#Anthropocentrism

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Living Species, by the Numbers

Species of Mammals: ~5,500

Species of Birds: Between 10,000 and 20,000 (lots of disagreement)

Species of nonavian Reptiles: Between 10,000 and 20,000 (see above)

Species of Amphibians: more than 7,000

Species of "Fish": more than 33,000

Species of Echinoderms (star fish, sea urchins, etc.): ~7,500

Species of Arthropods: over 2,000,000 and growing (only 1,257,000 described but all researchers know that is a gross underestimate)

Species of Molluscs: > 100,000

Other Bilaterans (wormy things): ~85,000

Corals & Jellyfish: ~16,000

Sponges: ~11,000

Fungi: > 6,000,000

Plants: > 400,000 (plants species are weird)

"Protists": unknown, but more than 100,000 and is severely underestimated

"Bacteria": who the fuck knows. there are too many. Our bodies are half bacteria. possibly in the trillions.

This is what we mean by mammal bias: mammals are the smallest group on here, and yet, because we are mammals, they get the most research money, the most screen time, the most conservation funding, the most love, the most interest. That's ridiculous. That's patently nonsense. Mammals are not "more evolved" than anything on this list - we're all modern life and thus, equally evolved. The other groups of life deserve at least more attention, more care, more interest, even if we can never get it to be proportional. In fact, you can even see mammal bias in this list - because mammals are so well studied, that's the only species count that is NOT vague.

We rely on ALL of these creatures because we are part of a complex biosphere where all of these organisms work together to allow the flow of nutrients and energy through the system. We are all descendants of each biosphere that came before. Mammal bias - focusing only on things that we share the closest genetic ties to - is not only ignorant, its self defeating.

Kill the mammal bias in your head. Kill it now. Because its gross, its inaccurate, and mammals do not in fact rule the world. Bacteria do, and if we *must* give it to an animal, that animal would be Arthropods.

This has been a PSA. Please reblog to spread, because I'm tired of dealing with mammal bias in my own house.

[geopolicraticus]

Aristotelian Science and Modern Science

The Displacement of Abstraction.—Before the rise of modern quantitative science, the quantitative aspects of science were treated as being of little relevance, while the anthropocentric impacts of phenomena, including the projection of anthropic properties onto natural phenomena, were treated as that which demanded explanation. The explanatory power of Aristotelian science, if it possessed any, derived from its abstractions and reductions as applied to anthropic properties of the world. The rise of modern science in its quantitative form neatly reversed this distribution of what is to be explained, what is to be abstract, and what is to be concrete. Now the anthropic properties of the world are treated as being of little relevance, while the focus of abstraction and reductive explanation is on the quantitative features of the world.  

[wealmostaneckbeard]

Signalis and Dungeon Meshi: Unorganized Comparison

Both are about crawling through dungeons, fighting monsters, and picking things up to get into inaccessible places.

There's a pair of siblings and a lesbian couple, both are cruelly separated by powerful forces. The living half (Marcille Donato, Elster, Isa Itou, Laios Touden) is willing to do anything to bring back their loved one (Falin Touden, Erika Itou, Ariane Yeong) from the depths of the dungeon. The searchers are motivated not just by love but guilt too, a stubborn refusal to fail their beloved one last time by abandoning then.

Both stories are about the evils of anthropocentric ideologies. It is the inescapable first lense that we all see the world through. It is a subjective, selfish, and almost nihilistic view point. It is the belief that the universe cannot match the significance of humanities existence. For anyone who has loved another human, this is an easy ideology to embrace.

It's also the foundation for hierarchical authoritarianism which dictates that you are either a productive member of humanity or a nonhuman agent of a hostile universe. Those who try to view the universe as itself and not as a means of, or obstacle to, the gratification of human desire are put into the latter grouping. Those who conform are elevated to positions of power within the hierarchy. This is illustrated by the suffering of Ariane Yeong and Laios Touden. As well as the elevation of various political figures in Dungeon Meshi and Kommandant Falke in Signalis.

