I’m watching Apocalypse in the Tropics documentary on Netflix about evangelicals and politics in Brazil and it’s mind boggling. Why do the religious people just blindly do whatever the pastors tell them?

    • HeroHelck@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      Survival of the Fittest isn’t failing, it just doesn’t follow what you’d like to be “fittest”. If a person is more reproductively successful because they’re religious, guess what, that makes them “fittest”. It really doesn’t matter if it’s stupid and illogical, just that it succeeds.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        No, because that’s not fit to the environment as in actual living space environment. Humans have largely removed themselves from the natural environment, so we are no longer nearly as subject to survival of the fittest in the way it’s meant to apply to a changing species ala darwinism.

        Besides, Idiocracy like behavior only further proves my point, it doesn’t prove the environment is magically different.

        • HeroHelck@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 days ago

          No I’m sorrry, “the environment” is just everything around you. Your house is the environment, new york city is nature. These distinctions are made up in our heads but deep down there is no essential difference between your house and a tree, or the city you live in and a forest. We haven’t seperated ourselves from anything, we’ve just changed it. Changing evolutionary pressures doesn’t mean we’ve somehow unmoored ourselves from it, traits are still being selected for and against it really doesn’t matter how anyone, or thing cares about it. It MAY end up getting us all killed, but the process will continue anyways and the “fit” will continue to reproduce more successfully than the “unfit”. It’s not that I don’t agree with you that the things that get selected for aren’t what I’d consider good, or that will make us happiest as a species. It’s merely that natural selection as a process will not “care” about what we care about because it is a process, nothing more.

          • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            That is an insanely dumb way to look at what environment is as far as darwinism is concerned. It’s like pretending being on a ship in the middle of the ocean is the same as swimming out there.

            Only one of these conditions is meant to apply to the process of evolution and darwinism.

            • HeroHelck@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              3 days ago

              “meant” what do you mean by “meant”? who meant? why did they mean for that? You’re not making sense, you’re ascribing special properties to manmade enviorns and acting like they’re polluted, bad, or different in some essential way. That manmade enviorns are polluted, harmful, or otherwise damaging is just incidental, they don’t HAVE to be that way, you cannot just assume that they’re innately worse than “natural” enviornments, they’re just different. I just want to understand how you think “manmade” is any different from the effort ALL fauna and flora makes to change their enviornment to suit their needs. Is it “natural” the bees build hives? Is it “natural” for beavers to damn creeks? Were trees “meant” to alter the soil chemistry around them to fight off competitors? Did bryophytes defy nature’s will by evolving a waxy cuticle to survive in locations untouched by plants before they evolved? Humans, nor any other animal whatsoever was “intended” to live somewhere or some way. This a fundamental error so many people make when talking about the ecology of our planet, there is psuedo-religious way of looking at things and ascribing of anthropocentric values. None of this has a purpose, none of it has a goal, none of it has an intent, or a desire, or any sort of human-like trait.

              • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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                2 days ago

                No, not toxic traits. Literal, absolute, augmentations to survivability.

                I agree that THE WORD “environment” applies to them.

                You need to understand that they ARE NOT “the environment” as applied to darwinism/survival of the fittest. They are augmented and artificial, and that removes humans from natural evolution, which is the entire point being made. Humans changing their environment so much as to have wholly separate spaces with wholly separate conditions than nature removes humans from the natural order of events of the planet’s biome. Yes species still change under artificial conditions. The point is humans are more subject to artificial conditions than natural. At least until natural conditions get bad enough.

                • HeroHelck@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  23 hours ago

                  I just have to disagree that there IS a dichtomy between what could be defined as natural and unnatural in this case. I just cannot see that it is a particularly meaningful difference between what is being categorized as “natural” and “unnatural”. I fundamentally believe it to be something that’s more emotionally relevant to people than meaningful in a material sense. Also, I particularly loathe when people use emotionally charged language to describe natural processes, nature really does not give a single shit about morality or ethics or the things we value, it’s not a “good” or a “bad” thing outside of the human lens, everything happens for material reasons and nothing more. Quick post-script, if you’re the one downvoting my posts that’s kinda disrespectful, I thought it was an interesting conversation I wasn’t telling you to “shut up and agree with me” or anything. If that wasn’t you then I apologize for suspecting you.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        No, it means most fit for the environment. If the environment changes, a species can become less fit to the point of dying off. Adaptability just means the species is more likely to stay “fit”.