71–80 of 206 posts
I really appreciated her speaking to young people, even riding the NYC subway for the first time to record "Subway Takes" last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAkwo6JPV00 She also was speaking on a panel just a week ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df0GWlZm3gk
crazy how you can just be this alive one year and then dead the next. I get 91 is old, but still
The weird thing is just today I had recommended that book to a friend.
“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.” -- Goodall at 2002 WEF panel discussion on Amazon rainforest The population 500 years ago was around 500 million. The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization. Paul Ehrlich…
Yeah I've seen this before, we could all drive V12s and eat only beef but it's not a very meaningful insight. We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point. We came from the caves, we didn't know any better we just multiplied like a cancer. More population also brings more benefits, more geniuses more invent…
it is so dangerous and naive to think that utopia is possible, even if we all could agree that Star Trek is one, which we shall not, because I certainly do not think its depiction of watered down "luxury space communism with military ranks" is a desirable society.
Jane Goodall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall
"Dr. Jane Goodall Teaches Conservation" https://www.masterclass.com/classes/jane-goodall-teaches-con...
I really appreciated her speaking to young people, even riding the NYC subway for the first time to record "Subway Takes" last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAkwo6JPV00 She also was speaking on a panel just a week ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df0GWlZm3gk
crazy how you can just be this alive one year and then dead the next. I get 91 is old, but still
The gap between us and the chimpanzees is, at the same time, "tantalizingly small" and "too big". We have learnt to communicate with them, but they also don't seem to ask questions, at least not the way that humans do. There is obvious intelligence in their eyes and deliberation in their movements, but they seem to be content with an almost static culture. Which was also true for the Neanderthals. What was the last s…
So many unsubstantiated claims, you find this pattern in someone infected with exceptionalism.
The Neanderthal claim is what you can call unsubstantiated (so, one claim, not so many), but I would like to draw your attention to the extreme stability of the Mousterien industry. No Homo sapiens sapiens industry comes close to this level of stability.
"infected with exceptionalism"
So, we aren't exceptional at all? How do you square this rejection with the fact that you have never encountered, say, a written comment by a member of another species?
The word "infected" is very negative. I like intelligent animals, but no one except for us has, for example, as versatile hands as we do.
“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.” -- Goodall at 2002 WEF panel discussion on Amazon rainforest The population 500 years ago was around 500 million. The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization. Paul Ehrlich…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey, even if it has a monkey-kind-of shape. It if doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey; if it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey: it's an ape."
With the one exception being Curious George.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off." True, but not the entire picture either. From what we know, even hunters and gatherers living in inhospitable regions have a rich oral culture and extensive pantheons of gods, demigods and legendary heroes. There se…
> There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories. And we have no evidence that we are different in this from Neanderthals (arguably also humans). There is evidence of cultural variation among chimps, so there must also be cultural change. Do they yearn for things more than calories? Well, they play. They are curious. I am extremely skeptical of claims that humans are special. We are…
For me, humans are special in their capability to create extensive culture. That does not mean that $deity has created us in its image, it may well be a random fluke of evolution.
But we haven't seen a cave painting done by non-humans yet, nor heard a story narrated by them.