A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.
Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.
Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.
— Ira Byock, The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (x)
finding out that almost all other animals don’t have periods like we do and instead simply reabsorb the egg back into their uterine lining to reuse the nutrients is like finding out the rest of the class has been taking WILDLY easier tests than you for the whole semester
like, hey, cat why don’t you have to use your Cat Dollars to invest in tampons? And cat is just like: fuck that noise, my body is OPTIMAL for not being made of inconvenient nonsense, sucks to be you
wack.
humans: hey, bleeding every month is actually really cumbersome and I lose both valuable nutrients AND fluids I need for survival? What the fuck is up?
evolution: yes, alright, but have you considered this about it? *cartoon blow horn noise*
Human bodies suck for many reasons including but not limited to:
Periods
Bad backs
Permanent breasts that do not leave once baby is weaned
Dangerously large, unprotected, and non retractable male reproductive systems
Huge brain takes up way too much energy gotta eat more sleep less
Baby brain bigger than hips guess birth is life threatening now
Takes like 25 years for big brain to even finish maturing
•Teeth are critical to living, yet not designed to last more than a few years without constant intervention and upkeep, and don’t grow back if this is not accomplished. Also, losing your teeth means the bones in your ear will shift, and your hearing will worsen.
•Breathing, eating, communication all from the same pathway, major choking hazard. Give me a dolphin style breathing tube.
•Most pleasurable nerve endings on the body locating on the filthiest parts of you, guarenteed spread of bacteria.
•knees and shoulders have almost zero capability to heal correctly, once they break, they’re basically broken forever without massive outside influence.
Have you ever considered how fucking astonishing babies crying is?
The young of other animals don’t make noise, or if they do, barely any at all. Baby birds only start chirping when their parents come back with the food, kittens meow to their mothers because cat communication is extremely subtle and drawing your caretaker’s attention may require a sound when you have eight siblings. At this point, they can already see and walk.
But human babies? Crying is essentially the first willful action that they learn. Months before being able to move on your own, or even hold your own fucking head up, or being able to choose when and where you defecate. Before anything else, a skill more valuable than anything else, is a distress call.
A distress call specifically intended to be impossible to ignore.
Before object permanence or theory of mind, without even an understanding of what help they need, who could provide it, and whether they choose to do so, a human being is capable of expressing that there is something wrong in the state they are in, that they are powerless to correct on their own.
This is what was evolutionarily selected above silent babies that did not attract predators. This is what was selected instead of young who could instantly walk. This is what was selected as the ideal offspring for the human race. Not one that runs. Not one that hides. Not one that can fend for itself. A creature that can communicate, if only the simplest, most inherent message:
I need help.
Humans are incredibly social creatures. We evolved under the reliance other humans would be there to help us.
humans literally everywhere, across times and places and cultures, are like “oh fuck i MUST create” and then they did, in a milliion different unique ways across a million unique mediums, and i think that’s very endearing and cute of us
having a flesh vessel is so annoying?????? like they have to be constantly watered, they have to be in specific temperature range to be comfortable, i’ve had a headache for like seven hours and nothing i do will get rid of it,
physical forms are so inconvenient??????????????
I knocked mine over yesterday and scraped off some of the outer barrier and it keeps sending me really annoying warning messages about it
blood.dll has caused an access violation exception
I still can’t figure off how to turn off the monthly compile time. It goes for like 7 days wrecks all the system and takes so much CPU time.
I got the wrong model, too, and there’s no returns or exchange policy. I’m trying to make do as best I can with aftermarket modifications, but even that’s a real bind. And then I have to deal with all the purists who try to tell me I should be happy with the model I was given.
the beard texture takes FOREVER to load even WITH the aftermarket mods
The code for my was poorly written and sends warning messages when nothing is wrong, causing it to be unable to function as usual.
Mine got some kind of error that made it stuck on the sad emotion
The battery life on mine is shit. I have to recharge it every day and it takes HOURS.
Mine has this issue where it runs too many background processes and opens programs at random until it forces a shutdown
Mine has extra code where there shouldn’t be and keeps jamming vital payhways for Blood.dll
I honestly think it’s trying to self destruct most days.
My antivirus software keeps identifying system files as threats.
The interface just… isn’t intuitive? at all?? I’ve had mine for years and I STILL don’t know how to make it do ANYTHING. Like maybe I’m just stupid? But I feel like something so basic should COME WITH A FUCKING MANUAL
I know loads of people have written walkthroughs, but there are so many different models and settings that it’s impossible to figure out if any given advice will work for me and I’m so tired I think this thing is MORE broken than when I got it because I don’t know how to fucking use it 😦
Mines battery has become very sporadic with it’s need to recharge I don’t understand why
My task management fucking sucks and never finishes a task before starting a new one
“How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realise this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realise this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didn’t do those things with their mouths?”
— Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari, Yuval Noah)
some of u (me) need to remember that u are an animal u are literally a fucking primate u are a product of everything that has ever occurred and u are actually a part of your environment/world/universe and not some voyeur experiencing the external concept of “nature”. you are natural you are an animal you are an animal
I hate the naturalistic fallacy. “Oh humans were never meant to eat anything besides meat and berries so eating anything that isnt 100% natural is bad” well if you look at a spine for more than ten minutes you’ll realize we were never meant to walk upright either but i dont see anyone advocating that we start walking on all fours
prehistoric man ate pretty much whatever he could get his hands on so i think that me doing the same is probably pretty natural
ifesbob 