Evolution creates knowledge, but it certainly doesn't cogitate, otherwise it would design things rationally and with purpose. Instead we get eyes that filter light through their own nerve circuitry, and lots of side effects and happy accidents, and millions of kinds of beetle, and no wheels.
What is "purpose"? Evolution is rational: it constantly produces species that survive better. Sure, there are many ugly "hacks" and things it could do better; yet we also produce things with hacks, e.g. enterprise software. Evolution not producing wheels may be analogous to humans not solving very large problems (e.g. computing very large numbers) in our heads; today we solve very large problems with machines, but likewise evolution has "developed" wheels through us building them.
We are accustomed to seeing our lives and the power of dictators and the influence of tiktok content creators etc as these enormous, reality-defining things. And then we look up at the sky — with extreme rarity thanks to light pollution — and often perceive little more than a tableau as if looking at an aesthetically pleasing poster in a waiting room.
Pale blue dot flips that on its head as it should, clarifying that everything we normally view as so important does not have to be confused with the fundamental nature of reality. If there is something wrong with our environment, the fact that it is small in a grander scheme means that we have a better chance of changing it than we might have otherwise supposed.
Tolkien offers a similar quote I'd like to offer to compare and contrast with Sagan:
```
Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.
```
Let me rescue it, then. It's a valid point that other species don't have literature. It shows that they don't have ideas. If they did, it would be really obviously evident. Instead we have to look hard for traces of memetic transmission of idea-like behaviours involving sticks and leaves, and rocks and shells, and calls and signs. These memes don't go anywhere, and the animals aren't creative. If they develop, it's by accident.
That is false. If you gave a whale five digits and an opposable thumb and have them live on land, you'd strongly reconsider that. Even without this, it doesn't take very long when studying animals to see that they have a plethora of ideas. Orcas demonstrate strong examples of this all the time.
And how can you possibly claim that you know any animal's internal dialogue?
Apes do have opposable thumbs. They still don’t really engage in any intellectual activity that we can recognize beyond basic communication. They probably have an internal dialogue, but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.
And there we go. That's an us problem and not a them problem.
> but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.
There are several interviews with native tribes who still practice hunting and gathering and that's the exact thing they worry about. Those humans are identical to us. But by your argument, "civilized" humans are more exceptional than these groups of humans?
Humans still have these basic needs and worries and thoughts. Just because we layer meta-societal pieces on top of that doesn't make them go away.
What makes humans different is technology. That does not make us different in an inherently exceptional way.
That is why I gave the whale counterexample in the first place. If you place humans in the ocean with magic to allow them to survive, you will not get technology. If you placed whales on land with dextrous hands, you would very likely get technology.
Our mental faculties are not wholly unique. Look at an orca brain vs a human brain and ask who the smooth brain is, even ignoring the size.
That's better, yes! Although it makes me want to cite this other guideline:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
- because I think the article already addresses this "other species don't have literature" argument, though it doesn't talk about literature specifically.
But the article, or the book it's promoting, isn't making any very strong point. I checked. It's saying that animals have great senses, and some of them can see Saturn's rings on a clear night. But they don't know or care that they're seeing Saturn's rings, and they don't have telescopes anyway, and we do and can see the rings much better if we want to, because we do want to, because we think about the things that we can see. So, I don't know, maybe there's nothing to talk about here except sidetracks.
The strongest plausible interpretation isn't "humans are not exceptional". Every species is exceptional by definition, so that's a weak and easily dismissed claim. This critique is not so interesting.
What's meant by "human exceptionalism" is something more like "humans' longstanding habit of regarding ourselves as the apex of a strict hierarchy of species, a worldview which has had profound consequences for ourselves and others". That is a complex thing worth exploring, and what the work in the article is about. A critique from that level would be more interesting. But to do this, one would have to take in a larger working set of information.
Comments that engage with only the title of an article or the tip of its iceberg tend to be rather boring, and also reflexive/indignant. On HN, a good comment is reflective rather than reflexive [1], and engages with specifics rather than just being a generic reaction to a generic claim (like "humans are/aren't exceptional") [2].
One way to "engage with specifics" is to dig beneath the top of the abstraction heap (i.e. the title or top-level claim) until you hit a layer of substance of the relevant work or argument. In this case that's pretty easy to do: there are two paragraphs which, in their first sentences, get more specific:
* when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline
* our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals [...] study them under highly artificial conditions
One can disagree or debate the significance, but a response on this level is likely to be less reflexive and therefore more interesting.