Both universes feature similar world building elements: a cosmic force grants individual humans their anthropocentric desires resulting in the formation of impossible things. In Signalis, bioresonance allows for the colonization of other worlds and the creation of replikas. In Dungeon Meshi, the Demon's intercession has resulted in the formation of different races, monsters, dungeons, and the magical arts.

And now we come to where the two narratives truly differ with each other:

The characters in Dungeon Meshi are able to triumph over anthropocentric thought and create a better world. Tragically, the characters in Signalis are not able to do the same and become trapped in a hellish existence. This isn't exclusively because of their traits, they are unconsciously conforming to a larger pattern.

In Dungeon Meshi, the natural world still exists and can be defended from corrupting supernatural influence. Even when the earth is devastated by magically augmented warfare, the world is big enough to recover. There are trained specialists, like the canaries, who are able to counter the expansion of dungeons and it's associated threats. Because magic is so important to the world dungeon meshi, knowledge is prevalent with a few severe restrictions.

In Signalis, Vineta/Earth was destroyed by the war between the Eusan Nation and Empire. The closest that people can get to nature is potted plants and a nights sky. The Eusan Nation limits knowledge about bioresonance so that no one can use that to challenge their authority. As a result, no one can understand what's happening during a bioresonance crisis.

In Dungeon Meshi, food preparation is a narrative focal point, it connects people to the world and each other. In Signalis, food is a secondary consideration, it is rationed out by the Eusan Nation, given to good citizens and denied to dissidents.

Ryoku Kui is a japanese manga creator and Rose Engine are a pair of german game developers. One could guess that the artistic differences between them are reflective of their nations history during a certain conflict that happened in the last century...

[astralarchilocus]

I’m not normally the type to go on lengthy rants about stuff, but this shit has been frustrating me for such a long period of time that I need to get it off my chest. Biology based misinformation has always been widespread and problematic, but we’re entering a new era of this shit that’s reaching a whole new level of awful. “Pandas and koalas are evolutionary failures!” this, “honey badgers are immortal gods that fight whole lion prides and win” that, it’s all the same bullshit with the exact same set of origins. Carnivora fuckos, TierZoo, NatureIsMetal, Quora, etc. They’re all vile awesomebros or awesomebro infested hellscapes that have managed to successfully misinform a legitimately terrifyingly high amount of people. It’s actually horrifying that you often can’t talk about a lot of these animals without people immediately regurgitating awesomebro tripe straight at your face.

“But is this even a problem, Comet? It just seems like something you’ve been overexposed to because of you being a biology person above all else.” Yes it is, and it’s an enormous one at that! Such a rapid circulation of misinformation like this on such a scale is going to have cascading impacts on the general knowledge around animals and a lot of public perception around biology. And it’s likely going to pose a very legitimate threat to the conservation of a lot of animals. Remember how Jaws worsened already present stigma and misinformation present around sharks, and added to something that became so intense that it actually became a very serious threat to them as a whole? And that Jaws is a fictional story at the end of the day, and still managed to cause such immense misinformation in spite of that? This is literally that situation but with a much wider impact on animals as a whole (given that this insanity applies to animals in general instead of just one specific group), and with the misinformation being much more widely believed to be correct due to it not originating directly from a fictional book and film. Bit of a gross oversimplification, but it’s extremely bad. A prominent example of why this is such a big problem is the situation with cheetahs, who are literally only struggling because of issues (habitat loss and the accompanying population fragmentation and inbreeding) we caused, but are constantly being lambasted as evolutionary failures essentially solely because of the “horribly low hunting success” misconception and the fact they can’t fight predators that either outweigh them considerably, are social, or both, and that cheetahs literally cope fine with kleptoparasitism and just up the amount of kills they make in response to it with pretty little difficulty, on top of generally having the second highest hunting success rate among large-ish African mammalian carnivores. Cheetahs are getting all of their value as a species determined by whether they can fight other carnivores or not, and people try to sneakily obscure that fact by using the actually legitimate inbreeding issue as a strawman to support the “cheetahs are getting outcompeted and would go extinct anyways” bullshit. And this is all going to make conservation efforts to try and protect or save them that much more troublesome, because few are going to bother paying funds for something they deem a useless evolutionary failure. And getting the funds for such conservation efforts is difficult enough as is even without that being considered. Combine that with the fact that said conservation efforts are effectively useless at stopping or at least weakening the actual problems without enough funding to properly financially support such things, and I think it’s abundantly clear how much of a cascading impact this has on everything. And as said earlier, this isn’t only applying to cheetahs, but to so many other animals as well. We are entering what could legitimately turn into a dark age regarding biology stuff, and it is terrifying how omnipresent this shit is becoming. The misinformation is so widespread and commonplace among people currently that it’s almost definitely impossible to properly reverse by now, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up. Now more than ever, we need to fight back against this shit and keep it from getting even worse.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, there is a very strong correlation between awesomebros and bigotry, and most of the stuff just talked about almost definitely has inherent roots in anthropocentrism, general human bias, the aforementioned bigotry, etc. And if fighting back against bigotry isn’t enough of an additional motivator to fight back against this shit, I don’t know what is at this point.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Naturalist Charles Darwin drafted a note to himself to “Never use the words higher or lower.” Apes did not appear just so they could morph into humans. Nor did reptiles evolve solely to give rise to mammals, nor fish to amphibians.

