[saalweachter]

While we humans are thinking creatures, and must seek to act morally, keep in mind that nature isn't and doesn't.

From the perspective of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, humans create a huge number of niches which dozens (hundreds?) of species have evolved to fill. (And to be fair, eliminated a vast number of niches as well.) We've created niches like "human head and body hair", which lice exploit, "provide emotional support for humans", which dogs and cats fill, "carry heavy shit for humans", which horses, donkeys and oxen have filled (and still do, in some places), and "produce huge numbers of delicious offspring, most of whom humans will eat", which pigs and chickens and cows fill.

From nature's perspective, these niches are no more strange or unnatural than the bacteria which live in guts to break down plant matter for their hosts, the birds that pick insects off of large animals, coral reefs or the ants that farm aphids. Even meat animals aren't really a significant aberration: countless species produce huge amounts of young, from dozens to millions at a time, with only one or two of those offspring surviving to reproduce themselves ("r selection").

Nature is all about the survival of the genes most fit for the existing niches. It doesn't care about what niches existed in the past or might exist in the future, and it doesn't share your biases. As far as nature is concerned, cows and dogs are more fit than buffalo and wolves, because cows and dogs are better-adapted to the existing niches.

You can choose to believe otherwise, that wolves are inherently superior to dogs and buffalo to cows, but that's your judgement, not nature's.

[Luc]

Well put, and I agree. I love the theory of evolution for explaining so much of the living world, including the awful stuff. I think it's a great comfort to know that it's not arbitrary.

In fact it can explain why I have empathy with other living things, and want them to have happy lives. Maybe that will be an expanding niche, who knows. I know nature doesn't care, but I do.

[alfredallan]

You/we ARE a part of nature. If 100% of people care about doing certain things (that they actually have control over) in a certain way, that's the same as nature doing it that way. When it's a smaller percentage, that's just that thing happening in different ways.

[Luc]

Well, that's true in the same sense that everything in the world is just quantum fields interacting. It's true that my mind is part of nature, but my thoughts are not part of an explanatory theory, a framework for predictions, certainly not one that is mostly about genetics and evolution.

[realanon]

Explanatory theories, frameworks and the like are always a work in progress, ergo, never complete - ref Gödel's theorems. What's standard knowledge in the future can easily be utterly incomprehensible today, thus that (being part of a theory or framework) shouldn't be taken as a necessary criteria in talking about things at a level that's more abstract than a theory (which by definition must be about the (mathematical) specifics of specific phenomena), as the parent thread does.

If, as you rightly claim, everything is just interacting fields, should it make or break the argument if the specific interaction of particular (as yet unknown) combinations of fields is as yet unknown?

It can also be questioned if an individual's thoughts are special enough in the grandest scheme of things - or if they're merely a mechanism, that seems special to the body where those thoughts are occurring. For example, moving away from humans: animals have thoughts too, yet their behavior(s) can be abstracted into proper theories (apex predator theory, food chains, etc.) backed with sufficient evidence, without much regard to the thoughts of individual creatures, or even entire species - classifying creatures as predator vs prey is sufficient to study a lot of large scale ecological phenomena.

Of course, there can be various kinds of explanations for why one feels empathy for others - evolution: humans evolved to live in groups and empathy was an asset to group-living, incentives/economic: those that show consideration for others were similarly reciprocated, etc. etc.

PS: I wrote the parent, different alias.

PPS: the dog breeding problems are very real, and I do hope a rich dog-loving American can hire veterinarians and lawyers to simply sue some of the organizations involved in setting/promoting the ludicrous breed standards (resulting in GSDs with sloping backs, pugs that can't even breed without human assistance, etc.). The difference with cows and chickens is one can find enough dog lovers to make an actual issue out of this, compared to (live) cow lovers or (live) chicken lovers.