To me the noteworthy thing in this HN thread is how rapid the reflex is to wholly dismiss the article (and the research it's about) and also how shallow that reflex is—how little information is processed before doing the dismissal. Strong emotional conditioning means little information can be tolerated before a reaction needs expressing. This thread is such a clear a case of that, that it points to how deeply what is called "human exceptionalism" lives in us.
Edit: actually, I was describing what I saw in the thread last night. Having looked it over again, there are a least some more substantive subthreads. That's good, and it's also common for those to take longer to appear, as described at [1] and [3].
Valuing other species based on human traits is misleading. Literature doesn't mean anything to animals, it's not applicable. Same thing as the ability to glow isn't applicable to humans, but is for bacteria. Ideas are a human-only trait. Trying to argument that animals don't have ideas, therefore they are worse, is like saying that humans are worse than dolphins because humans can't breathe under water.
If you value animals based on human traits, humans will always be better. Because you take your own good traits which other species don't have. But that's not the point. Animals have animal traits. For example, low factor of self-extinction is something we should be learning from from animals. Acceptance of death. Limiting the use of our own resources. Taking these aspects into consideration make humans a stupid race that destroy the environment they live in.
We're also unique for worrying about our arrogance, and about the future of other species, and we seem to have a unique urge to spin nebulous arguments for animal rights out of any wisp of an idea.
You don't inherit secularity. I mean you do, but children copying their parents is not the only way ideas spread. Otherwise secularity would never have spread in the first place.
(That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
Of course it's not the only way ideas spread but it is the most relevant. Parents' religion (and many other values) are, by a very wide margin, the most predictive traits for determining what those traits will be in their children.
This is one (of many) reason why having children is so rewarding. The idea of 'transferring ones consciousness' into something is nonsense - at best you die and then have a chatbot that does a questionable imitation of you. But with children you directly transfer many of your genetic and physical/mental characteristics, and you can then instill your environmental characteristics into them. It's about as close as you can realistically get to 'transferring your consciousness.'
Interestingly this, like many things, also only becomes even more true as we age. Depending on your age, you might find yourself having more similarities with your own parents than you might care to acknowledge, depending on your relationship with them.
It's not the most relevant. The enlightenment spread secularity. Books spread secularity. Childless hermits can write those. Come to think of it, religions spread through childless hermits writing books, too.
Yes, it literally is, and this isn't ambiguous. You can find a zillion studies contrasting the religion of people to those of their parents. For instance here [1] is an overview from Pew. 84% of adults who were raised in e.g. a completely Protestant home are Protestants themselves. That strong of a correlation simply doesn't leave room anything else to significantly matter.
If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
Effects have mechanisms. Not everything works by correlation. In fact nothing really works by correlation. Things work by causes. Indoctrination, that's pretty effective, but so are heresy and sedition, and revolutions in thought, and sea-changes. Pew probably isn't monitoring those.
People leaving some faith would obviously be the inverse of those who stay with it. So for Protestantism, it'd be 16%, or 11% for highly religious households. In deciding to look up the numbers for Islam, it's somewhat unsurprisingly only 1%. [1]
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"Based on survey data collected in 117 countries and territories from 2008 to 2024, we estimate that about 1% of people who are raised Muslim leave the faith. This loss is offset by a comparable influx of people joining Islam."
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Wiki has a nice table on Islam in particular here. [2] They broke 10% of the world population sometime around 1820. They broke 20% 170 years later, around 1990. And they're expected to to break 30% about 60 years after that, by 2050. We're trending towards a majority Muslim world, simply because of fertility, all the while people not having children somehow think people in the future will somehow share their values.
Not really, if you look at the actual birth rates, it maps to economic success more than religious identity.
Yes, we all know that global population growth is mainly happening in Africa and other poor countries.
You also cite global retention rates for islam. Those retention rates are memetic and highly dependent on the same set of poorer, non-western countries so you are comparing applyes to oranges. If you look at western countries, the retention rate is pretty similar.
You keep stretching statistics to reinforce your world view without trying to actually understand the statistics, which is why I assume you keep repeating garbage like "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely."
You are misinformed here. Islamic fertility rates within Europe remain high with an average of about one more child per woman. [1] This is why Muslims are expected to continue rapidly growing as an ever larger percentage of all Europeans, even in the scenario of 0 immigration. And this will continue indefinitely unless fertility rates markedly change.