Frogs are perfectly happy being frogs. They are not frustrated creatures thwarted from attaining humanity. Further, frogs have many adaptions humans lack. Can you sit underwater for hours on end, or propel your tongue out of your mouth? Frogs’ incompletely divided hearts are often seen as makeshift transitions, but they divert blood from their lungs to their skin, where frogs can gain sufficient oxygen to sustain their low metabolism while resting underwater. Traits people often view as “imperfect” instead enable other species to attain outcomes humans could never achieve.

But it is not simply frogs, bacteria, and apes that are considered “less than” in the typical evolutionary story. Even other hominins—our closest ancestors—get short shrift. After seeing endless “March of Progress” memes, one might be forgiven for concluding that proto-humans existed on a straight and narrow path toward larger-bodied, bigger-brained hunters that directly replaced smaller, vegetarian ancestors. This is simply not true.

Robust herbivorous australopithecines, sometimes placed in the genus Paranthropus, continued to exist for at least a million or more years after smaller meat-eaters in the genus Homo appeared. Archaic Homo species did not disappear just as anatomically modern humans appeared, and Neanderthals had brains that were on average larger than those of our more gracile species.

Anthropologists studying genetic diversity have learned how fragile humanity is: During multiple population “bottlenecks,” our ancestors came within a hair’s breadth of extinction. Life has never been about attaining humanity. Humans evolved as a result of chance contingencies and random mutations.

[palaeowhy]

Documentary: look at all these cool mammals

>Goes outside

>sees a dozen types birds

>sees some fish

>sees about a bajillion different bugs

>only mammals i see are other humans and their dogs

Easiest way to realize mammal bias might be a thing is literally just to go outside

[stoicmike]

Try not to always be thinking like a human. -- Michael Lipsey

[the-apparatus]

I wake from my tumblr.com hibernation to talk about something that has plagued my mind for the past 3 or so weeks (ever since I watched the fly (1986) on a first date):

Okay, so y'know Frankenstine; or, the modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly? Okay, so The Creature is commonly used as a trans allegory -- trans bodies are viewed the same as The Creature, they're viewed as other and monstrous, even to the extent that trans people have "mutilated" bodies. Now take the fly: a contemporary (mis)interpretation of the same idea behind the modern Prometheus. The fly is directly villinizing the monstrosity, it shows someone's descent into madness from having a body viewed differently (brundlefly). This body is MORE monstrous than The Creature because it is explicitly nonhuman, where The Creature is testing the boundary of what is considered human.

