> Because they relate to the trees as live beings with intimate ties to surrounding people and other creatures, the Waorani aren’t alarmed by the notion that a tree might scream when cut, or surprised that harming a tree should cause trouble for humans.
That sounds like textbook anthropomorphizing, and the article seems to follow down that path as well...
Absolutely. I study ecology, and I have to say this article sounds like quite a lot of hogwash to me.
Of course, trees do communicate - but obsessively trying to frame mindless chemical ecological processes in such extreme anthropomorphic terms is dangerously close to the border between extreme oversimplification and rank pseudoscience.
I always wondered, why is anthropomorphizing looked upon with such disdain? To me, that attitude smacks of the idea that humans are "special." Additionally, if it really is wrong to generalize from human internal experience to that of animals, logic implies that it is wrong to generalize from a specific human's internal experience to that of any other human. Since we don't seem to want to give up on making sweeping generalizations about humans, we should probably also stop making such a stink about anthropomorphizing.
Finally, anthropormophizing is a useful metaphorical aid to help people understand. I don't think it's a big deal as long as you avoid making absolute teleological claims.
> anthropormophizing is a useful metaphorical aid to help people understand
Absolutely. So does simplification. Simplifying things to make them understandable to non-experts is an incredibly important skill - ask any teacher (or their students, for that matter). The problem comes with oversimplification, simplifying explanations to a degree when they are just dead wrong. At that point, the simplification doesn't only not help with the understanding, it can actively hinder future understanding by suggesting that you have already understood (when in fact you haven't).
I guess a better way of putting this is that trees are communicating / fungus and other things that live in symbiosis with trees relay certain types of info.
Language and speaking not so much and it does seem s little far-fetched.
It was a whimsical comment, and you are being overly critical. And I was considering the way man affects our environment. And yes, it is mentioned in the article.
Your hair trigger response says far more about you than me. I literally have made one whimsical comment in literally hundreds of comments, and you decide to threaten me.
The issue is that you have a long history of posting borderline comments and creating drama on the site as well as in abusive emails. This was a problem. We took the rate limit off your account out of courtesy to you, but that's provisional on the problem not starting up again. Since multiple unsubstantive comments were starting to show up again from your account, I thought I'd better say something.
"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.
The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing."
If that doesn't sit right with you then maybe you'll be more comfortable using Reddit or something similar.
The problem is more complicated and more interesting than this. You can have many innocent comments, none objectionable in its own right, that add up to a situation no one wants or enjoys. The issue isn't that the individual comments are bad; in principle they could add fun to an otherwise good and substantial site. But in practice you can't have a stable equilibrium that way: if you allow it, you end up with a snowball effect in which such comments take over and it's all downhill from there. Therefore we can't allow it. It isn't about being killjoys, but about protecting the viability of the site.
I agree, but I'm not too sure about that, but I also don't know enough chemistry to convincingly argue for the opposite..
Are there many varieties of self-replicating molecules? (which I understand is needed to start life) Maaaaybe there's only so many ways that this can get started and RNA is the "only" way to do it. In a similar way that we have a hard time imagining non-carbon life since no other element behaves in the ways that carbon does
I'm really enjoying this comment section conversation. I had to look up "Panspermia": the theory that life on Earth originated from microorganisms or chemical precursors of life present in outer space and able to initiate life on reaching a suitable environment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
It means all of that. We find something we've never seen before. There's something about it that seems "alive". It's an instinctual feeling. We have to decide how "alive" that is. Is it alive like a human, a tree, bacteria, AI? I'm being general on purpose here. It's just neat that this conversation is still so relevant here on Earth. It's kind of like how alien the deep ocean still is to us.
If by "speak a language" you mean "have unique ways of sharing information", then of course trees speak a language and of course we can learn about it.
It's not "of course" obvious that trees "share information." That's pretty cool if true and not something that all or even most plants are known to do.
I remember there was some experiments on plants that were treated differently. Both receives the same physical treatment (water, sunlight, etc). The difference was the other plant used to get yelled at, or cursed at. While the others is treated with kindness, talk positive in front of it. The result was, the plant who got cursed died. I forgot where I found this, would be helpful if anyone else encountered such researches.
This reminds me of Masaru Emoto's "The Secret Life Of Water" <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto> where he exposed water to intensely positive and negative words and sounds and photographed the crystals of frozen water from each state. A beautiful book, but also seems to have been debunked as lacking any scientific evidence, as it was more an art project then a peer reviewed experiment. <http://www.beliefnet.com/news/science-religion/2006/03/sensi...
Since it was conceived by an ad agency to promote anti-bullying (and furniture giant IKEA) there's a fair chance it wasn't the most scientifically valid experiment ever conducted.
Mythbusters ran their own test in the past and found that both insulting and being kind to plants stimulated them more than allowing them to grow in silence, but they liked death metal even more (their conclusion was that the basic theory of sound vibrations mildly stimulating growth was plausible). There's more serious research going on into plant bioacoustics: the theory some plants have evolved to respond to specific sound stimuli
Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species.
If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.
The huge difference is that lions dont put impalas into huge factories, where they feed them afwul food, rob them of any dignitiy, slaughter them by the masses, ship them across the globe in order to throw half of it away because it didnt hit the market’s taste of the month!
It's not about tendencies. Intelligence is about being better at getting what you want. A lion wants to eat impala. A smart lion would figure out how to breed them in captivity, and it's only a small step from there to factory farming.
Agreed. Every hunt a lion does imposes fatal risk of its own. The lion could break its leg running and falling in some hole. It could break its teeth getting kicked in the face by the impala. Any of that even could cause it to not be able to hunt any more, and lose its status in the herd.
A smart lion wouldn't want to risk itself like that just for a meal.
How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass? :)
Farming is after all pretty sustainable. But how about the things that aren't? We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc.
We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive".
> How many smart lions would kill every impala and then wonder if they can switch to grass?
Probably a few, then they'd figure out the concept of saving something for later, just as human farmers did countless of centuries ago :).
> We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc.
A nit, but the reason we're "kind of ignoring" renewables is because fossil fuels are better. They're much more energy dense. They're easier to handle (just burn to release energy; meanwhile, photovoltaics is a very advanced piece of technology, and we most likely wouldn't have it if we didn't start with fossil fuels). They can be processed for other things - e.g. lubricants, plastics. Fossil fuels are absurdly useful. That's why they're so popular. But we're slowly getting there with renewables, not that both the tech and the will to use it seems to be here.
> We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive".
Here's the thing - it's a social problem at this point. Something I believe smart lions would face too. We've spawned an economy that makes us do these things to survive, even though at least some of us individually realize they're monumentally stupid. Those are hard problems, because they involve getting a lot of people to agree to something that isn't in their immediate short-term interest.
Hey, you're right. Although another huge difference is that lions didn't evolve to be intelligent enough to learn to farm, invent mathematics, leave the planet etc. We are hunters, and what is going on now is a logical progression of what hunters who got smarter and more powerful would do. It sounds silly but I think that if any other hunter animal evolved like us, it would lead to very similar results.
I am not a fan of the mass farming, but there are thousands of variables that lead to our current treatment of cattle and so on.
How many people do you know have left the planet, or could solve a mathematical theorem, eh?
The difference is that before, we hunted enough to eat, but not so much that the species died, whereas now we are willing to exterminate a species if it means we can get rid of other versions of us ('Every buffalo dead, is a dead indian').
Seems like we've got more callous and stupid the more this 'intelligence' was displayed.
Mars One is noted as being very short on funding, lacking critical concepts about hardware, life support, electrical power supply, and has been criticized as glossing over logistics, medical concerns, and protection against space radiation.
The name of the people that had leaved the planet is not exactly a secret.
> we hunted enough to eat, but not so much that the species died
Yep, the myth of the good savage. Mammooth, Moas, European Wolly Rhino, Megalania giant varanus, Meiolania turtle, Sabre tooth tiger, Cave bear or Australian Diprotodon could tell us a different hystory.
> The name of the people that had leaved the planet is not exactly a secret.
Yes, but all that proves is that some subset of humanity is capable of doing it. Not humanity as a whole.
> Yep, the myth of the good savage.
Actually a lot of the verbal culture of many tribes show that they understand how they are dependent on the animals for their food source, and you can find active efforts not to overhunt in many cultures. It seems to me the main thing that has increased isn't necessarily intelligence, but greed.
> Yes, but all that proves is that some subset of humanity is capable of doing it. Not humanity as a whole.
What's the point of this argument? Yes, humanity as a whole has become very specialised. With the consensus of the community and enough will power a subset of humanity can achieve almost anything we can conceive. Is this any different than toting dolphin pods that pass on their hunting tricks? Or captive gorillas that can communicate? Potential is not limited to the lowest common denominator.
