While humans aren’t perfect, it is fortunate that the first species with the potential to dominate all life for billions of years evolved at least some empathy for other species.
While humans aren’t perfect, it is fortunate that the first species with the potential to dominate all life for billions of years evolved at least some empathy for other species.
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Especially the species that are the most beneficial to us.
We don’t even have that much empathy for other groups within our own species.
Sorry but we will be very lucky if we cross the 1 million year mark. 1 billion is certainly not happening and if so then we wont be humans anymore but evolved into something else or more than one species.
Could’ve been ants. They already farm and enslave. They just needed bigger brains.
most of our ancestors had to care for an animal in order to eat. Not really fortuitous. More like deliberate. We even need empathy to help our crops grow.
You say as we drive a massive extinction event
I think so, even though it is always hard to get a perspective from the inside. Like being under the influence of post enlightenment western democracies seems preferable when you are inside them. Tough to prove we are being objective.
It’s probably not just fortunate. Animals are useful to us.
A trained and domesticated dog makes life so much easier for hunter-gatherer societies, both pre-agriculture and post. You basically have faster hunter to help you catch prey 10 times more efficiently that will lay down its life for you if needed. They can guard the crops that you and your tribe depend on for survival. All they generally ask for in exchange is a small share of the food (which they are more than earning) and the occasional belly rub.
Horses? Absolute game changers. Even cats were good at pest control and comforting to pet.
Psychopaths never go far. It’s always more beneficial to have win-win deals with your rivals, even the worst cute-throat ones rather than eliminating them and having all their allies hunt you John wick style.
The species that kills other species the most is being reverred as the one with empathy is hilarious
What empathy? We farm other species for food and are eating the environment to the point of destruction.
Agreed. I hate when everyone is all “humans are trash we’re so dumb”. Yeah we’re so dumb that we’re the only one out of billions of species that have lived on this planet to be this self aware, have a sense of self, create fucking electricity and computers and flying machines, and go to fucking space.. yeah sure we’re dumb.. oh and to have concepts like empathy and consent etc. Not very common in the animal kingdom. Fuck that were this planets crown jewel and likely every other intelligent species in the universe is too far to ever come into contact with so sorry to burst everyone’s bubble.. we’re the pinnacle for at least another million years if the planet survives.
Tribes without enough empathy didn’t survive. It’s nothing special about us. The same would have happened to intelligent lizard men or fungus blob people.
haha billions…lets get through the next century first
>billions
Really? Life on earth has a history of 3.5 – 4 billion years. Early human divergence happened at max a million years ago. And we as modern humans have been here for 10,000 years. Making a claim 5 ordes of magnitude higher? The tree of life says otherwise and there is little to no chance that we’ll be there to see billions, let alone another few million years.
>empathy
we are also potentially the only organism that caused/continued to cause mass extinction of other lives in earth. If you are looking at maybe protecting endangered species or whatever, it’s at best damage control. I wouldn’t call it empathy. And we have quite a track record on doing nothing until it’s too late. The passenger pigeons would be a good enough example.
It seems unlikely that a technological civilization could have evolved without empathy. We needed to be able to cooperate well together to succeed in the way we have, and that probably requires empathy.
What? Billions of animals are killed every single year for palate pleasure.
I don’t think this is true. We kill billions of animals every year, we industrialised it. We are the worst problem for every other species on the planet, longterm wise, especially with climate change.
Billions of years? We’ll be lucky if our species survives the next millennia.
These morons will be lucky to make it through 100 years. Ants will outlive them.
What makes you think we’re the first? Maybe some all-knowing judge somewhere hit the reset button.
(This is a call to The Good Place. I wanted to clarify just in case anyone thought I was getting weirdly religiousy)
Yeah some have empathy however humans a have directly caused the extinction of countless species. We are also doing our best to create an earth that is no longer livable for ourselves. I would argue we may be one of the worst species to dominate the earth, at least as far as other animals and our future descendants should be concerned
It would be strange for an intelligent being to have 0.0000% empathy for other species.