In the film, we see Brundle slowly become less and less "human". It's explicitly body horror, his hair and teeth fall out, he starts to peel his fingernails off -- gross stuff. But this body horror isn't just gross and weird, it's specifically made worse because it's a transformation, Brundle is becoming something else, something "inhuman". The main question this raises, is what is a human? The brundlefly is still party human, it has human DNA, yet it is considered completely nonhuman, even by Brundle himself. This brings in a secondary aspect, which is that Brundle is ingrained so deep in forms of anthropocentric queerphobia that his transformation drives him "crazy". Unlike Frankenstein, it's not a story about someone being shunned by society and that radicalizing someone to violence -- it's about someone who is shunning and isolating themselves so hard that they would kill the ones they love (girlfriend and unborn baby) in order to return to something "more human than I have ever been". The drive isn't just to go to a baseline normal, the goal is to create the MOST human thing that has ever existed, and have Brundles consciousness controlling it. So that's what we get from the movie. The movie isn't overtly critical of any of these, however -- the point is the analysis of what's available to the viewer. And the themes that are left, is that people are driven to violence because of the cultural norm of "normal" vs "other" bodies, and anthropocentric conceptions of what is human and stratifying value based off humanity

What further complicates it, is that what Brundle practices in response to his transformation is rage (it is a hurt and desperate rage, but rage nonetheless) it is antithetical to Susan Stryker's conception of rage as a practice to realize one's body -- Brundle lashes out to try and reduce his body to one of hyperreal person-hood -- more human than human itself.

[sirensoul]

[caffeinec0rpse]

book recommendation!!! :D

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy - by Jenny Odell

i read this book so so fast!!! this is a non-fiction book about the power of attention, capitalism's obsession with productivity, the state of being constantly bombarded with information, and our connection to others and the world around us. it is a beautiful essay that speaks to what a lot of people are currently feeling about our information overloaded capitalist hellscape. It has a healthy balance between information and anecdote. this book made be feel hopeful about the state of things without being ignorant/dismissive about the shitty things at play. i would recommend this book to anyone who is dissatisfied with the current state of social media, capitalist individualism, anthropocentrism, or having your attention constantly stolen/profited off of. (but honestly i think everyone would enjoy something from this, its so well done)

incredibly interesting 9/10 book

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

if I could erase the terms "Lower X" and "higher X" from all scientific literature, I would

this post is inspired by a paper I just had to cite that calls birds "lower vertebrates"

[pass-da-baton]

People have no problem labeling animals as invasive species, but when it comes to the most destructive invasive species on this planet—humans, they start applying double standards and vehemently deny overpopulation by doing all kinds of mental gymnastics. Population control on other invasive animal species through means like euthanization and sterilization is okay, but advocating for humans to stop having kids is where you draw the line, because “muh autonomy” and “eugenics bad”. Sure, keep breeding at the current rate, keep stepping harder on the gas pedal as the vehicle accelerates towards the cliff. We’ll see where that takes humanity.

[sebthedreamsmith]

Basically, on Animism and Spirits,

Math exists as a fundamental part of reality but a Goldfish can never meaningfully engage with Calculus and need not concern itself with it

And some birds can have experiences of colors we will never be able to conceive of with our instantiation as humans

So “Spirituality” is but a Range of a larger Set of ways to engage with greater Reality. It’s the Human Range of the Set. We can safely assume any Entities within that range are part of the same “Ecosystem” as us. Anything “Spiritual” must be within the stomping grounds of Humanity’s Instantiation and therefore it’s not some terrible act for us to engage with the things within our native habitat through the lenses we have available to us

If something didn’t want to or needed not to engage with Humanity in some level, even the layers of “Nature Spirit” we can meaningfully engage with, we wouldn’t be able to in the first place I believe.

The ant cannot conceive of the Microbe or the Whale, but within its Scale of Being it is free to exist and act for that is where it Belongs

[quillswords]

i am as much an animal perusing the grocery shelves as the gray wolf is an animal slowly stalking the magnificent bison

i am as much an animal digging in the garden soil as the terrestrial isopod is an animal burrowing in the damp detritus

i am as much an animal whistling to myself in the kitchen as the european starling is an animal singing over the red dawn

i am as much an animal asleep between my bedsheets as the basket sea star is an animal resting on the ocean’s floor

i am as much an animal appreciating the spring sunlight as the marine iguana is an animal basking by the tumultuous surf

i am as much an animal working alongside my partner as the whale shark is an animal providing shelter to travelling fish

we are not the same yet we are not so far apart

… when did we forget?