>> The huge difference is that lions dont put impalas into huge factories, where they feed them afwul food, rob them of any dignitiy, slaughter them by the masses, ship them across the globe in order to throw half of it away because it didnt hit the market’s taste of the month!
"Awful" food? "Dignity"? It doesn't make sense to judge the lives that these animals have chosen on human standards. Chicken is the most successful bird in the world, and cattle and sheep the most successful mammals. I'd say the symbiotic relationship with humans has worked out quite well in terms of reproductive success.
The OP may not have realized it but “the dignity of animals” is really a parsed reflection of how we treat and see ourselves. In a sense, It’s not about the animals.
Life feeds on life. No animal would hesitate for a second to eat you, if it could without risk. Even herbivores, have you seen cows/deer/horses eat little chicks?
Life then replicates without limits until all resources are consumed and it cannot be supported anymore.
We are in fact, (we can't know for sure but I think it's very reasonable to assume) the only species
capable of seeing this and MAYBE,hopefully control ourselves before we do the same thing.
We are pieces of shit, but at the same time we're the only animal with potential to escape the bad parts of our nature
Most animals live in constant fear, dirt, with parasites and depressing social relationships. I bet that if you got to know few impalas, you would state that most of them are jerks who don’t live long anyway. Lions also may leave their prey’s parts to smaller carnivores. The only difference is that they don’t throw it out since they eat right from the floor and then walk away.
I think he mean the main difference would be that animals mostly kill (probably applies to most of their other actions) out of need (protection, food). Humans destroy things because they can many times. Sometimes it's not about needs... unless for example you consider greed to be a need.
Learning English: They kill out of need, out of seems to me more like without. They kill without need. In Spanish we should say they kill because of need. How "out of" became because?
Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.
Well... "out of necessity" is actually an idiom, meaning "because you have to". Since need and necessity are very similar in meaning I assume this is a correct statement. But I'm not a native English speaker this may of course be a common mistake.
Since we are trying to learn the tree language, I hope people don't get annoyed if I wonder about what is the mental state that converts "out of" into "because".
If necessity was a generator, a vector or force for movements or actions, then I could understand that use of "out of". Out of indicates the result produced by a force, algorithm or oracle. But I consider necessity not as a generator or force but as a passive state. Hence I wonder what is the mechanism for this use. If we collapse the concepts of passive and active then I think language get corrupted and poissoned. Analogies are not fruitful because they go far beyong the logical ground. I believe that if you are going to get something out of a state then that state should be a generator. I don't know if what I am trying to say is sound but I sharply feel the unsoundness of linguistic non logically generated derivations
Perhaps originally this use of "out of" indicates a mental state in which change is promoted, in which you fight against an hostile passive state, so you bootstrap from your needs.
Perhaps that kind of mental state could be used for sentiment analysis. The probability of that use of "out of" increases when you are in a mental state that promotes flipping active and passive states. For example, when you not any longer want to cope with your actual state, going to extremes: you put yourself in a fight for survival state that promotes a revolution by beating the slavery chains.
There is a great explanation of the difference between 'because of' and 'out of' in an answer to this question on English Language Learners SE [1]:
> You should use "because of" in cases like this when the thing in question is the catalyst for something to happen, and use "out of" when the thing in question metaphorically "gives rise" to something else.
I always assumed out of necessity idiom means no other choice. And because of would mean I have choices and this is the justification for the one I made.
For the purpose of the comment "out of need" felt a lot more appropriate for an animal that kills.
I think it’s somewhat reasonable if you interpret it “the killing came out of need”. As in, the animal had a need (to eat, or defend themselves) and from that need came killing. So they “kill out of need”. Not sure if that helps!
(Also, fwiw, you could also say “they kill because of need” or “they kill because they need to”, so because works in English as well)
If you want a rationalization for that idiom, think of a state machine: they are in a state of need, therefore they kill. Note also how acting "out of" does not necessarily imply transitioning away, e.g. company x operating out of city y.
The grammatical nuance between out of need and out of luck (nice find btw) would be doing (out of need) vs being (out of luck): you might win out of luck, and later lose because you are out of luck. Wastefully spend out of wealth, then be out of wealth, and so on.
Animals kill "for fun" too. Not just cats (example: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2018-04-30/wolf-a... -- note: that was a single wolf, not a pack; and do you know what happens when a marten finds its way into the chicken coop? Chicken genocide).
It's not the behaviour that is unique to humans; it is the ability to act counter to instinct, counter to appetite, to choose and be aware of the consequences. We alone can be held accountable for our actions.
Unique? I specifically used the word mostly and not unique. And the scale is vastly different. Also "killing" was just an over-encompassing metaphor.
I'm not implying that needless killing is the only, or the main thing that sets us apart from animals, except in the context of the comment I was replying to (about lions feeding on an impala). But it's taking this kind of actions despite having the ability to be aware consequences that makes us special. You would expect the threshold for some of these actions to increase with these newfound abilities but it went the other way around. A person is willing to kill a last member of a species not for survival but for little more than a trophy on a wall.
There are probably far more things that set us apart from animals than instinct or awareness of consequence. Most children actually lack these abilities because they are partly taught, they have to be groomed. So the main difference might be that we are able to learn up to a point that no animal can rival us.
This is the perfect example of what a human can be without "learning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxana_Malaya
I think you can be more empathetic with humans too, interpret me right. One could object that you are anthropomorphizing the natural world, meaning your sentiment is still in the end just rooted in the human experience. But I think that's fair to do. I'd just like to add, as the Swedish dramatist Stringberg once wrote: "Human beings are to be pitied!"
> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species.
This "harmony" is really just interlocking loops of unconstrained growth, followed by running out of resources, and starvation while the food supply regenerates. It only looks pretty if you ain't looking very carefully.
In fact, human beings seem to be the only ones observed with a capability for restraint. We're not very good at practicing it, but we are at least capable of it. Have you seen a pack of animals or plants jointly deciding to voluntarily forgo extra food, so that they don't exceed carrying capacity of the place they live in?
Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :). And I'm a cat owner. RE ants, I'm not a biologist so I won't speculate how exactly that relationship came to be, but it doesn't seem to me that there was any meeting of minds involved - I would guess evolutionary feedback loops again.
I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts.
"One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily."
> Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird, so I'll raise you that for harmony :)
We had a cat once who, we found out, liked to sit in the berry bushes in the garden, wait for a bird to land, and then kill them. She didn't didn't eat them - she much preferred the cat food she got. She just murdered bird after bird and left them to rot.
Cats certainly are not the best examples of harmony.
Depends on what you define as fun, what we're observing is more like "not for immediate need" and/or "not for food" - and when the immediate need for food arises, the first reflex is the cat food, but that obviously doesn't happen in nature. A dog is most certainly capable of attacking you even though it's not hungry or feeling unsafe.
Since it seems to me that "fun" or "malice" or other motivations cannot be measured that precisely in animal kingdom, i think it is fair to say that surplus killing covers your question.
>Are (aren't?) cats the only animal that kills for fun, rather than food?
Obviously not. All kinds of animals kill. Also it's not "for fun" in the way we're having fun. They don't plan on entertaining themselves that way, weighing and ignoring the moral impact, etc.
It's an instinct they have. It's training to hone their hunting skills -- which they need evolutionary to survive -- even if they we take there of them for the last 5-10.000 years (which is very little in evolutionary terms)
Lots of animals have been observed to kill others for no known or obvious reason; primates and dolphins are two I’m aware of. My working dogs would, too, considering they wouldn’t eat the pests they killed and there was no upside for them other than praise. That should count I think.
Would you yourself consider lifetime seclusion? Why, you cause harm to billions of living creatures every time you venture outside. (Although sitting in solitary jail cell only reduces that by a negligible factor). And that's only taking into account direct harm, third or fourth-order consequences of being out there are impossible to even start comprehending.
If not, why you think it's okay to condemn another living creature to such a life sentence? After all, its well-being is just as important as yours, is it not so?
It's pretty clear its well-being is not just as important as ours — as a society we have decided this; we don't give cats open-heart surgery, it's not illegal to kill a cat, and cats also have no rights.
Cats seem pretty alright with "lifetime seclusion", anyways. As with other domesticated pets, the only reason they exist is because they are, on the whole, happy being domesticated; if they all hated their lives (in a way that we were aware of), we wouldn't breed them to begin with.
The amount of birds and mice our cats used to bring in perfectly alive and unharmed was quite astonishing and one time ended up leaving a large amount of Sparrow droppings all over my room. Of course they were probably just trying to teach us humans to hunt.