The same follows in places like the US, even just amongst Christians. [2] See the first figure (about 2/5ths of the way down the study) for an extremely informative graph. Intended and actual fertility rates for those who consider religion important remains healthy - at around 2.5 children. For those who it is not important or have no religion, it's around 1.5 children.
It's easy to just handwave the fertility rate of developed economies while failing to consider the issue that fertility isn't just a random distribution within these countries. It's extremely biased, and religiosity is one of the most predictive factors.
You have, and continue to, make endlessly false claims, only to shift the goal posts onto more false claims each time you're debunked, with plentiful ad hominem on top.
If you would like to continue this discussion then (1) acknowledge the falsehoods you make instead of just endlessly shifting the goal posts and (2) in order to prevent an endless series of #1, cite things instead of continuing to just 'invent' false facts. And I mean actual data, not some Ted Talk, Reddit, pop media, or wherever you're getting much of the nonsense you're saying like calling Islamic fertility rates 'memetic' or now deciding to claim that fertility rates change faster than they effect populations which is going absurdly far off the deep end.
So if you have some meaningful citations for these things, great. Perhaps I can see what you missed - maybe you yourself might even see that. Or maybe indeed I'm the one missing something. But otherwise, I can only assume that you're just randomly stating, as fact, whatever you happen to want to be true.
That statement is not only true, but a tautology. The multiplication will only cease if the fertility rate declines. For traits and values that are highly heritable, these too will consequently increase in a rate that is, at the minimum, proportional to the rate of fertility. Especially in modern times this is literally how Islam is 'spreading', and it's spreading rapidly, everywhere.
And bear in mind that fertility is an exponential system, in both increases and decreases. So groups that are removing themselves from the gene pool will do so with a rapidity that is quite counter-intuitive. Like a fertility rate of 1 doesn't sound that insane (it obviously translates to literally every single woman having one child on average), yet it results in a generational decline of 50%, with a generation tending to be around our window of fertility - about 20 years.
So imagine two groups start at 16 people and one group maintains a fertility rate of 1, and the other group maintains a fertility rate of 3. After just 5 generations, about a century, the low fertility group will have 1 person, and the higher fertility group will have 81. You went from equal size to an 8100% difference, after a single century! And that's with fertility levels that are entirely realistic and not just comparing extremes like Nigeria or South Korea.
A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation.
The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population.
These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate.
> For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%.
These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors.
Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities.
Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.
I'm enjoying these conversations but kind of having really similar conversations in a number of different threads - so let me link to this [1] as a response, and would prefer if we could continue there. One of the few times I miss the old school non-threaded forums!
Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised!
Largely by a mixture of hypocrisy and commercialism. Catholicism has struggled mightily with this issue throughout its history, and is a big part of the reason that Protestantism even exists today. Get it, "Protest"ant? When people claim to hold values, and then act in apparent contradiction of those same values, it doesn't exactly inspire one to themselves adopt those values.
And that's been a major player, especially in the West, for the past ~70 years where you have politicians wearing religion on the coat of their sleeve, and then going and killing hundreds of thousands of people over what is overtly about oil, economics, and geopolitics - lofty moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding. Then you have things like the pedophilia scandals high within the Catholic hierarchy, made even worse by coverups.
This is probably why religions like fundamental Islam, Haredi Judaism, and so on are even more heritable. Those who follow such religions tend to very much live their proclaimed values. For instance I really don't agree with people like Khabib Nurmagomedov on many of his values, yet he lives those values, even when they hurt him in the short-run, and I find it very inspirational. I can only imagine how young (or older for that matter) Muslims see him. Integrity in life is just so important.
Definitely, our children do not learn so much from our words as much as from our behaviors and actions. Religious individuals like to claim that the decline in religiosity drove a decline of morality in society. I think it's rather the opposite - that a decline of morality in society drove a decline in religiosity.
It's like a parent trying to teach their child about healthy eating while they down cokes, chips, and sweets every day. That kid is going to be much more likely to, himself, end up downing cokes, chips, and sweets than he is to eat healthy. And for his own kids, he may not even bother with the pretext of healthy eating.
Morality is relative. But from my worldview the perpetuation of a culture, and a society, is the first and foremost requirement of any successful culture or society, and arguably the single most primal responsibility of the people within that culture and society. This overlaps well with religion, but not so much with what I assume you might consider moral or amoral given your comment.