[haggishlyhagging]

The statement in Genesis that God created humanity to rule the earth has often been taken as a license for human beings to do whatever they want with nature. In the Bible, it clearly does not mean that. On the contrary, all of nature is seen as dependent upon the actions of humankind. Ancient thought sees nature, the animals, humanity, and divinity as lying along a continuum, with the gods, in a sense, mediating between humanity and nature:

HUMANITY———GODS———NATURE

In the Bible, the diagram is different:

NATURE———HUMANITY———GOD

God's actions towards nature depend on human activity. God cares about nature; after all, the purpose of giving laws immediately after the flood is precisely to prevent nature from being contaminated again. But God's behavior towards nature is reactive. In effect, humans determine what God does, not by prayers and manipulation, but by their behavior. In this way, humanity mediates between God and nature. The ultimate responsibility for what happens to the natural world rests on the behavior of human beings towards nature, towards God, and towards each other.

This monotheist conceptualization of the world is a stark philosophy of action. God's actions are predictable in fixed response to behavior. God's solo mastery would seem to lay stress on Israel's having liturgical and sacrificial interaction with God, to propitiate and manipulate the result. But, at the same time, the prophets announce that such ritual activity will not help. The prophets emphasize that neither Israel's history nor the fertility of her land depended on worship-rituals. Fertility rituals are condemned as faithlessness, and even the officially prescribed sacrificial worship can not ensure peace and fertility. Only non-ritual activity—fidelity and ethical behavior—bring about the well-being of the people.

This concept of fertility and natural survival puts enormous responsibility in human hands, for the whole world depends on human behavior. The "monotheist myth" in Psalm 82 relates that it was not always so: God had a council of divine beings who were charged with upholding social justice. When they did not do so, the whole world began to totter. As a result, God made these gods mortal. Since then, God has reigned alone over all the nations. There are no longer any gods—and it is up to humanity to ensure that the foundations of the earth do not totter. The way to do this is right behavior and social justice. This is an enormous task, but the way to accomplish it has been revealed: God has instructed and continues to instruct the people as to how they are to behave. The laws and instructions of Israel have a cosmic significance. The people have to listen, to learn, and to observe in order to fulfill their duty to uphold the universe. Disobeying these instructions can lead to catastrophe, and as pollution builds up, even repentance can no longer help.

This theology of God's reactivity locates the fault for disaster in Israel. Maintaining faith in the constant predictable behavior of God, it "blames the victim" with ever more exacting faults. After the exile, when droughts still continued, the prophet Haggai blamed the people for not having built a new temple, and the prophet Malachi attributed the droughts to the lack of full tithing. If God has absolute mastery, and God is always good, then evil and hardships must always be due to the evil of humanity.

The general problem of theodicy (the justification of God's behavior in the face of adversity) continues to occupy theological thought. The radical nature of fully developed biblical monotheism, with the great responsibility that it places on human behavior, has often been softened by belief in various supernatural powers. After the Babylonian exile, the skies are once again peopled with celestial beings, the angels. Still later, forces of evil were believed to be abroad in the world, rivaling the forces of light. The idea of ultimate human responsibility and divine reactivity has continued to be misunderstood into our own day. Western culture has assumed that dominion over the world implied a freedom to act at will without concern over neveative consequences towards the earth and its fertility. The modern ecology movement has sometimes sought to find a philosophical-theological rationale for its concern for the earth in the pagan continuum. The biblical theory of God's reactivity is biblical monotheism's way of grounding humanity in its interconnectedness with nature and its ultimate responsibility for nature's well-being and survival.

The absorption by God of all the forces of nature leads humanity onto center stage. Biblical monotheism is essentially anthropocentric, though not in the sense that the world exists to serve humanity. Rather, in the absence of other divine beings, God's audience, partners, foils, and competitors are all human beings, and it is on their interaction with God that the world depends.

-Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth