This is like the question I’ve always asked about getting sick.
Do you produce extra mucous because your body is trying to get rid of what’s making you sick or does the illness make you produce more mucous in order to spread more easily?
Comment on Humans didn't invent agriculture
br3d@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Makes total sense: who’s working for whom? Is wheat making an effort to till the soil and find fertiliser to help us grow, or is it the other way round?
ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 4 months ago
br3d@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I suspect the serious answer is that we produce mucus and sneezing as a natural response to microbes, and that’s the environment within which microbes have evolved to take advantage of the mucus and sneezing
jpeps@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Pretty sure this is exactly correct. I read the Kurzgesagt book Immune recently and it was a fascinating view into how our bodies are really the result of ancient warfare, with constant oneupmanship between us and the environment.
danc4498@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Survival of the fittest does not work with intent.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
It does if I kill loads of stuff
Steve@startrek.website 4 months ago
Evolution is a loop of random mutations that get reproduced if they randomly happen to give the organism better odds at reproduction.
Some germ gets a little better at spreading via mucous, so it gets to reproduce more because humans make mucous when they get sick
name_NULL111653@pawb.social 4 months ago
Idk about the mucous, but a fever is definitely an attempt at killing whatever foreign pathogen is there. Hopefully a pathologist or doctor can help us here.
CobblerScholar@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Mucus is one of the bodies innate methods of protection, same with vomiting, same with crying same with sweating. The body knows something is wrong so it kicks the production of those into overdrive to hopefully force whatever was in it out. Its why we start sweating, salivating and sometimes vomit when we eat super spicy peppers despite the fruit being room temp amd full of water
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 months ago
And here we have a typical specimen exhibiting capitalist realism: Observe how the subject is analysing everything they come across on a “who works for who” basis, projecting human modes of production onto the universe. Applying it, even in vain, this reductive universality ensures that they will never think beyond it and, not thinking beyond it, not question either working for a capitalist or being a capitalist who is worked for, thereby in either case working for capitalism, a form of human cooperation in which happiness, well-being, yes even human connection (that necessitating eye-level communication) is traded for hastened advancement of the economy to achieve post-scarcity.
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
9 points out of 10, very good. Except that capitalism doesn’t want to ever achieve post-scarcity. They’re a dog chasing a car, without scarcity and demand their profit streams dry up.
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Hence why post-scarcity is the natural death point of capitalism.
Your question is essentially the same as Freudians arguing among themselves about the existence of a death drive: How could it possibly benefit the individual? If it can’t in some way benefit the individual, how can it be a drive? How does it mesh with the pleasure principle? The answer is simple: It doesn’t benefit the individual. In certain circumstances it benefits the genome, that’s why us seed-pods can, in certain circumstances, enter states in which it is pleasurable.
And all-encompassing and all-powerful, indeed, religious, as capitalism may seem right now it, too, is a seed pod. It does not have to will its abolishment to bring about the material conditions abolishing it.
Of course there’s also nothing speaking against it not making things unduly nasty for us. But that’s mere politics, not fate.
trolololol@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Class war: wheat vs humanity
Don’t even get me started on cats.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I suspect cats. my.clevelandclinic.org/…/9756-toxoplasmosis
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
All realism is bullshit soulism.net
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Fool. Allow me to show you truth: timecube.xyz
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Eris help us, the zoomers are here with lame humour.
MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
That’s not humour, it’s postmodern political theory.
Have you read any postmodern theory? Check out cyborg feminism. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto