[pdevr]

About the female whale whose dorsal fin was punctured: "Ólafur appears to have developed a personal kinship with the whale"

A macabre kinship that involved spearing her calf. And eventually, killing the female whale herself while trying to kill her calf again.

[ianmcgowan]

That is a partial quote:

"Ólafur appears to have developed a personal kinship with the whale, choosing not to try to kill her again. But he had no problem shooting the whale’s calf. One summer, when he raised his spear and took aim at the calf, his spear went askew, hitting the mother instead.

With that, he’d had enough. That was the last time Ólafur speared a whale."

[chefkd]

A mother's love is unconditional like 99% of the time regardless of the species and humans are more or less the same across culture, time and space 99% of the time :(

does anyone ever think about a less vicious world? like I know evolution / survival of the fittest all that is a thing but did it have to be like this? Could we have evolved without killing?

[justinclift]

> A mother's love is unconditional ...

There are many people whose personal experience is decidedly not like that, so "citation needed".

[chefkd]

Haha valid I could tell you stories but trauma comparison is not a healthy thing they tell me I don't even speak to mine but idk the pain of giving birth should get some credit?

I feel like when I was growing up this statement would have been accepted as a near tautology perhaps a cultural thing? or maybe a testament to the trauma-centric times we live in?

[lupusreal]

I don't think it's a "sign of the times" thing, I think it's an internet thing. If you made that claim outside IRL today it would be well received by nearly everybody, including people with bad personal experiences (if only because most people prefer to believe that good outcomes are the norm instead of wallowing in pessimism.)

But the internet? The internet is packed with people who focus on the negative, even people who resent their mothers (who may love them and treat them well) because they're so miserable they wish they had never been born.

Always remember that talking to people online doesn't give you a representative sample of what people at large are really like. There's a selection bias in play; people who have problems with "real life" have a tendency to spend more problem online.

[datameta]

The internet often carries a reverse of a normal distribution in terms of sentiment of opinion.

[justinclift]

> ... the pain of giving birth should get some credit?

Sure, up to a point. If the treatment of the children later on is massively detrimental though, then that "credit" is well and truly expired.

[AlecSchueler]

Testament to strong social tabboos that kept poeple quiet about their as abusive families.

[fladrif]

Why is there credit due? It's hard for me to accept the fact that children owe their parents for giving birth to them. I would say credit is due how the parents treat their child afterwards is what matters.

[cess11]

It's rather common in rodents that they eat their offspring, as many parents that kept hamsters for their kids know.

In sheep it's somewhat common for first-time mothers to not want their offspring and refuse them the early ('raw'?) milk, which is pretty much a death sentence. A slow, painful death unless culled by a human.

The term mother isn't very clear in itself. Who is the mother in an anthill?

[gus_massa]

> Who is the mother in an anthill?

Except the queen, all the other ants are the daugthers of the queen.

IIRC thermites have many "queens" and "kings". I'm not sure about social wasps.

[cess11]

Right, so the queen lays the eggs, and there her care stops. Is she the mother since she made the eggs, or would the drones that care for them be the mothers?

[gus_massa]

The drones are the male ants. They just go away to find a new queen and die, while the new queen makes a new colony.

The new born ants are feed and cared by their sisters.

[card_zero]

That's an interesting question. In principle intelligence could evolve as a fitness indicator. That is, a species of herbivorous apes could select mates for ability in music, art, and story-telling, and then you get a gentle tribe of orangutan-like creatures with human-like culture. However, unless they specifically settle on non-killing as the fitness indicator, I don't see why they'd be consistent about it. Even an orangutan may eat a slow loris from time to time. It's more morality's business than evolution's.

[chefkd]

Assuming a high dimensional multi-variate search space I guess that leads to the question what the role of killing is in calculating fitness is right?

In my head the more humans / beings have known about their world the better the have survived so it makes sense intelligence would be a fitness indicator that speeds up the search algorithm. But there's no intuitive answer to why killing as many people as possible would be a fitness indicator like population wasn't a factor until recently so it's not like resource scarcity was the issue

[lazyasciiart]

Resource scarcity has always been the issue. Even ignoring water (still an issue), foraging and agriculture are both incredibly hard ways to supply food.