> Well, your cat will also likely be very cruel if it ever caches a mouse or a bird
I'm no expert but I vaguely recall hearing from non-trivial sources that this is a common but inaccurate misrepresentation as regards their "intent".
They are not "toying" with their hunting target so much as obeying a powerful instinct to be careful to kill it with the minimum risk of infection from getting even a small scratch in return from a target that is "playing dead" as a defense/evade tactic.
> Have you seen a pack of animals or plants jointly deciding to voluntarily forgo extra food
Actually, the only animals I know to become obese are humans, and animals that are attached to humans.
You may say it's because they don't have an unlimited supply of food, but actually, many animals do, or used to have before we destroyed it.
Of course, they don't really forgo extra food, they use it to multiply their number instead of providing more to an individual. So it's not real restrain.
Obesity comes from the type of food you eat, not just quantity. Humans are the only species that invented glucose-fructose syrup and other highly processed foods. Feed that to any wild animal an they will become obese as well.
Obesity simply comes from consuming more calories than you need. You can (and people have) loose weight by eating McDonalds if you wanted—you just have to make sure the amount of calories you get from it is less than what you actually need.
As the other commentator mentions, the only thing processed foods might bring, is trying to break our self-restraint by being delicious in certain ways.
This is overly simplistic. Our bodies process sugars in vastly different ways. Fructose for example was historically rare for us to have and is metabolized in basically unlimited quantity as fast as possible by the liver and transferred to fat reserves.
So yes, quantity matters but you will have incredible difficulty not putting on weight from high fructose foodstuffs because your body will tell you "eat more food" to feed your muscles well before it decides to give up any fat reserves.
Sure, but the view that it's just sugar that's bad, is even more overly simplistic, and in fact harmful. Obesity is always more deeply rooted in habits, comfort, stress and the way a person deals with things, than it is with just sugar---it's a behavioral issue that needs to be tackled at a deeper level. One calorie is one calorie, regardless of were it comes from.
You'd find very little actual scientific backing for your statement, from papers that haven't been debunked[0]. That sugar itself is bad is an age old meme that needs to die. Similarly, that kids get hyperactive with sugar is also a myth[1].
Now, your other argument that you might "feel" hungrier, is something else. You have still gotten the energy you needed, it just doesn't feel as filling, perhaps.
Your reference [0] is talking about the concept that such a thing as "sugar addiction" exists. That is not at all what I was arguing. The fructose metabolic pathway is well known, and particularly in the US, excess fructose in the diet is common due to the corn industry.
Restrain is all over the place in nature. Unconstrained growth followed by starvation is the hallmark of primitive processes like fire and basic life forms.
Most individuals grow up to a genetically predetermined size. Colonies adapt their size to the amount of resources they have available, optimizing for long term perenniality.
The human economy behaves like a primitive life form, at the moment.
Ecosystems are usually resilient to such threats, but the fact we've been able to tap into fossil fuel gives us too large an advantage for them to strike back.
I'm not sure "restraint" is the correct word in the examples you cite. Individual size is typically the result of a combination of evolutionary selection pressure and physics. Colonies are constrained by resources which influence reproductive rates.
Everything in biology is the result of a combination of evolutionary selection and physics, I don't understand where you're going with that.
These are both instances of restraint hard-coded in DNA. Not growing/reproducing in some circumstances is part of the program.
Contrast it with cancer, or breakthrough, overaggressive infectious agents that kill their host quickly (but gradually give way to milder versions of themselves).
Some cancers grow so fast that part of the tumors die of necrosis (and off course most often the host ultimately dies).
Many species have finely tuned territorial instincts that have evolved to do exactly that: restrain growth to sustainable numbers. Individuals who fail to dominate sufficient territory won't breed at all. Just yesterday I observed two swans in busy border negotiations, a quiet "dance" that has more similarities with a proof of work algorithm than with an actual fight.
On a macro level, sure, it was unconstrained growth and the resulting hardship that caused these patterns to evolve, but that evolution has happened many times.
Maybe you should qualify this as "planned restraint" o "deliberate restraint". In most animals "restraint" is a largely automated mechanism.
E.g.: if the food is scarce, fertility decreases (and/or post-birth mortality increases).
have you ever seen a jaguar let caught gazelle go, just because it's full? llamas restraining pooping only on specific spots to not ruin grasslands (maybe not direct example but I saw it recently all over Bolivia, pretty impressive environmental protection).
you can find abundance of examples of both restraint and greed/cruelty in animal kingdom, although it seems to me restraint is far more prevalent. Just like among humans
You're very right, and I don't like the way the OP framed the argument. The problem is 1) even though we're capable, as you note, we're terrible at utilizing it, and 2) we're so much more powerful than any other species, so when we do lack restraint, we cause much more damage.
"Humans are the most unique creatures on Earth. Well…not really. Yes we have developed technology, language, society, and have a great capacity for abstract thought. But if you look at our genetics, at our biology, we find that we may not be that unique after all. Primates share a vast majority of our genes and have organized their families into something akin to a social structure. Dolphins and whales communicate with diverse types of language using their larynx in ways similar to how we make sounds." - Carl sagan, pale blue dot
One of the most awful trait in humans I observe is disdain fo the own species in favour of other. There is no harmony in the nature, just an equilibrium.
We are the nature as is everything else.
I agree. If we're speaking about an understanding of the deep connection between all species in this planet, and how it all relates to extinct species and old ecosystems, the human being is the only species in all of Earth's history that ever became aware of it.
People often seem to assume non-human species partake of some universal wisdom that humans have left behind. This is a pretty shallow narrative of "lost innocence", that ignores what other species are and how they relate to each other.
If there is an animal that does care, that is Homo sapiens.
I think you are misunderstanding the equilibrium of nature. There's no great and beautiful mutually orchestrated harmony. What happens invariably is a predator hunts a prey to the point of scarcity. At this point, assuming that prey was the predator's primary diet, the predators begin to literally starve to death which lowers their population. This, in turn, gives the prey a chance to increase their population with fewer predators. Over time this results in a dynamic equilibrium that gives the illusion of harmony - though it's really just controlled by starvation. At times, this equilibrium is never reached and one species or another ends up completely dying off (or getting killed off). And if that species that died off had not spread elsewhere, we get an extinction. Something that's been happening for millions and likely billions of years. Long before humanity entered onto the scene in any case.
I think humans today are, by far, the most harmonious creature on this planet. We have the ability to hunt absolutely anything to the point of extinction if we so desired. And while on occasion we do end up doing just that, for the most part we manage to create an artificial balance by restraining ourselves, diversifying our diet, and artificially multiplying the numbers of the species that we prefer to eat the most to ensure their sustainability.
And as another aside here, even in modern times with extinctions related to human activity you'll often find that while we did play a role, it's often also driven by other animals. For instance it's often said that the Dodo was hunted to extinction. That's entirely true, but it wasn't just by humans. The other animals introduced to the Mauritius also had a taste for the Dodo and its eggs in particular. A human might begin to take note of a population becoming more and more scarce. Another animal isn't going to think twice of it until they start starving for lack of their prey.
And also I do not think people just ignore the personalities of animals when choosing to eat them. If you've ever known anybody who's raised goats or even pigs. They're incredible critters that are friendly, cute, playful and in the case of pigs - even quite intelligent. Nobody, for the most part, enjoys slaughtering these guys, but meat is something our bodies have evolved to consume and is still the most straight forward means of living a healthy life. Hunting is a different story, but in many ways that's even more humane. An animal killed on a hunt undoubtedly lived a life magnitudes more free and pleasant than the conditions of many in the farms that produce the food you buy at the grocer or restaurant. In any case you'll find a strong overlap both in modern times, and premodern times, of hunters and animal conservationists. The circle of life is something those closest to it tend to understand all too well.
Indeed in this case it was humans, though the same thing happens with regularity without humans. Creatures migrate, environments change leading certain creatures to prosper and others to flounder, and so on. Acting like there's some beautiful harmony in nature is missing the fact that it's a cruel and selfish system that humans, as a whole, have managed to rise above and indeed had to rise above for the sake of all life on this planet.
Humans are to blame for the extinction of the dodo then. It doesn't matter if such things happen without humans. The point is that humans are directly responsible for the extinction of many more species on top of the normal extinction rate. I'm not talking about beauty and harmony and balance, I'm talking about the facts.
I have an alternative perspective on the question of how harmonious we are with our surroundings. I'm not peddling a wordview here, but I think this is an interesting thought exercise. What if we are in harmony with nature? Yes, taking into account all our seemingly disharmonious traits, greed, self-obsesssion, social and environmental irresponsibility.
