Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly "eusocial" mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.

Unto Others has a great section about this. In a bunch of studied tribes who live generally pre-industrial lifestyles, the anthropologists were interested in how they "organize" big projects like building a house, and when they watched them, wondered what made them so willing to just do it.

Long story short, they saw how the kids watched them and subsequently "played" at doing things like building houses, carrying things together, etc. They essentially concluded that the "work" they did was understood more like play--that without any coercion to labor beyond meeting their needs, they were surprisingly eager to do that boring stuff because they made it into the day's activity rather than grinding "work."

TL;DR unalienated labor schniff and so on

Nobody goes nutting any more huh

Aussie magpies are ridiculously smart, love them as an example of convergent evolution since they are not corvids but rather songbirds that have evolved to be more crow-like to fill a similar niche to corvids

That question below is honestly a good way to demonstrate how bad people can be at understanding what would be called materialism without it being explained to them first

Easy to assume the shape of that flower is due to decisions made by the plant itself instead of the more accurate way of understanding its shape being the result of external conditions and pressures acting upon the plant and its flower growth over a long time

Thanks, I'm already thinking of ways I am off the mark though, like how things like race science and eugenics have been the "academic" position in the past.

I think properly working the academic consensus into your mind involves also understanding that it's the product of people. It's not that different from having some trust in institutions outside of academia too. There were people in the sciences fighting bitterly against those trends, and in the long run their position became standard.

Anti-intellectualism comes alongside alienation from others. It has to. Being an intellectual is essentially saying "I trust the findings of academics and will adopt their consensus." Nobody can learn about the whole span of the world, it's too much information. But when you are convinced that collaboration is weakness and compromise is failure, you have to keep the world in your head, and the only way to do that is to maintain a really simplified internal diorama from which your "truth" is derived.

Okay people of this thread you gotta just accept the fact that activism is always gonna be at the end. Like I don't intend for this to insult anyone's intelligence, I promise, but you gotta understand that it's matter of love. Spend enough time in a headspace in which funky lizards and ugly insects and smelly lil rats are your companions both physically and mentally and these things matter to you in ways that approach your love for people, it's just the truth of it. I'm surprised Attenborough docs aren't all activism and calls to action at this point, it's so frightening and overwhelming that I myself have drifted away from field research because in my cowardice I just couldn't bear to get more attached.

But yeah sadly he's too old (British) to be able to summon anything like a cohesive call to action, which sucks ass

How about we do two things

Like how about we work less and we immediately and totally nationalize energy and agriculture haha just a thought haha (fireflies are going extinct haha)