Why We Dominate the Earth

One is that our species is at least 100,000 years old, most probably 200,000 and possibly a million years old. Yet, culture, history and "world dominance" only happened very recently. Why did it take so long?

Another is that there were many "sapiens" species and they went extinct, either because we exterminated them, or nature did, or we absorbed them by cross-breeding. Being cognitive is no guaranty of success and even, it turns out, no protection from extermination.

Yet another is that other species have language (dolphins for instance, which are neither "dogs" or "fish" or "ants").

And finally, talking of our "success" is the most ironic way of putting it, since we're in the process of destroying all mammal life on earth (including us). Maybe ants "eat our garbage" but they are likely to survive us, unlike anyone who's reading this.

Fiction is a loaded word that says "not real" where maybe shared truths, shared beliefs (in the sense of the Greek: hupostasis rather than pisteuo) would be better.

We can conceptualise and communicate about thing that are immaterial like trust, honor and promises.

Are you sure that agriculture isn't just grain's way of domesticating humans ;)

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/visions-of-the-sem...

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/were-fucked-so-now...

> The biological origins of narrative lie in shallow information cognitive ecologies, circumstances characterized by profound ignorance. What we cannot grasp we poke with sticks. Hitherto we’ve been able to exapt these capacities to great effect, raising a civilization that would make our story-telling ancestors weep, and for wonder far more than horror. But as with all heuristic systems, something must be taken for granted. Only so much can be changed before an ecology collapses altogether. And now we stand on the cusp of a communicative revolution even more profound than literacy, a proliferation, not simply of alternate narratives, but of alternate narrators.

> If you sweep the workbench clean, cease looking at meaning as something somehow ‘anomalous’ or ‘transcendent,’ narrative becomes a matter of super-complicated systems, things that can be cut short by a heart attack or stroke. If you refuse to relinquish the meat (which is to say nature), then narratives, like any other biological system, require that particular background conditions obtain. Scranton’s error, in effect, is a more egregious version of the error Harari makes in Homo Deus, the default presumption that meaning somehow lies outside the circuit of ecology. Harari, recall, realizes that humanism, the ‘man-the-meaning-maker’ narrative of Western civilization, is doomed, but his low-dimensional characterization of the ‘intersubjective web of meaning’ as an ‘intermediate level of reality’ convinces him that some other collective narrative must evolve to take its place. He fails to see how the technologies he describes are actively replacing the ancestral social coordinating functions of narrative.

1) They do exercise control, self-aware or not. Your guts' bacteria control what you can eat or not. The environment bacteria control what diseases you can get and even if live or die. The bacteria decide what chemicals are to stay in the air or not, even what chemicals are released in the air, including the most extremely deadly toxins we know about (e.g. botulin, anthrax...).

2) Humans definitely do not exert far more control over the environment around them. You're talking about building and modifying the environment. Bacteria directly decide if there can be life or not in an environment, and even which forms can be alive or not. What nutrients will be available. What the air, water and earth chemical composition is going to be. Besides, many bacterias are apex predators. They do shape everything to fit their "wishes", even including human behavior since they make up 50% of your body, and that without counting the mitochondrion. So whatever we actually do as humans "controlling" the environment does not even come close to what bacteria control.

3) And finally, we can't get rid of all bacteria, ever, mainly because that would kill us as well. They could easily kill us all whenever they want to, and they won't even notice.