> But from my worldview the perpetuation of a culture, and a society, is the first and foremost requirement [...]and arguably the single most primal responsibility of the people within that culture and society. This overlaps well with religion,
I was agreeing with you, if not prescriptively, at least descriptively.
On that I would disagree. Had the Catholic Church chosen to take severe actions against the pedophiles, defrocking and even excommunication in severe cases, I think they would be in a far greater position today. By protecting the pedophiles, they have greatly imperiled their own authority and ability to persist into the future.
This gets back to the original discussion we were having about hypocrisy. Far lesser ails led to the Protestant reformation. In this case, alongside the dysfunction in the College of Cardinals, there will be no reformation but simply a decline.
I wouldn't say this is entirely accurate. For instance there's some irony in that the reason Priests can't marry is, in part, because of draconian measures against priests abusing their power by essentially establishing fiefdoms composed of Church lands and property. Local priests would control such property and then pass it onto their heirs, appoint family members to important positions, and generally just treat it their own little demesnes.
The Church responding with 'you can no longer get married and shall have no heirs' was a very serious FAFO moment. Just think about how huge a deal that is, if you can even imagine it! The Church used to make much more effort to abide their values, very much in the way that e.g. Islam does today. The centralized nature of the Catholic Church means this (the pedo stuff) could easily be rectified by a single person, the Pope, but their failure to do so is also what I was alluding to with the dysfunction in the College of Cardinals (which is whom elects the Pope).
Those are all examples of people looking down on other people.
To describe humans as exceptionalist, you must claim "animals are people too", but you didn't say that part. Or perhaps "rocks are people too", that would also work, but we don't tend to anthropomorphise rocks because they don't have faces. Or maybe "LLMs are people too". Whatever the claim is, it's an extraordinary claim, and yet you've chosen to present it in the form of a patronising telling off as if it was a foregone conclusion.
There is a philosophical/probabilistic argument that explains why 'rocks are people too' holds less weight than 'pigs are people too'.
We cannot be sure pigs feel anything or have qualia, but from comparison to humans, and let's say, human babies, they at least exhibit the exteriorities of e.g. feeling pain, fear. So, I would assign a non-negligible probability that they do, in fact, have qualia and can feel pain.
Scale that up to a billion farmed pigs, the expected suffering inflicted is huge. Now yes, 'Pascal's wager' and so on, but for rocks, the argument does not work as well.
If you claim for example that rocks suffer when you walk on them, I can claim an equally substantiatex claim that rocks feel sublime extasy as you walk on them. As it stands, we don't have much reason to believe one more than the other, and they cancel out.
All that to say that you don't need to be certain that 'pigs are people too' for its consequences to be seriously considered. And each argument for why you consider pigs to not be people, ask yourself whether it is equally applicable to human babies.
"(1) Any person who prepares a criminal offence [Wer eine Straftat nach] pursuant to Section 202a or Section 202b by: 1. passwords or other security codes that enable access to data (Section 202a (2)), or 2. computer programs whose purpose is to commit such an act, manufactures, procures, sells, transfers to another, distributes or otherwise makes available, shall be punished with imprisonment of up to two years or with a fine. (2) Section 149 (2) and (3) shall apply mutatis mutandis."
Not sure how this is twisted into opening devtools.
"Among other things, criminal charges were filed against the Federal Office for Information Security, as the office allegedly violated the law itself." But were dropped. Sounds like this is a vague law that can lead to a lot of harassing intimidation, followed by cases being dropped.
Substitute later parts with earlier parts they refer to and it's much clearer: "computer programs whose purpose is to" "enable access to data", when used "[to prepare] a criminal offense". I guess it depends on what the vulnerability was.
You made me check damninteresting.com, and I'm delighted to see that it's back again, with a contributed post about adenoids and a Bellows post about word games, and (groan) one of those "free daily word games" that many sites have now, presumably in an attempt to get people to donate regularly.
I know Alan Bellows wants to write, but the thing is, he wants to write for money, so that he can write and live. I want to read it, but the other thing is, I don't want to give him any money. I suppose I might do if I had like ten times as much of the stuff, but I don't. The whole situation is enigmatic.
We need to differentiate between "he wants to write instead of working as X" and "he wants to write and he is willing to do that in his spare time".
I know that this isn't that simple.. someone who's not employed or has a job where they can mostly do nothing might just "want" to write and be able to, while others might _really really_ want to write but they can't afford it.
Still, as long as there exists someone who wants - and is able to - give me good content with no strings attached, I'd rather consume that than content written for money.
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