Conceptually, it's simpler (or more elegant?) to consider that we are in harmony with nature, like every other of its elements, but our definition of harmony, in other words it's our perception that is lacking.
If nature, as in life on earth, is a fractal of ecosystems, when we perceive that one fails, we change our focus by one level to the containing or a contained ecosystem and repeat the process of perceiving whether or not it is failing. The most basic example is a sickly animal that is then fed upon by predators, or medium-height plantlife withering due to expanding tree canopy. If it's failing, we again step to the next ecosystem; if we perceive that it's ok, then we consider the previous ecosystems to be ok too. As an extreme case, we could keep going this way, if we thought that everything on earth is failing, until we got to the "top-level" ecosystem of life on earth -- the earth itself. We could then just generalize the definition of nature to the cosmos as well, and the process would continue.
To come back to humans, while it's true that we are killing life on earth, we don't have to step far in terms of the cosmos to find harmony in it. In this view, the deeper point is that harmony is a property of perception, not the universe. Or in other words, the universe is universally harmonious.
I assume you have - or have had - a cat? Which you watered and fed, provided with shelter and a modicum of social interaction?
...and then the cat goes out and catches a mouse. Not because it is hungry, only because it saw the mouse and just had to catch it. After discarding the mouse - it wasn't hungry, you see, just having stuffed itself with KittyPro (tm) (with Bull Elk, Nearly Extinct Herbivore and Baby Seal) - and goes on to catch a few birds which were happily hopping around, unaware of the presence of a killer in their midst.
Can you blame the cat? No, not really. Cats are hunters, being hunters they are playful - play being a way to keep their hunting skills sharpened - and they just have to strike when the opportunity arises.
Can you blame the human? No, not really. If the human would not water and feed the cat and provide it with a modicum of social interaction the cat would walk, simple as that.
Does this mean the cat 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that cat acts like a trophy hunter in a safari park.
Ever seen a chicken coop raided by a weasel? We lost 16 chickens in one night once, all of them killed by some nasty critter which had managed to wriggle its way into the chicken's safe space. All of them bitten in the neck and left to bleed out.
Can you blame the weasel who clearly killed far more than it could ever hope to eat, let alone the fact that it even could not get any of the chickens through the keyhole it used to enter the coop in the first place? Can you blame the human who thought to protect the chickens against just such mayhem but failed?
Does that mean the weasel 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that weasel acted like one of Stalin's henchmen, killing everything in sight.
Humans are intelligent primates and as such are capable of bigger feats. Bigger in both ways, from the human equivalent of what those cats and weasels are doing to, say, a group of humans cooperating to get a beached whale back into the sea.
I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.
Self loathing of the human race needs to stop, there are an incredible number of hard working people making the world a better place one step at a time. Our impact on the world barely registers to past extinction level events. Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species. If you don't like what we are doing, work to improve things.
Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are.
As a species we seem to be a cancer on the planet. We are pretty much responsive for the current mass extinction event. That doesn't mean that individuals aren't good.
There has been global cancers before. With the difference that we may be able to restrain ourselves.
As an example see the great oxygenation event. Where bunch of selfish green algea pumped waste product into the atmosphere killing almost all anaerobic life.
Then there is the carboniferous period where trees grew so much that due to lack of lignin breaking fungi they basically sucked out all CO2 from atmosphere causing global glaciation and killing themselves in the process.
Life has been crapping itself since the very start. We are no worse than others, however we have the chance to be better.
"As a species we seem to be a cancer on the planet."
This platitude is actually interesting in this context. It connects multiple threads:
* One of the previous major extinctions was the Oxygen Holocaust [1], caused by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria. It killed pretty much everything alive back then. And turned our Earth into a snowball to boot.
* This oxygen is a major contributor to CANCER, via free radicals etc. It leads to a faster (and more ruthless, more side effects) metabolism, enabling evolution of highly reactive creatures such as us.
* And trees, the "speaking organisms" under discussion, are one of the major producers of this highly volatile, carcinogenic O2 substance.
Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But hopefully no worse than the naive "humans are a cancer to the planet".
"Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species"
I completely agree.
"Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are."
It is a symbiosis. You make it sound like a parasitic relationship.
I completely agree with your first paragraph, but I have some things about the second one:
> "Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life"
Aren't most people do it for selfish reasons? (Money, feel good about yourself, ...)
Police protects us, for the money they get.
Agriculture delivers us food, for the money they get.
Water stations deliver us water, for the money they get.
Touristic attractions give us joy, for the money.
PETA, "saves animals", for the money.
Youtube provides fun and education, for the money.
If these organisations didn't receive our money, will they still provide us with those things?
The only noble profession these days is a fireman, which don't get as much money as they are worth to the society!
Of course there are people that are genuine "good", that will help others just because they want it to, but most of the people do something, wanting something in return.
I don't agree with the parent poster that we should hate ourselves, but we aren't angels too ;)
What if money didn't exist, where would we be right now as a civilization?
> here are an incredible number of hard working people making the world a better place one step at a time.
There are also an incredible number of people making the world a worse place.
> If you don't like what we are doing, work to improve things.
I've always hated this retort. It completely ignores the systematic disenfranchisment of the people, the takeover of the political system by cronies and corporations, and increasing lack of financial and political power in the middle class, declining wage growth, rampant corruption, rampant incompetence, rampant apathy and maliciousness... just to start.
> Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you,
I was one of those people who thought he was "protecting" when he signed up for the military. First of all, you need protecting from... thats right... bad guys! Second of all, the bad guys we were "protecting" you from ended up not nearly as dangerous to freedom and liberty as the people in suits back CONUS who were ripping the constitution apart.
Look, I get it. It's nice to be positive and focus on the positive things, but I feel like way too many first world people are stuck in this bubble where all the shitty things in the world are abstract "someone elses problem" things you only see on tv. I agree we need citizens to participate more (Solon made it illegal for citizens to shrink from political debate to decrease apathy for example), and we need to try to focus on and improve the positive.
That said, some of us have seen the darkside of humanity, and I don't think you ever truly come back from that to start thinking all hunkey dorey about life. I've seen so much death and destruction I know better.
Stay positive and change things, I like it. The reason I went on this long rant though is I think this wishful thinking type on either end of the spectrum is counterproductive to the very issue you are bringing up.
In essence, your statement is like religion to me. "It doesn't matter if it's not true, believing it can make you feel better!"... I don't think we can fix the problems until we have a frank and honest discussion about what those problems are and potential solutions, not just burying our head in the sand and saying "everything is great!" while a family of Yemeni's just got blown up because Saudi Arabia is our friend and we want oil. (for example)
> But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
I don't necessarily agree with your misanthropy (I don't see the broader point of it - "my plan for humanity: let's self-annihilate, we suck"?).
But I'm interested in psychology. And there are studies that show that people perceive cows as dumb while eating them. When they get asked before and after eating meat, the same people said that cows are intelligent beings.
So there are cognitive processes in place to make it possible that we eat meat despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat.
I think we can learn a lot about the difference between humans and other animals when we focus our efforts on understanding the excuses and biases that we develop using our cerebral parts of our brains and the prefrontal neocortex.
> I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.
Bear with us and have a little bit of compassion. I'm glad every time a human being is able to be positive despite the fact that every human has the potential to destroy other lives.
I would love to read some of those studies. That sounds fascinating!
> despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat.
Didn't there used to be whole cultures (like the Aztec, I think) where cannibalism was a mostly normal part of life? That seems like a pretty extreme version of this cognitive dissonance.
"You're human but you're tasty and I'm hungry soooo ..."
Start here [1] and see this [2] for a light introduction. Then proceed with cognitive dissonance, implicit belief systems and cognitive biases [3]. Have fun!
More things than any other organism. Already more than most organisms using our biological sense organs. Our sight and hearing are pretty good, even by animal standards. But then we developed tools to transcode signals not directly observable by our biological sense organs. We perceive more than all other organisms combined.
we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species.
We are the only ones that partially attempt to live in harmony with other species and partially succeed. All others care nothing for any other species than their own. And often not even that.
The truth is ecologys are bubbles divided by barriers that any large scale migrating species punctures.
The only thing preventing problems so far is a inabiliity of plants to hijack migration species as pathways and other species to transport theire offspring that way.
The agah-frog could have been everywhere worldwide, if its eggs - stuck to birdfeet where able to encapsule.
>Humans can't perceive a lot of things, and on top of that, we have egos that makes us feel superior even though in reality, we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species.
Harmony is just the result of a struggle + emerging balances.
Left to their own devices, even cats could eradicate entire species of birds, diseases could exterminate whole populations of animals, and so on. And of course a big rock from space could end life on earth in its entirety.
