Actual Science Reveals Human Beings Are Not All That Great After All
Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently ROCKED the Internet community, (loosely defined as "the entirety of the Internet"), by revealing that an astrophysicist doesn't possess an inherent fundamental grasp on the nuances of biology, almost as if they're two completely different and unrelated fields of scientific study.
He recently Twippitted: "If there were ever a species for whom sex hurt, it surely went extinct long ago," followed by a disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out "WEEELLLL AAACTUALLLEEE" and then refused to be silenced. Apparently there are a lot of animals for which sex hurts including myself because I'm horribly out of shape. But at least my penis isn't 20 inches long or spiked on the end. At least to my knowledge, none of my mates have ever literally bitten my head off and eaten me once we've finished. So we humans have that going for us, evolutionarily, I suppose.
Facebook user whose name I'm sure he won't mind me reprinting without his permission, Richard Bramer, summed up the controversy better than I ever could: "Notice the mark of an incorrect, but informed, opinion: his logic is correct. That such species exist, in fact, makes one wonder how they overcame this obstacle, or why wasn't it an obstacle, if not? One doesn't rethink Dr. Tyson's original thesis, which is, in essence, correct. The opposite of this, an incorrect and uninformed opinion would look like this: 'Islam hates us.'"
I had been toying with a subject I wanted to write about for a couple of days now. I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how to get the article off the ground. The Notorious N.D.T. gave me the opening I needed for the rest to flow out of me like the multicolored chain of verbal handkerchiefs flying out of a clown's anus that you're used to.
Human beings think we're so great with our society, and our technology, and our communication, and our money, and our religion, and our war, and our compulsive need to dominate other races and genders for absolutely no reason at all, and our smug sense of superiority, and our porn. We think we're the smartest creatures on the planet just because we have figured out how to successfully kill literally every single other thing on the planet, including the planet itself, and I haven't checked for a few weeks, possibly also the entire solar system.
But let me tell you something. Human beings aren't so great. We are not so smart. In fact, compared to most other creatures, human beings are actually pretty incredibly stupid when you stop to think about it. Except no one's really stopped to think too much about it. That's how stupid we are.
Humans are pretty much clueless. We have to be taught everything, and we still manage to screw up 98% of everything we do. Let's compare what some other creatures we believe to be inferior instinctively know FROM BIRTH that human beings need to be taught.
SINGLE CELLED ORGANISMS: These swim around in puddles of goo wherever they can find it, and believe me, you can find goo EVERYWHERE. They commonly have names the average person can't even pronounce, let alone spell. If they land in something that starts killing them, they just start massively breeding until they conquer death.
Their most common method of reproduction is simply splitting in two over and over and over again. Human beings are just getting around to figuring out how to clone livestock, and we still can't decide whether or not it's ethical.
ADVANTAGE: SINGLE CELLED ORGANISMS.
CATS (AND BY EXTENSION, DOGS): Look at cats, and by extension, dogs. (They're basically the same thing in that they're both happy to see you when you come home because it means you will eventually give them food.) A cat is born automatically knowing how to cat, complete with every skill set a cat needs to communicate and survive as a cat. The same with dogs.
You don't see cats spending one third of their lives being taught by other, older cats what a hiss means or what food is. No, when a kitten sees something smaller than it scurrying across the floor it instinctively identifies that small, scurrying thing as "food," and it automatically reacts by attacking and killing it. The typical human child won't even identify "broccholi" or "sautéed shrimp" as food until they reach the tender age of 39. (A dog also instinctively knows what food is: Literally everything; let vomit sort it out.)
Cats and dogs automatically know how to bathe properly, how to poop properly, how to mark and defend their territory, how to communicate with one another, pretty much how to do everything they need to do to survive. The only thing we send dogs to school for is to learn how to entertain us. The only thing we send cats to school for is-ha ha! We don't send cats to school; they're smart enough not to care what we think of them.
ADVANTAGE: CATS (AND BY EXTENSION, DOGS).
BIRDS: Once a baby bird, or "birdlet," reaches a certain age of "roughly feathered," the mother bird instinctively knows it's time to kick it's baby out of the house. Only in this case, "kicking its baby out of the house" entails a drop of about 300 billion feet (to a bird).
You see, the idea of flying is so nonsensical even birds don't want to do it. The baby bird is standing on the edge of its nest or a gutter or a tree branch or wherever the mother bird chooses to play Russian roulette with her offspring, looking down, thinking, "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?? THIS IS INSANE!! WHAT DOES SHE EXPECT ME TO DO, DEFY THE NATURAL PHYSICAL LAWS OF GRAVITY?? I AM GOING TO DIE!! THIS IS HOW I DIE!!" Then the mother bird pushes the baby bird off the edge and the baby bird starts frantically waving its arms, trying to grab onto anything it can on the way down until, suddenly, it's not falling anymore and, "HOLY SHIT!! I'M DEFYING THE NATURAL PHYSICAL LAWS OF GRAVITY!!"
You couldn't do that with a human toddler. You drop a human toddler from a tree top, and it is going to drop like a very soft rock, (or perhaps a very heavy pillow), laughing all the way down until it (hopefully) bounces. (NOTE: DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS EXPERIMENT AT HOME. Birds are highly skiled aviation professionals with years of training. You and your toddler are not. Risk of injury or death and the customary prison time is highly likely.) It probably wouldn't even wave its arms. It doesn't even understand how "lift" works or what "physics" is.
ADVANTAGE: BIRDS.
HORSES: Pretty much as soon as they're born, baby horses, or colts, (or possibly ponies or foals or fowls), stand up on their wobbly legs and start walking around. Granted they're walking like the old guy who has been at the bar since 1 PM and by 10 PM the bartender has decided that his contributions no longer outweigh the inconvenience, but the point is they're WALKING. As uncoordinated as the beginning of every Rolling Stones song sounds.
Human babies don't walk as soon as they're exposed to air and sunlight. They just lay around and stare at things, switch between emitting cooing gurgles and high-pitched screams, and poop. It takes MONTHS, or maybe YEARS (I'm not sure; as you can tell, I'm no expert on babies), for a baby to learn to walk.
ADVANTAGE: HORSES.
SHARKS: I may have read once somewhere that if a baby shark doesn't swim away fast enough the mother shark will turn around and eat it. I don't even know if this is true, but for the sake of me being too lazy to look it up, even though I'm on a computer RIGHT NOW, and Google is ONE TAB AWAY, let's just pretend it is.
A baby shark knows one thing the moment it's born: GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MAMA. I don't know how it knows this; whether the mother shark spends the entire gestation period quietly singing to it "You'd better swim fast / You'd better swim far / Mama's gonna eat you / Har har har," but it has to spend the rest of its life learning to suss out what it means to be a shark on its own.
Humans have no idea how to raise their children. We go to seminars, hang out on Web forums, talk to other parents, read multitudes of books, follow none of that advice, do what we think is best for our children based on the values instilled in us by our parents, and still end up somehow emotionally scarring our children for life before sending them out into the real world to stake out their own paths.
Maybe sharks have the right idea about eating their young and just being done with it after all.
ADVANTAGE: SHARKS.