I don’t think that humans will survive for billions of years. We seem to self destruct. We’re squandering all the resources, reducing what future generations will have access to.
We barely have respect for our own species and less for the other life that we depend upon for our very existence.
There’s a tipping point which we’ll eventually meet and it’ll be too late to change the outcome of. We’ve ignored climate change because it’s inconvenient.
Nature usually finds a way to balance things out, I don’t know what that means for us with the over population and our insatiable push to out do every one else, at any cost.
Too bad we don’t have enough for our own species lmao
We haven’t passed a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the time of the Dinosaurs “billions of years” nothing.
Don’t confuse altruism with selfish intent.
Yeah, we got empathy… right next to the “exploit everything” button
Humans clapping themselves on the shoulder while having made what people perceive as hell a reality for livestock on the planet. We use and abuse to our own benefit. If we really have empathy we need to show it through informed decisions and actions.
Lol, billions. Nah, we’re definitely not that race. I give it a few millennia, tops.
Um. We would be the most terrifying and terrible species to be the first to explore and discover other life forms. We’d abduct them, experiment on them like we do on every type of lifeform here.
We’re racist towards each other imagine how xenophobic shit can get if we keep on allowing genocides on people we deem lesser.
Imagine Warhammer 40k thats essentially us if we become universal explorers if we keep our current pace of distasteful actions.
We take care of things that are cute or tasty which is unique
Potential? Humans have been enslaving life since before recorded history. We torture and murder 90 billion animals every year for food and other products, despite the fact that we’ve never needed to.
Veganism – Wikipedia
Dominion (2018) – full documentary [Official] – YouTube
780,000-Year-Old Discovery Reveals That Early Humans Thrived on a Plant-Based Diet
This is Why Humans Aren’t Omnivores (or Herbivores) – YouTube
lol no it’s because foods going to run out quickly otherwise.
Is this a joke? If you’re serious then you truly have no idea what humans do to animals, not just for their meat, but for scientific testing and of course skinning them alive for leather or whatever material we need for clothes and bags. The empathy some humans have for our dogs and cats is far outweighed compared to the utter suffering we bring on chickens, cows and every other animal you can think of. That’s without even mentioning how we’ve desecrated the ocean. By every metric humans have NO meaningful empathy for other species.
Humans being very big, extremely slow to reproduce and with children being very slow to develop requiring intense care for years may have basically saved the world.
Another example is that if industrial age with widespread and inefficient coal use would’ve continued as is for a century or two more, we probably would be in an obvious runaway doomsday scenario with the greenhouse effect. Imagine a scenario where the innovation just stopped right there either due to limitations of the species or due to unforeseen externalities like cognitive impairment due to lead poisoning.
Of course, it could’ve been a species that was even more intelligent and had more compassion for other species and possibly even one with even slower reproduction. In the case that any Ape had a chance to evolve into a dominant species, there was a recipe for a disaster – the current situation is already close enough to one!
dominate others but never himself. that’s the real challenge.
We breed billions of animals into existence every year only to torture and slaughter them for a sandwich. That’s not empathy.
id say on the whole the individual empathy you are referencing is far outweighed by the convenient ignorance of the mass extinctions of various species around the planet because they were a slight impediment in humans covering this planet like a cancer and mostly just so we can buy more stuff and things
and i dont think we were the first with the potential to dominate all life (why should that even be a goal or celebrated) and i would stake anything on the fact that humans will not be around for billions of years …. let alone dominating …at current rate if we dont wipe each other out entirely we will be top of food chain for another 10-15 years max …we are draining this planet dry of all resources and not worrying about different ways to exist in harmony with it just what other country has more stuff we want and we can overpower to get it
We hope that when AI takes over the planet and then WE just become a species that just happens to live here, that they will have at least some empathy for us.
it’s not fortunate at all. It’s the function by which we got this far. It’s not an accident, it’s the reason.
It’s like nature said, Let’s give these humans the power to rule, but make sure they can also hug it out. Empathy keeping us from being total tyrants since day one.
