To be fair, I don’t know exactly what is meant.

But my mind went to meat consumption, which is higher in the developed world, is considered indicative of a high standard of living, and, in my opinion, is best addressed not by lab-grown meat (or other technological solutions), but by reduced consumption (the reduced living standard).

I never said that. What I meant is that a behaviour, which benefits a species as a whole but reduces one individual’s fitness, is not evolutionary competitive. It’s evolutionary game theory, like the prisoners dilemma from normal game theory.

And to determine if some behaviour is such a dilemma, you have to consider costs and benefits of it, which is not at all clear in natural situations. That’s why I said it needs to be studied.

But I must concede, I sort of assumed what exactly you called an evolutionary advantage. Common homosexuality in penguins or not discriminating against homosexual individuals in penguins have very different analysis here.

I’d be cautious with saying evolutionary advantage here.

I don’t believe the “Gay Uncle hypothesis” any more than the somewhat debunked “Grandmother Hypothesis”, which aimed to explain menopause with biological altruism. Just because we could think of a way in that it might be advantageous for a species doesn’t mean it’s advantageous for an individuals fitness.

Of course, it can be still an advantage, but we’d only know with more free, uncensored research.

Yes.

We humans are very well adapted to tell humans apart, penguins are very well adapted to tell penguins apart. They have gender specific mating calls for example.

Contrary to popular belief, Emperor Penguins do not mate for life. They are serially monogamous, only having 1 mate per year, but between years fidelity is at around 15%.

I think this means that they only choose last years partner 15% of the time. Still higher than random chance, but in no way dependant on their partner.

Was looking up something else on Wikipedia and stumbled onto this fact. I know this is not exactly related to the point you wanted to make, but I might as well share it.

From the penguin documentaries I watched as a kid, I feel like the “leaving eggs behind” might involve relentless bullying.

I think I used to eat mud when I was bored.

This bike lane is on the left side, but the bike lanes in the rest of the city are on the right. Someone then thought the best way to connect them is to have them cross 2 streets to get to the bike path leading to the right, and from there take 2 left turns if they want to go left, which also has a separate lane for right turns - just for the cars, of course, so that is another lane bicycles need to cross.

So, depending how the traffic lights work, bicycles have to wait up to 5 times to do a simple left turn. The traffic needs to flow after all, and traffic just means car traffic to some city planners.

Actually, it was the train that has come the long way.

It might look like you’re moving when you focus completely on the train, but you are in fact standing still while train spotting.

I think that is thinking a bit too narrow. A lot of the stuff we use today might just be our bronze to our successors iron - you can build an unstable society on either. And what we do use up today could still work if used more efficiently - we might not have enough rare metals to give everyone a smartphone in the post-post-apocalypse, but I could see us still launching satellites if only big governments had computers - because they did.

You are correct, but that doesn’t mean I can’t speculate about it.

The ability to do photosynthesis is widely distributed throughout the bacterial domain in six different phyla, with no apparent pattern of evolution., according to this random paper I found on the internet (I’m not a biologist either).

What I can glance is that photosynthesis has (probably) evolved independently 6 time in Bacteria and 3 times in Eukaryotes.

Plants evolved to photosynthesise after photosynthesising bacteria already existed for billions of years.

(But then we have to also acknowledge that multicellular life evolved like 25 times in Eukaryotes, and the Eukaryote - aka Mitochondria-“Powerhouse of the cell”-haver- is the real big step as it only happened once to our knowledge).

We have had Millions of years of (presumably) intelligent Dinosaurs on this planet, but only 200.000 years of mankind were enough to create Civilization IV, the best Strategy game and peak of life as we know it.

So clearly, Civilization™ is what sets us apart.

Jokes aside, the thing evolution on earth spend the most time on is getting from single celled life-forms to multicellular life (~2 billion years). If what earth life found difficult is difficult for all, multicellular collaboration is way harder than photosynthesis, which evolved roughly half a billion years after life formed.

A filter for sure, but not a great one. Call me optimistic, but I don’t think that will set us back more than 10.000 years. If humanity can survive, society will re-emerge, and we are back here 2-3000 years into the future.

Is +5°C Earth a good place to be? No. Will the majority of humans die? Absolutely. Will the descendants get to try this society thing again? I believe so.

On a cosmic scale 10.000 years is just a setback, and cannot be considered a great filter.

No, there’s barely any physical evidence that anyone a few hundred years ago existed.

But if writing is enough, there are some. Tacitus basically said: “Nero blamed the Christians, followers of that Guy called Jesus who Pilatus executed a few decades ago.”

Wikipedia at least says both his Baptism and crucifixion are not disputed by historians.

“Time is an illusion anyway, who cares if noon isn’t at 12?”

Looks at China: 1 time zone

“Maybe we oughta get our shit together just in case”

Rabbits were initially bred as a source of meat, as were guinea pigs.

I personally couldn’t slaughter either.

I should have instead started with Chickens, maybe they would have liked it.

I grew Chard one Summer during the pandemic. I had some old garden magazine with a similar sketch, but focusing on the vegetable beds. They described how incredibly space efficient chard is, and how it should be grown in any garden centered on self-sufficiency.

So anyways, I’m all for community gardening now and can not look at another leaf of chard for the next decade. That stuff really knocks the dream of self-sufficiency out of any gardener. It’s ridiculous how much Chard just 2 rows of plants can produce with minimal time spend tending to them, but don’t believe anyone who says its leaves tastes like spinach and the stems like asparagus. It tastes like green mush and is best chucked in the freezer to die a slow death, maybe to be micro-dosed into some smoothie.

Ugh.

• fluids should be around two 3rds of what you consume every day by weight. Reducing microplastics in there by 80% is a huge improvement, not at all comparable to your dieting allegory
• for the same reason, the microplastics we breathe in are unfortunate, hopefully some day eradicated, but negligible compared to what we consume
• it’s not my fault your country still allows lead based solder and you don’t know what a tea pot is. Hot tip: You can boil your water every day in it.
• Again, people can care about 2 things at once. Just because I don’t have any idea how to deal with the great pacific garbage patch doesn’t mean I might as well eat the plastic wrapper with my food inside it.

In some studies Mircroplastics seem to be linked to skin cancer. And while no food will truly be 100% free of it, I believe like toxins, they build up each level of the food chain (Bio-accumulation). So eating big carnivorous fish like Tuna may be less healthy than beef which is less healthy than a vegan diet, but most research on Bio accumulation seems to be focused on marine life.