>If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
Well, there's no rule that something with feelings shouldn't be eaten.
In fact animals (who you said "live in balance") eat other animals all the time.
Besides, we hurt people's feelings all the time. An employee might not want to flip burgers for 10 hours every day and little pay , but we don't care about their feelings, we take advantage of their life's circumstances and need to pay the rent and have them do it.
With animals, we go a step beyond, and also eat them.
Besides, isn't the main story of the article that trees have a sort of language and a sort of feelings too? Which means that the "has feelings, we shouldn't eat" theory would leave us with nothing to it, since plants now have feelings too.
Maybe crops and vegetables don’t feel like trees, still something. As for fruit trees, we eat only their specific reproduction phases, who I believe can’t talk to each other anyway and have no parental connections.
How do other species live in harmony? Ever listed to the into scene in lion king? We're just animals who got smarter. It's part of the "harmony" you speak of for animals to eat other animal.
Humans cannot perceive a lot of things. However, given the right conditions (post-apocalyptic world?), it would not take a lot of time before humans become perceptive again. A lot many will be wiped out, but as a species we will find a way.
I have a couple of dogs and I know what you mean. With the level of intelligence we possess, we should have achieved more. Technological achievements mean nothing when 70+% human population of the world struggles to survive. I think we use too much of our left brain and too little of the right. A balance is what is needed. Understanding this needs intelligence.
> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species.
Oh boy, this is a very naive and emotionally involved perception of things. A tendency to restore ecological equilibria is not the same as harmony. There is no trend for stability or perfection, that's only an illusion based on the short lifespan of humans. That's not what science and archaeology tells us.
For most species there is no resting in appreciation of creation, no moment of weakness, no mercy. Most everything wants you dead. Wants your air, your food, your space, your niche. You fall, you stumble and there is already mold growing between your toes. In the eyes of a human there might be a fiction, a notion of meaning and beauty. For everything else there is just thermodynamics.
Especially in light of the Great Oxygenation Event, we really seem more like the only species to ever have the option of creating a global ecosystem collapse and also the option of maybe not! Those early photosynthetic microbes had no choice and no idea what they were doing.
> If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
But isn't nature so metal?
Through all its self-judgment, I view mankind as a way out of local maxima. A complete death might happen with or without humans, but I put my chips in humanity.
> we are the only ones on the planet who can't live in harmony with other species.
That's not true. Every species can't live in harmony with other species. Go read about what happened to native species on pacific islands when rats, cats, snakes, etc were introduced. They wiped out entire ecosystems of islands.
They won't live in harmony with each other. A single ant colony has wiped out much of the world's ant population.
Even fish like the european carp in a span of a few hundred years wiped out much of other fish in the US and now dominate pretty much every lake and river in a continent.
> If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
Cats, birds, pigs and even horses eat other animals. As a matter of facts, cats are devastating ecosystems around the world and causing many birds and mammals to go extincts.
> I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.
You are the one putting humans on a pedestal. Humans are animals just like cats, horses, etc. We are no more awful than any other animals.
Actually, you could argue humans are less awful than other animals because we actually consciously decided to save some species. A cat or a wolf or a pig would never do that. They will consume/kill until there isn't an animal left.
Umm, no, more like humans are a lot more like other animals than we care to admit.
We have some oppossums ND raccoons that constantly try to break in to our chicken coop. If successful, they will, without fail, kill every single chicken they can get their hands on. They'll only be able to eat one or so. But they will kill all of them. Either out of greed or just for the fun of it.
If you were to ask what is human language, it would be the superset of sign language, spoken language, body language, etc. If you take that kind of approach when deciphering the language of cats, just as convnets can decipher the hidden logic of recognising faces, I'd imagine a rudimentary form would be a mixture of visual and auditory signals designed to "trick" the cat into responding.
Cats are smart enough to communicate with humans, I have no doubt of that. N=2, but once I had a cat that woke me up at night to point out a possum had entered the house and was hiding under a piece of furniture, and once I had one which (different house) gestured me to follow him in the chase after shooing away the intruder cat that kept stealing its food.
Reminds me of "Once upon a forest". A great mixture of scientific facts and research scaled against the cultural hearsay and mysticism around forests from various cultures.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place" -GBS
It's a bit sad we can't yet fully communicate with other life here effectively. I wonder what ethical implications it would have if we ever got there. An analogy to the current state may be that of a man from another language trying to ask for directions to an autistic kid.
what's the definition of language? You can communicate emotion through sound/voice, is it considered as language? Language is what makes human superior intelligently. It is the software makes us a computer rather than calculator. Language is where we store knowledge. A language needs to be able to store logic as well as data, and it needs to have a written form so that the knowledge can be stored for a very long time. I wouldn't call any signal language.
This is how a title like this fails to make impact. Whether it's information theory, semiotics or grammatology, language is soon reduced to the merest coding of information, implicit or explicit, as any medium of sense (or non-sense). I could argue an algorithm is, by virtue of its operation, a language exchange. The universe too.
One should perhaps ask if there is something akin to grammatical structures in this system of roots and fungi.
I once listened to a great radio show [1] on trees communicating (in a way) and sharing resources through a network of fungus that connects their roots in a forest. I can recommend listening if that interests you more than reading a related wiki page [2], but both are cool.
>trees communicating (in a way) and sharing resources through a network of fungus
when i listened to that (or similar) show i was wondering - whether it is trees communicating through fungus or whether it is the fungus managing and herding the trees like say we do with cattle.
Yes, I felt the same way! It is extraordinary to consider that the fungus is able to convince the trees to trade with it, seeming almost like it has plans to facilitate many such relationships over a network of exchange - like an underground market runner.
Often on Ayahuasca I feel extreme empathy for plants and feel like I communicate with them without spoken sounds. Sometimes I wish that it would work that way in real life, it is really wonderful and humbling feeling.
One thing I find rather interesting is that a lot of people who trip on mushrooms mention that they see the world around them much more vivid and alive, especially when being out in nature. I've always wondered if this was something beyond some kind of chemical reaction in our body.
To me, there needs to be a differentiation between communicating and speaking. If you broadcast information and another entity receives it, and uses it, that is not dialogue - just reactions. Even if through an evolutionary game the species reaches effective communication (predators, plagues, etc.), and complex feedback loops emerge, resembling a dialogue, there seems to be something lacking - perhaps the ability to query the other for specific information would be a good litmus test for it?
I’ve had house cats ask me things plenty. They’ll ask whether they are welcome in my lap by stopping short of stepping on my leg and looking at me for feedback. There’s much more to communication than human spoken word.
The dog conveyed to you its intent to harm you (even if it was being deceitful).
The mountain communicated nothing to you.
If you were hunted and killed by a mountain lion, it would be akin to the avalanche. It did not intend to send you any message, even if you managed to spot it before it attacked you.
According to one definition of communication, you are absolutely right. There are other ways of defining it.
You define it as requiring intent. Fair.
I can formulate just as valid of a definition of communication without intent. The way you dress communicates certain things about you, whether you intend to do so or not. My pheromones communicate a lot of things about me, even though I don't intend them to do so.
Again, it's not so simple unless you use a single narrow definition and forcefully ignore all other ones (some of which are easier to accept than others).
249 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadThat sounds like textbook anthropomorphizing, and the article seems to follow down that path as well...
Of course, trees do communicate - but obsessively trying to frame mindless chemical ecological processes in such extreme anthropomorphic terms is dangerously close to the border between extreme oversimplification and rank pseudoscience.
Finally, anthropormophizing is a useful metaphorical aid to help people understand. I don't think it's a big deal as long as you avoid making absolute teleological claims.
Absolutely. So does simplification. Simplifying things to make them understandable to non-experts is an incredibly important skill - ask any teacher (or their students, for that matter). The problem comes with oversimplification, simplifying explanations to a degree when they are just dead wrong. At that point, the simplification doesn't only not help with the understanding, it can actively hinder future understanding by suggesting that you have already understood (when in fact you haven't).
This article over-anthropomorphizes.
Language and speaking not so much and it does seem s little far-fetched.
If we learned how to speak to trees, it could be terrifying.
"the Waorani aren’t alarmed by the notion that a tree might scream when cut"
It was a whimsical comment, and you are being overly critical. And I was considering the way man affects our environment. And yes, it is mentioned in the article.
Your hair trigger response says far more about you than me. I literally have made one whimsical comment in literally hundreds of comments, and you decide to threaten me.
"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.
The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing."
If that doesn't sit right with you then maybe you'll be more comfortable using Reddit or something similar.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose#Plant_re... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(paranormal)
I don't understand fully what this comment means.