[chefkd]

even if resources were highly limited it seems intuitive that the evolution algorithm would prioritize acquiring knowledge for efficient resource gathering over killing long term wouldn't it?

Let's say cave person a figured out how to dig a well cave person b not so much. cave person b kills cave person a to get the well and uses it for x years then dies because they didn't acquire the knowledge to dig another one. so cave person c will be like "protec well digger hooman". same for foraging let's say cave person a killed cave person b who was extremely good at remembering where trees are in a given area sure cave person a got a meal for today but is gonna die out unless they develop the skills cave person a had

sorry I'm a homeless dropout maybe I'm missing something super obvious I'm still not seeing the how killing leads to an optimum solution. Maybe a local maxima for sure but not the most optimal solution in the search space and as civilized as humans have become killing still persists I've seen some brutal stuff by some insanely rich folk (at least to me) that had absolutely nothing to do with resources so maybe that's coloring my viewpoint but idk even for inter species stuff some species have been hunted to extinction which is like a dairy farmer killing everything instead of planning for multiple generations it doesn't make any sense

[card_zero]

I was thinking (but forgot to say) that hunting is usually said to be what drove the evolution of intelligence. Humans needed tools, plans, and at least the ability to yell words if not grammar, in order to kill large tasty animals, that's the usual idea for how it happened, more commonly mentioned than intelligence as a fitness indicator (aka pure showing off).

[nycdatasci]

Beautiful idea, but of course people have thought about and wished for an alternative and less viscous world for thousands of years. The current paradigm is the worst possible, except all others.

[card_zero]

> less viscous world

This would be no land of milk and honey. Maybe just the milk.

[WalterBright]

Killing is the easiest way to get lots of calories and building materials. Plants do it, too.

[chefkd]

I think about this a lot does that explain intra species killings? cave person A see sabertooth cave person A dead cave person B also see sabertooth cave person B dead cave person c gotta kill sabertooth before cave person c dead. cave person eat sabertooth like sabertooth eat cave person A & B I understand but not cave person A kill cave person B cause caveperson different / new its not like humans eat humans haha unless you're a wendigo ofc

[lupusreal]

Two possible reasons why humans don't eat humans (except when we do):

We're hardwired to have empathy for our own kind, e.g. the "selfish gene" theory, stronger for kin than for strangers but nonetheless strong enough to create an almost universal taboo against eating people. Note however that many other animals do seem to be wired to eat some of their own children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_cannibalism

"The most dangerous game." People are very resourceful, and furthermore have friends and family who hold grudges. Eating people is a bad strategy because people who make a habit of it tend to get killed for it sooner or later. Hunting nearly anything else is safer than hunting other humans.

[marcosdumay]

Just to say, that second one also explains why almost no other animal likes to eat people either.

[WalterBright]

Eating one's own species is a fairly complex topic, and there are many local optimas. For a detailed read on this topic, see "The Red Queen" by Ridley.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...

[zelphirkalt]

Interpunctuation would really help making your comment understandable.

[thfuran]

>A mother's love is unconditional like 99% of the time regardless of the species

That's just BS. In many species, the mother never has any interaction at all with the young. In some species, it's not particularly uncommon for a mother to eat her young.

[chefkd]

> "mammal mothers eating their young are relatively rare and usually occur under extreme stress or adverse conditions"

perhaps i meant to say just mammals? would be cool if neuroscience advanced enough to figure out what makes mammals specifically different but alas like Moses won't live long enough to see that day

[card_zero]

Generally, a tendency for a type of animal to eat its young correlates to a strategy of producing a lot of them. Rabbits, for instance. I'm blanking on the name of it but this is one of a pair of strategies where the other is to be long-lived - like humans, or at the extreme end, the greenland shark, which has a very low metabolism. That's the alternate way of persisting as a species: do nothing, and especially don't die.

[throwaway87651]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

[marcosdumay]

Not only mammals, birds seem to have it from the same origin.

Also, some reptiles and fish care for their children. Some arthropod too. So it looks like reasonably easy to evolve.

[zelphirkalt]

That proves it, they love their offspring so much, they could just eat them all up, hair and nails.

[amelius]

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance