of insects, but in many countries selling insect-derived products as food is currently illegal*, and one can wish to change this fact without wanting to force any diet on anyone.
"It's not happening and it's good" is not contradictory, either, if the two "it"s refer to different things. One can quite plausibly believe, for example, "forcing insect-eating is not happening, and permitted insect-eating is good".
EDIT: * With at least one universal exception being honey, of course.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
In history you study kings not peasants.
If you get your idea of history from Medieval sagas, perhaps. In history as practiced by actual historians, social organization, mass migrations, cultural and political shifts, adoption of technology, and other such things that necessarily involve large collections of people are fundamental. Even if we know few specific individuals from a social group, it definitely does not mean the group as a whole cannot have played an important role in history. Can you name a single Sumerian scribe? And yet we owe them one of the most important inventions in the history of our species. As the poem goes, kings deliver little if they don't have servants, soldiers, and quite a lot of peasants doing the actual work for them.
By the way, even actual horses are, in fact, extremely important objects of study in history, having played a fundamental role in many important events (cases in point: the Indo-European expansion, the Germanic migrations into Roman Europe, the Medieval agricultural revolution, the Eurasian steppe empires, the European conquest of the Americas).
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I think that's the phenomenon David Chapman writes about a lot in his essays on Buddhism -- how Westernized "therapeutic Buddhism" has very little in common with how Buddhism is actually traditionally practiced, and if anything resembles more 19th century German Idealism, of all things?
Interesting, thanks.
EDIT: ... did I say anything wrong?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Not proxy wars, but there were at least one war between URSS and China in 1964 and one between India and Pakistan in 1999, in both cases with both participants having nuclear weapons (and URSS being a superpower). Though admittedly both were fairly small in scale.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I would dispute even "mammal" -- in the present time, you have basal species like the platypus that, while solidly classified under Mammalia, have generally un-mammal-like features such as laying eggs and lacking nipples; and in prehistory, you have the whole series of mammalian ancestors gradually emerging from reptiles, developing the characteristics trait of mammals through many intermediates. Granted, in most practical circumstances this is pointless pedantry, and the intuitive category works just fine -- how often are you going to deal with a platypus or a Procynosuchus in real life? But there are very few categories that have really sharp borders; most things blur at the edges.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
If you can just pick fruit off a tree all year. No need.
Is that the case, though? Any tree whose fruits can "just be picked" at any time would be stripped bare pretty quickly, and Malthus would rear his head soon. Hunter-gatherers and horticultors in tropical jungles have to work really hard for their food, water, and toolmaking resources. Even in the lushest jungle the vast majority of biomass is useless to humans. Besides, warm weather does not necessarily lead to lush jungles -- monsoon or savanna climates with long dry seasons often result, and harsh deserts as well. Is life significantly easier for the San or the Yanomamo than for the Inuit?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
In my experience libgen has slightly higher quality, but Zlib has books that are not on libgen.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I feel compelled to add that here in Italy eating liver and tripe, and to a lesser degree heart, brain, and lungs, is still quite popular, even to the point of being considered a delicacy. I can tell by personal experience that Tuscan liver paté is excellent.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
In recent years, I've become very fond of Enya.
Susan Bauer's History of the Ancient World seems a pretty good overview of Antiquity up to the fall of Rome, although I'll admit I've read only parts of it. The Great Transformation is a wonderful primer on the origin of all major religions and philosophical traditions of Eurasia. In general Erenow's archive is full of gems (though I also notice a couple that are pretty much pseudohistory). I don't know if the site itself has any particular political bias, but the books are all over the place in that sense.
-- Roland Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, 1916
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