If alien life has DNA (chemistry) like ours, we learn that life as we know it either started somewhere and spread or was re-invented.
If it doesn't, but is obviously alive (move on its own will, hunts, i dont know) we learn that life can exist with different chemistries.
If it's not obviously alive but we determine anyway, whichever way we do that, we've learned of a new aspect of life.
what does "what that means" mean ? ? ?
Are there many varieties of self-replicating molecules? (which I understand is needed to start life) Maaaaybe there's only so many ways that this can get started and RNA is the "only" way to do it. In a similar way that we have a hard time imagining non-carbon life since no other element behaves in the ways that carbon does
Since it was conceived by an ad agency to promote anti-bullying (and furniture giant IKEA) there's a fair chance it wasn't the most scientifically valid experiment ever conducted.
Mythbusters ran their own test in the past and found that both insulting and being kind to plants stimulated them more than allowing them to grow in silence, but they liked death metal even more (their conclusion was that the basic theory of sound vibrations mildly stimulating growth was plausible). There's more serious research going on into plant bioacoustics: the theory some plants have evolved to respond to specific sound stimuli
If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.
A smart lion wouldn't want to risk itself like that just for a meal.
We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive".
Probably a few, then they'd figure out the concept of saving something for later, just as human farmers did countless of centuries ago :).
> We're over-exploiting basically every limited resource we have. Ironically we kind of ignore the unlimited ones, like wind, solar, etc.
A nit, but the reason we're "kind of ignoring" renewables is because fossil fuels are better. They're much more energy dense. They're easier to handle (just burn to release energy; meanwhile, photovoltaics is a very advanced piece of technology, and we most likely wouldn't have it if we didn't start with fossil fuels). They can be processed for other things - e.g. lubricants, plastics. Fossil fuels are absurdly useful. That's why they're so popular. But we're slowly getting there with renewables, not that both the tech and the will to use it seems to be here.
> We're cutting down forests like there's no tomorrow and they literally make our oxygen. And worse, sometimes this destruction is totally gratuitous and avoidable. Save for those who really need a couple more millions of $ to "survive".
Here's the thing - it's a social problem at this point. Something I believe smart lions would face too. We've spawned an economy that makes us do these things to survive, even though at least some of us individually realize they're monumentally stupid. Those are hard problems, because they involve getting a lot of people to agree to something that isn't in their immediate short-term interest.
I am not a fan of the mass farming, but there are thousands of variables that lead to our current treatment of cattle and so on.
The difference is that before, we hunted enough to eat, but not so much that the species died, whereas now we are willing to exterminate a species if it means we can get rid of other versions of us ('Every buffalo dead, is a dead indian').
Seems like we've got more callous and stupid the more this 'intelligence' was displayed.
Not yet but she's planning[?] to leave "soon"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Carson
Infinitely times as many as there are lions which can do these things – namely, more than zero people vs. zero lions.
Eh.
> we hunted enough to eat, but not so much that the species died
Yep, the myth of the good savage. Mammooth, Moas, European Wolly Rhino, Megalania giant varanus, Meiolania turtle, Sabre tooth tiger, Cave bear or Australian Diprotodon could tell us a different hystory.
Yes, but all that proves is that some subset of humanity is capable of doing it. Not humanity as a whole.
> Yep, the myth of the good savage.
Actually a lot of the verbal culture of many tribes show that they understand how they are dependent on the animals for their food source, and you can find active efforts not to overhunt in many cultures. It seems to me the main thing that has increased isn't necessarily intelligence, but greed.
What's the point of this argument? Yes, humanity as a whole has become very specialised. With the consensus of the community and enough will power a subset of humanity can achieve almost anything we can conceive. Is this any different than toting dolphin pods that pass on their hunting tricks? Or captive gorillas that can communicate? Potential is not limited to the lowest common denominator.
If they could, they would.
We are in fact, (we can't know for sure but I think it's very reasonable to assume) the only species capable of seeing this and MAYBE,hopefully control ourselves before we do the same thing.
We are pieces of shit, but at the same time we're the only animal with potential to escape the bad parts of our nature
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150714-animal-do...
Anyway, if you are out of luck I hope it is not because you are lucky.
Regardless, I hope the idea stands.
If necessity was a generator, a vector or force for movements or actions, then I could understand that use of "out of". Out of indicates the result produced by a force, algorithm or oracle. But I consider necessity not as a generator or force but as a passive state. Hence I wonder what is the mechanism for this use. If we collapse the concepts of passive and active then I think language get corrupted and poissoned. Analogies are not fruitful because they go far beyong the logical ground. I believe that if you are going to get something out of a state then that state should be a generator. I don't know if what I am trying to say is sound but I sharply feel the unsoundness of linguistic non logically generated derivations
Perhaps that kind of mental state could be used for sentiment analysis. The probability of that use of "out of" increases when you are in a mental state that promotes flipping active and passive states. For example, when you not any longer want to cope with your actual state, going to extremes: you put yourself in a fight for survival state that promotes a revolution by beating the slavery chains.
Edited many times.
> You should use "because of" in cases like this when the thing in question is the catalyst for something to happen, and use "out of" when the thing in question metaphorically "gives rise" to something else.
[1]: https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/115445/can-i-use-bec...
For the purpose of the comment "out of need" felt a lot more appropriate for an animal that kills.
Where are you from? / Where are you out of?
"Out of luck" is weirder. German has ausgehen to mean "run out" (as in "our supplies are running out"), but it's not quite the same...
(Also, fwiw, you could also say “they kill because of need” or “they kill because they need to”, so because works in English as well)
The grammatical nuance between out of need and out of luck (nice find btw) would be doing (out of need) vs being (out of luck): you might win out of luck, and later lose because you are out of luck. Wastefully spend out of wealth, then be out of wealth, and so on.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
Although there were possible health factors that drove these lions to preying on humans, I find it an interesting aside to this conversation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsavo_Man-Eaters
It's not the behaviour that is unique to humans; it is the ability to act counter to instinct, counter to appetite, to choose and be aware of the consequences. We alone can be held accountable for our actions.
I'm not implying that needless killing is the only, or the main thing that sets us apart from animals, except in the context of the comment I was replying to (about lions feeding on an impala). But it's taking this kind of actions despite having the ability to be aware consequences that makes us special. You would expect the threshold for some of these actions to increase with these newfound abilities but it went the other way around. A person is willing to kill a last member of a species not for survival but for little more than a trophy on a wall.
There are probably far more things that set us apart from animals than instinct or awareness of consequence. Most children actually lack these abilities because they are partly taught, they have to be groomed. So the main difference might be that we are able to learn up to a point that no animal can rival us. This is the perfect example of what a human can be without "learning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxana_Malaya
This "harmony" is really just interlocking loops of unconstrained growth, followed by running out of resources, and starvation while the food supply regenerates. It only looks pretty if you ain't looking very carefully.
In fact, human beings seem to be the only ones observed with a capability for restraint. We're not very good at practicing it, but we are at least capable of it. Have you seen a pack of animals or plants jointly deciding to voluntarily forgo extra food, so that they don't exceed carrying capacity of the place they live in?
What about when my cat restrains from eating all of its treats at once? Or the restraint any animal takes through a farming process like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism?
I made a pretty generalized argument, but the point is, what we observe as harmony in nature - the balance between predator and prey, the various species of animals and plants (and bacteria and viruses) living next to each other - is a dynamic process that involves lots of blood, death and starvation. The order in nature isn't negotiated - it's an aggregate of countless number of conflicts.
Related, recently on HN, "Trillions of Viruses Fall from the Sky Each Day": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839636. The money quote from the article is mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840575.
"One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily."
That's nature's harmony at work.
We had a cat once who, we found out, liked to sit in the berry bushes in the garden, wait for a bird to land, and then kill them. She didn't didn't eat them - she much preferred the cat food she got. She just murdered bird after bird and left them to rot.
Cats certainly are not the best examples of harmony.
(Apart from the scum that are some humans...)
Since it seems to me that "fun" or "malice" or other motivations cannot be measured that precisely in animal kingdom, i think it is fair to say that surplus killing covers your question.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing
Obviously not. All kinds of animals kill. Also it's not "for fun" in the way we're having fun. They don't plan on entertaining themselves that way, weighing and ignoring the moral impact, etc.
It's an instinct they have. It's training to hone their hunting skills -- which they need evolutionary to survive -- even if they we take there of them for the last 5-10.000 years (which is very little in evolutionary terms)
It's not, it's just their nature, which in other words is what they evolved to do.
If not, why you think it's okay to condemn another living creature to such a life sentence? After all, its well-being is just as important as yours, is it not so?