Would say that livestock ranks up there in being beneficial to humans. And I doubt they would say we are very empathetic towards them.
What the fuck does “dominate all life for billions of years” mean?
You mean the few species we havent killed off yet?
Most human empathy ends where their needs begin
You must be joking or really ignorant. We are living through a mass extinction of all other forms of life, caused by us.
We … we haven’t been around for billions of years. And we’re not going to be.
hahahahahahahah
wait are you serious?
HAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAH
It’s inevitable. This shower thought clearly illustrated the strange propaganda we’ve been beholden to for the last 100 years or so. Before that it was fairly well known and acknowledged that species frequently cooperated and worked alongside one another. (Tiger style kung-fu, manta rays working with pikes, or octopus working with various marine life to hunt, etc.)
Cooperation is not a choice it is a prerequisite
Humans won’t dominate for “billions” of years. The mutation rate of DNA ensures there will be 500-1000 interstitial species that are not homo sapiens sapiens between now and a billion years from now.
The planet could be ruled by sentient cats by then.
Scary but also comforting thought… at least we care a little about the world we live in
I highly recommend the book Hail Mary, which is soon to get a feature movie. This is actually discussed in the book by two of the main characters, and one of the things notes is that at the end of the day you need community to grow as a species.
To summarize from memory, one of the books points is that to have time to build and to sleep, you need a community to keep you safe. It only makes sense then a society like humanity to be the ones to reach a certain stage of evolution.
You know what, OP? You’re right. Thanks for the thought
Empathy is a major social intelligent factor, so since humans are precisely a social and an intelligent species it actually make sense.
It also explain why out of clinical psychopath, people with no empathy always seem deep dumb.
Unfortunately the people who are in charge don’t have any empathy.
True, empathy’s a nice touch. Would be a shame if the dominant species used it selectively, like caring for pets with their little personalities while annually farming other animals by the billion and saying oh well, these ones experience life differently.
Its no coincidence. It’s design. Human are evolved to cooperate, including with other species.
I think one thing people forget is that cooperation is one of the strongest forces in evolution. Some biologists argue it is the strongest force (stronger than competition).
What? 1. We are not the first. 2. We wont dominate life for billions of years. 3. Our “empathy” is based on neccesity and consequences. 4. We are horrible against any animal. 5. Ask the the Emus about human empathy and they will come back and start another war.
Some empathy? Yeah right. Only if the cute animal video is entertaining.
We are also the only species that pays to live here!!!
This is neither high-quality nor thought-provoking.
Eh, there probably could have been a better species to evolve, apes are too violent and it shows. Capybara for instance.
Humans, when not constrained by greed or their own survival, are a remarkably social and benevolant species. Even moreso than some of the examples we love to report as better than humans.
There are, of course, outlyers, but the same can be said for other species.
I would say that’s a pretty low bar. At least most animals kill to feed. We abuse animals in all sorts ways other than eating them. We definitely can do better but we choose not to.
Dominate all life for billions of years? What are you talking about? Bro modern humans only evolved 300,000 years ago. Modern civilizations emerged within the last 10,000 years. And by 2025 we’re facing an ecological and environment catastrophe brought on SOLELY by our consumption of the planets resources with absolute disregard for the degradation we cause.
By point of comparison, early hominins like Australopithecus evolved 4.2 million years ago and only went extinct 1.9 million years ago, meaning they were around for 2.3 million years. Our 300k is a blink of the eye and all we see behind the lids are nightmares.
some empathy for dogs and cats and a few other domesticated creatures, but not a lot. not a lot of empathy.
Yep, we were given empathy for a reason by the same power that told us to be stewards of the world. It’s a shame so many people don’t live up to it.
I think the millions of animals that are only raised to supply us with eggs, milk and meat, will disagree with your statement.
you’re pretty optimistic with billions there ,
Dude, that empathy is because they’re useful. Animals are extremely useful.
“Survival of the fittest” isn’t exactly true. “Survival of the FRIENDLIEST” is what’s gotten us so far, feels like we’ve lost the plot recently