Submitted 4 days ago by lena@gregtech.eu to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://gregtech.eu/pictrs/image/5237d55e-50fa-4d24-9e43-f675419d9e31.jpeg
Yuval Noah Harari light heartedly raises the question in his book Sapiens, of whether men domesticated wheat or wheat domesticated humans.
Humans went from wandering through the world exploring and foraging, to doing the back breaking work to grow and farm wheat.
Wheat went from being fairly unsuccessful in evolutionary terms, to covering something like 20% of the earths surface !
Something similar is suggested to a lesser extent about psychedelic mushrooms by Melvin Sheldrake in Entangled Life. No where near the same scale as wheat, of course.
Another Sapiens reader. Look, I don’t care how uppity those maize are – there’s no way they trained us into cultivating them, we slaughtered their brothers and sisters and kept only the tamer, weaker, fatter renditions that we could use for our own means.
Corn is not sentient, and I will die on this hill!
I feel like I heard this perspective elsewhere…it may have been The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Which I really enjoyed, myself.
Well, you must be a real fungi at parties.
Corn is the vegetation equivalent of a cubicle dweller.
Ah, but you forget, Maizen have a collective identity, so stalks think nothing of sacrificing their individual lives for the good of the whole.
if they compete for sunlight and happily smother their brethren in this fruitful pursuit, then they’re no better than us at chucking each other under the bus in the name of this so called collective ‘progress’
Giving in to the wheat propaganda, I see
YOU BETTER RUN, EGG!
Relevant
that was an edgy idea in the book, but stuff like that happens in ecological systems all the time. I read the book around the time of the election, and it read like a manifesto to justify oligarchic takeover as the next phase of human development (see the part how societal rules where assigned to the government and how the internet will take it back)
The common, did we domesticate XYZ, or did XYZ domesticate us? Conundrum.
Myc is the real death dinner monster. When everything dies, it’ll be them that don’t and then eat everyone else’s of whatever’s left.
Cats
Yep. We feed cats, they kill pests which give us disease and spoil our foods.
Makes you think that domestication is maybe the wrong paradigm, neither or us domesticated each other (or we both did) but truly it’s a mutually beneficial partnership, something that is actually common in nature.
Old Deuteronomy.
www.dailymotion.com/video/x2b3rb0
This is part one of “the botany of desire”, exploring how four plants, apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes have adapted human desires, which in turn has made them some of the most successful plant species around the world. The rest of the parts are on Dailymotion too for those interested.
Wouldn’t fungus be more immediately interested in being among us?
More like fungsus
There isn’t mushroom amongus for the fungus to rule. They won’t be able to be a funguy and party.
This is my tune, not only biocentric, but also a very healthy dose of anti-anthropocentric. A species traitor, if you allow me to be as bold.
I really don’t think that talk about humans being the god on earth, center of the universe, with a metaphysical excuse to exploit everything around us is doing wonders to our health nor long term survival… And obviously the “sapiens” of our epithet is only there because we gave it ourselves chef’s kiss
It’s also a very Buddhist outlook. Not because of anything specifically antihuman or pro ecology but simply because we as humans are part of a cycle that lives and dies. We don’t have a say.
You could say our karma is that we will be too proud and be too exceptionalist and end it all earlier than expected because we couldn’t come together and take care of the earth.
It sucks but the earth will go on for a few more billion years without us.
Oh yeah, I believe nature, the planet, will carry on, we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot. I just feel for the part of it that won’t survive our stay.
Sometimes I make this joke about all currently living higher primates, including us, sitting at a table, and we are yeeting our way around the room, and the other primates look at eachother and go "wait, that’s the sapient one?? :D
I think we as a species took a very nasty turn in our evolution, either biological or social, that allowed us to “break away” from nature, so to speak, and create that duality Man/ Nature that in my opinion really didn’t work that well. I’m pretty sure other animals have a consciousness too, so probably being conscious and self aware is by itself not the culprit. But something makes us feel so far removed from the rest of life that I find really unsetling, and it also only makes dealing with being that much more complicated, for example, not being able to accept death like you said. In that aspect, some religions are definitely better than others to mitigate that damage. Either way, I’m just here doing my best and hoping for the best!
Yup, bury me in a burlap sack in a deciduous forest.
Why deciduous? Because fuck pine trees, that’s why. I don’t want to feed those assholes.
Oof! Cool perspective
The primordial soup developed animal life to reproduce itself. We are all basically the reproductive stage for crap.
Jokes on them, we’re going to put carbon into the atmosphere faster than they can process it raising the global temperature to the point of extinction
Symbiosis
Why?
Because it amuses me. Next time I’ll make sure you are okay with me having fun before posting anything.
In reality, we are actually farming jpegs, by posting reencoded versions of them daily, until they all eventually decompose so we can merge with them.
This is why I don’t eat edibles lol.
I wanna fukken die, free my soul, the plants can have my body
Eukaryotes likely evolved during The Great Oxidation Event which saw oxygen levels rise to levels that were toxic to the Cyanobacteria (which use photosynthesis). We evolved to save them!
We all give back in the end one way or another.
Cue music: “It’s the circle of life”
And yet we're here for it:-)
Or - get this - it is all a cycle.
We could call it the carbon cycle!
Pfft, next you’re going to be selling me on the idea that we’re all made of carbon
This is some Trump level zero sum understanding of mutual benefit.
OP is probably going to be appointed Secretary of the Interior to shoot all the DEI trees and end woke oxygen.
Lmao perhaps, make breathing great again(note: I do not support trump, this is just a joke)
Fwiw, you are on Lemmy now: (virtually) nobody thinks that you support Trump:-D
It’s mutually beneficial gardening.
Reminds me of this modern classic: youtu.be/Cf2Q-McO_Fw
Thanks so much for posting that. I hadn’t heard it before and loved it
I was going to sleep you know…
It’s like a circle
So deep!!
Oh yeah plants? Eat my ass!/ Wipes ass with toilet paper
Fungus rules them all
What? Why does no one in the comments mention that plants don’t decompose dead bodies? This statement is just utterly wrong.
Nowhere does it say that plants decompose bodies. It says they consume us after we’ve been decomposed.
I misread, thanks for clarifying :)
RustyNova@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Oh really?
Then let’s accelerate climate change. I won’t let those green fuckers win
medicsofanarchy@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That’s right! Besides food, clothing, housing, tools, weapons, erosion control, and beauty, what have the plants ever done for us?
thenextguy@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Brought peas?
Notyou@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Medicine. A lot of plants are used in medicine as well. Asprin came from tree bark.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 3 days ago
They literally just fucking sit there, I’ve seen Jumanji I know what they could do, they just choose not to
idunnololz@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yeah but do those fir the wring reasons. If you were a slave and your master gave u food, clothe and housing would you think “wow what a wonderful master”? Well its like that but with the plants. They are enslaving us and we csnt just let them get away with it. /s
Sergio@slrpnk.net 4 days ago
That’s too slow. Take us to defcon one.
Please_Do_Not@lemm.ee 4 days ago
I’m Jewish, so unfortunately, Kanye has already taken me to death con 5. But I’m not sure if those are related.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Won’t the extra CO2 just help the heartier plants (weeds) take over?