Cats seem pretty alright with "lifetime seclusion", anyways. As with other domesticated pets, the only reason they exist is because they are, on the whole, happy being domesticated; if they all hated their lives (in a way that we were aware of), we wouldn't breed them to begin with.
I'm no expert but I vaguely recall hearing from non-trivial sources that this is a common but inaccurate misrepresentation as regards their "intent". They are not "toying" with their hunting target so much as obeying a powerful instinct to be careful to kill it with the minimum risk of infection from getting even a small scratch in return from a target that is "playing dead" as a defense/evade tactic.
What about it? Other animals don't restrain, and even a cat can eat too many of its treats at once, and end up obese.
Here's some info on cats:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stone-cold...
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/it-s-official-cats-ar...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/kille...
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
Actually, the only animals I know to become obese are humans, and animals that are attached to humans.
You may say it's because they don't have an unlimited supply of food, but actually, many animals do, or used to have before we destroyed it.
Of course, they don't really forgo extra food, they use it to multiply their number instead of providing more to an individual. So it's not real restrain.
Obesity simply comes from consuming more calories than you need. You can (and people have) loose weight by eating McDonalds if you wanted—you just have to make sure the amount of calories you get from it is less than what you actually need.
As the other commentator mentions, the only thing processed foods might bring, is trying to break our self-restraint by being delicious in certain ways.
So yes, quantity matters but you will have incredible difficulty not putting on weight from high fructose foodstuffs because your body will tell you "eat more food" to feed your muscles well before it decides to give up any fat reserves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructolysis
You'd find very little actual scientific backing for your statement, from papers that haven't been debunked[0]. That sugar itself is bad is an age old meme that needs to die. Similarly, that kids get hyperactive with sugar is also a myth[1].
Now, your other argument that you might "feel" hungrier, is something else. You have still gotten the energy you needed, it just doesn't feel as filling, perhaps.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-016-1229-6
[1] http://www.mortenelsoe.com/blog/sukkeroghyperaktivitet great write up if you can read Danish or translate it, or just check the sources in the bottom
Most individuals grow up to a genetically predetermined size. Colonies adapt their size to the amount of resources they have available, optimizing for long term perenniality.
The human economy behaves like a primitive life form, at the moment.
Ecosystems are usually resilient to such threats, but the fact we've been able to tap into fossil fuel gives us too large an advantage for them to strike back.
These are both instances of restraint hard-coded in DNA. Not growing/reproducing in some circumstances is part of the program.
Contrast it with cancer, or breakthrough, overaggressive infectious agents that kill their host quickly (but gradually give way to milder versions of themselves).
Some cancers grow so fast that part of the tumors die of necrosis (and off course most often the host ultimately dies).
For nature? There's reports of predators in wild ignoring humans, possibly because they ate already. One obvious example are snakes.
On a macro level, sure, it was unconstrained growth and the resulting hardship that caused these patterns to evolve, but that evolution has happened many times.
you can find abundance of examples of both restraint and greed/cruelty in animal kingdom, although it seems to me restraint is far more prevalent. Just like among humans
People often seem to assume non-human species partake of some universal wisdom that humans have left behind. This is a pretty shallow narrative of "lost innocence", that ignores what other species are and how they relate to each other.
If there is an animal that does care, that is Homo sapiens.
I think humans today are, by far, the most harmonious creature on this planet. We have the ability to hunt absolutely anything to the point of extinction if we so desired. And while on occasion we do end up doing just that, for the most part we manage to create an artificial balance by restraining ourselves, diversifying our diet, and artificially multiplying the numbers of the species that we prefer to eat the most to ensure their sustainability.
And as another aside here, even in modern times with extinctions related to human activity you'll often find that while we did play a role, it's often also driven by other animals. For instance it's often said that the Dodo was hunted to extinction. That's entirely true, but it wasn't just by humans. The other animals introduced to the Mauritius also had a taste for the Dodo and its eggs in particular. A human might begin to take note of a population becoming more and more scarce. Another animal isn't going to think twice of it until they start starving for lack of their prey.
And also I do not think people just ignore the personalities of animals when choosing to eat them. If you've ever known anybody who's raised goats or even pigs. They're incredible critters that are friendly, cute, playful and in the case of pigs - even quite intelligent. Nobody, for the most part, enjoys slaughtering these guys, but meat is something our bodies have evolved to consume and is still the most straight forward means of living a healthy life. Hunting is a different story, but in many ways that's even more humane. An animal killed on a hunt undoubtedly lived a life magnitudes more free and pleasant than the conditions of many in the farms that produce the food you buy at the grocer or restaurant. In any case you'll find a strong overlap both in modern times, and premodern times, of hunters and animal conservationists. The circle of life is something those closest to it tend to understand all too well.
Which species introduced the other animals to the Mauritius?
I have an alternative perspective on the question of how harmonious we are with our surroundings. I'm not peddling a wordview here, but I think this is an interesting thought exercise. What if we are in harmony with nature? Yes, taking into account all our seemingly disharmonious traits, greed, self-obsesssion, social and environmental irresponsibility.
Conceptually, it's simpler (or more elegant?) to consider that we are in harmony with nature, like every other of its elements, but our definition of harmony, in other words it's our perception that is lacking.
If nature, as in life on earth, is a fractal of ecosystems, when we perceive that one fails, we change our focus by one level to the containing or a contained ecosystem and repeat the process of perceiving whether or not it is failing. The most basic example is a sickly animal that is then fed upon by predators, or medium-height plantlife withering due to expanding tree canopy. If it's failing, we again step to the next ecosystem; if we perceive that it's ok, then we consider the previous ecosystems to be ok too. As an extreme case, we could keep going this way, if we thought that everything on earth is failing, until we got to the "top-level" ecosystem of life on earth -- the earth itself. We could then just generalize the definition of nature to the cosmos as well, and the process would continue.
To come back to humans, while it's true that we are killing life on earth, we don't have to step far in terms of the cosmos to find harmony in it. In this view, the deeper point is that harmony is a property of perception, not the universe. Or in other words, the universe is universally harmonious.
...and then the cat goes out and catches a mouse. Not because it is hungry, only because it saw the mouse and just had to catch it. After discarding the mouse - it wasn't hungry, you see, just having stuffed itself with KittyPro (tm) (with Bull Elk, Nearly Extinct Herbivore and Baby Seal) - and goes on to catch a few birds which were happily hopping around, unaware of the presence of a killer in their midst.
Can you blame the cat? No, not really. Cats are hunters, being hunters they are playful - play being a way to keep their hunting skills sharpened - and they just have to strike when the opportunity arises.
Can you blame the human? No, not really. If the human would not water and feed the cat and provide it with a modicum of social interaction the cat would walk, simple as that.
Does this mean the cat 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that cat acts like a trophy hunter in a safari park.
Ever seen a chicken coop raided by a weasel? We lost 16 chickens in one night once, all of them killed by some nasty critter which had managed to wriggle its way into the chicken's safe space. All of them bitten in the neck and left to bleed out.
Can you blame the weasel who clearly killed far more than it could ever hope to eat, let alone the fact that it even could not get any of the chickens through the keyhole it used to enter the coop in the first place? Can you blame the human who thought to protect the chickens against just such mayhem but failed?
Does that mean the weasel 'lives in harmony with other species'? Of course is doesn't, that weasel acted like one of Stalin's henchmen, killing everything in sight.
Humans are intelligent primates and as such are capable of bigger feats. Bigger in both ways, from the human equivalent of what those cats and weasels are doing to, say, a group of humans cooperating to get a beached whale back into the sea.
Self loathing of the human race needs to stop, there are an incredible number of hard working people making the world a better place one step at a time. Our impact on the world barely registers to past extinction level events. Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species. If you don't like what we are doing, work to improve things.
Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are.
As an example see the great oxygenation event. Where bunch of selfish green algea pumped waste product into the atmosphere killing almost all anaerobic life.
Then there is the carboniferous period where trees grew so much that due to lack of lignin breaking fungi they basically sucked out all CO2 from atmosphere causing global glaciation and killing themselves in the process.
Life has been crapping itself since the very start. We are no worse than others, however we have the chance to be better.
This platitude is actually interesting in this context. It connects multiple threads:
* One of the previous major extinctions was the Oxygen Holocaust [1], caused by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria. It killed pretty much everything alive back then. And turned our Earth into a snowball to boot.
* This oxygen is a major contributor to CANCER, via free radicals etc. It leads to a faster (and more ruthless, more side effects) metabolism, enabling evolution of highly reactive creatures such as us.
* And trees, the "speaking organisms" under discussion, are one of the major producers of this highly volatile, carcinogenic O2 substance.
Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But hopefully no worse than the naive "humans are a cancer to the planet".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
I completely agree.
"Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species"
I completely agree.
"Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are."
It is a symbiosis. You make it sound like a parasitic relationship.
> "Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life"
Aren't most people do it for selfish reasons? (Money, feel good about yourself, ...)
Police protects us, for the money they get. Agriculture delivers us food, for the money they get. Water stations deliver us water, for the money they get. Touristic attractions give us joy, for the money. PETA, "saves animals", for the money. Youtube provides fun and education, for the money.
If these organisations didn't receive our money, will they still provide us with those things?
The only noble profession these days is a fireman, which don't get as much money as they are worth to the society!
Of course there are people that are genuine "good", that will help others just because they want it to, but most of the people do something, wanting something in return.
I don't agree with the parent poster that we should hate ourselves, but we aren't angels too ;)
What if money didn't exist, where would we be right now as a civilization?
Why, because you said so? I'm not convinced.
> here are an incredible number of hard working people making the world a better place one step at a time.
There are also an incredible number of people making the world a worse place.
> If you don't like what we are doing, work to improve things.
I've always hated this retort. It completely ignores the systematic disenfranchisment of the people, the takeover of the political system by cronies and corporations, and increasing lack of financial and political power in the middle class, declining wage growth, rampant corruption, rampant incompetence, rampant apathy and maliciousness... just to start.
> Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you,
I was one of those people who thought he was "protecting" when he signed up for the military. First of all, you need protecting from... thats right... bad guys! Second of all, the bad guys we were "protecting" you from ended up not nearly as dangerous to freedom and liberty as the people in suits back CONUS who were ripping the constitution apart.
Look, I get it. It's nice to be positive and focus on the positive things, but I feel like way too many first world people are stuck in this bubble where all the shitty things in the world are abstract "someone elses problem" things you only see on tv. I agree we need citizens to participate more (Solon made it illegal for citizens to shrink from political debate to decrease apathy for example), and we need to try to focus on and improve the positive.
That said, some of us have seen the darkside of humanity, and I don't think you ever truly come back from that to start thinking all hunkey dorey about life. I've seen so much death and destruction I know better.
Stay positive and change things, I like it. The reason I went on this long rant though is I think this wishful thinking type on either end of the spectrum is counterproductive to the very issue you are bringing up.
In essence, your statement is like religion to me. "It doesn't matter if it's not true, believing it can make you feel better!"... I don't think we can fix the problems until we have a frank and honest discussion about what those problems are and potential solutions, not just burying our head in the sand and saying "everything is great!" while a family of Yemeni's just got blown up because Saudi Arabia is our friend and we want oil. (for example)
I don't necessarily agree with your misanthropy (I don't see the broader point of it - "my plan for humanity: let's self-annihilate, we suck"?).
But I'm interested in psychology. And there are studies that show that people perceive cows as dumb while eating them. When they get asked before and after eating meat, the same people said that cows are intelligent beings.
So there are cognitive processes in place to make it possible that we eat meat despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat.
I think we can learn a lot about the difference between humans and other animals when we focus our efforts on understanding the excuses and biases that we develop using our cerebral parts of our brains and the prefrontal neocortex.
> I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.
Bear with us and have a little bit of compassion. I'm glad every time a human being is able to be positive despite the fact that every human has the potential to destroy other lives.
> despite the fact that we normally know about the human-like qualities of the animals we eat.
Didn't there used to be whole cultures (like the Aztec, I think) where cannibalism was a mostly normal part of life? That seems like a pretty extreme version of this cognitive dissonance.
"You're human but you're tasty and I'm hungry soooo ..."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat
[2]: https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
What about rats arriving on islands?
The truth is ecologys are bubbles divided by barriers that any large scale migrating species punctures.
The only thing preventing problems so far is a inabiliity of plants to hijack migration species as pathways and other species to transport theire offspring that way.
The agah-frog could have been everywhere worldwide, if its eggs - stuck to birdfeet where able to encapsule.
Harmony is just the result of a struggle + emerging balances.
Left to their own devices, even cats could eradicate entire species of birds, diseases could exterminate whole populations of animals, and so on. And of course a big rock from space could end life on earth in its entirety.
>If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
Well, there's no rule that something with feelings shouldn't be eaten.
In fact animals (who you said "live in balance") eat other animals all the time.
Besides, we hurt people's feelings all the time. An employee might not want to flip burgers for 10 hours every day and little pay , but we don't care about their feelings, we take advantage of their life's circumstances and need to pay the rent and have them do it.
With animals, we go a step beyond, and also eat them.
Besides, isn't the main story of the article that trees have a sort of language and a sort of feelings too? Which means that the "has feelings, we shouldn't eat" theory would leave us with nothing to it, since plants now have feelings too.
I have a couple of dogs and I know what you mean. With the level of intelligence we possess, we should have achieved more. Technological achievements mean nothing when 70+% human population of the world struggles to survive. I think we use too much of our left brain and too little of the right. A balance is what is needed. Understanding this needs intelligence.
Oh boy, this is a very naive and emotionally involved perception of things. A tendency to restore ecological equilibria is not the same as harmony. There is no trend for stability or perfection, that's only an illusion based on the short lifespan of humans. That's not what science and archaeology tells us.
For most species there is no resting in appreciation of creation, no moment of weakness, no mercy. Most everything wants you dead. Wants your air, your food, your space, your niche. You fall, you stumble and there is already mold growing between your toes. In the eyes of a human there might be a fiction, a notion of meaning and beauty. For everything else there is just thermodynamics.
But isn't nature so metal?
Through all its self-judgment, I view mankind as a way out of local maxima. A complete death might happen with or without humans, but I put my chips in humanity.
That's not true. Every species can't live in harmony with other species. Go read about what happened to native species on pacific islands when rats, cats, snakes, etc were introduced. They wiped out entire ecosystems of islands.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zeal...
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0725/How-New-Zeal...
Go read about ants.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3352483/
They won't live in harmony with each other. A single ant colony has wiped out much of the world's ant population.
Even fish like the european carp in a span of a few hundred years wiped out much of other fish in the US and now dominate pretty much every lake and river in a continent.
> If you ever had a cat and really observed it and communicated with it, you know it has feelings and emotions. Birds have it also, so does pigs, horses... But we just ignore all that when it's convenient for us to eat them.
Cats, birds, pigs and even horses eat other animals. As a matter of facts, cats are devastating ecosystems around the world and causing many birds and mammals to go extincts.
https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
> I'm not a big fan of humanity. We are pretty awful.
You are the one putting humans on a pedestal. Humans are animals just like cats, horses, etc. We are no more awful than any other animals.
Actually, you could argue humans are less awful than other animals because we actually consciously decided to save some species. A cat or a wolf or a pig would never do that. They will consume/kill until there isn't an animal left.
We have some oppossums ND raccoons that constantly try to break in to our chicken coop. If successful, they will, without fail, kill every single chicken they can get their hands on. They'll only be able to eat one or so. But they will kill all of them. Either out of greed or just for the fun of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG1vwxFmwME
“We can’t even understand other people when we speak the same language - what hope do we have of communicating with an alien life?”
By which I mean we wouldn’t even recognise the nature of the intelligence presented to us, never mind work out how to exchange information.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17389842
It's a bit sad we can't yet fully communicate with other life here effectively. I wonder what ethical implications it would have if we ever got there. An analogy to the current state may be that of a man from another language trying to ask for directions to an autistic kid.
What does it mean to understand?
One should perhaps ask if there is something akin to grammatical structures in this system of roots and fungi.
Coincidentally enough, there was a comic about this yesterday: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/245
[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network
when i listened to that (or similar) show i was wondering - whether it is trees communicating through fungus or whether it is the fungus managing and herding the trees like say we do with cattle.
Do you know of Alex the grey parrot? It seems to be the only animal that we have recorded actually asking questions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)
I've had dogs communicate with me by angrily running towards me and barking. This conveyed danger and told me to get out of the way.
I've once had a small avalanche do the same as well.
People would call me looney though if I told them that the mountains communicate with me, and I listen.
The mountain communicated nothing to you.
If you were hunted and killed by a mountain lion, it would be akin to the avalanche. It did not intend to send you any message, even if you managed to spot it before it attacked you.
The dog fully intended for you to know.
You define it as requiring intent. Fair.
I can formulate just as valid of a definition of communication without intent. The way you dress communicates certain things about you, whether you intend to do so or not. My pheromones communicate a lot of things about me, even though I don't intend them to do so.
Again, it's not so simple unless you use a single narrow definition and forcefully ignore all other ones (some of which are easier to accept than others).