That's only part of the truth. Animals do cooperate within and even across species, but they also compete, even within a species - wolves, ants, and chimpanzees are all territorial (as are many others), and the latter two are known to engage in war within their own species: https://www.livescience.com/animals/land-mammals/a-decade-lo...
And the competing against nature itself you mention, is often determined by the territory a group is able to claim. Some places get drought, others freeze, and in others food is plentiful. Nature may not be a free-for-all deathmatch, but it's not a pacifist coop either. At least, most species don't behave that way.
Oh certainly. But that's the thing. Even with species being territorial, that serves a broader purpose in the ecosystem. Territoriality for predators is important to prevent concentration of predators, overpredation, and then depletion of prey species (which has many downstream effects).
And because of that, territoriality tends to be fairly low in most species until the food supply becomes constrained. And even then it's a gradient where hostilities generally only escalate out of desperation rather than innate competition. i.e. Competing between individuals or communities tends to occur mainly when they fail to compete against the environment and run out of other options.
But really my point was just about the general sentiment that it's "against evolution" or "against natural selection" to help the weak and that doing so is something that humans do out of a unique sense of love or kindness or whatever.
> I cringed while reading his many comparisons between people of different regions, as if they were species of finches
Wasn't exactly that one of the most revolutionary insights of his theory? That humans evolved and are governed by the same forces of natural selection as other animals? It is amusing that, 166 years after On the Origin of Species, that part is still controversial.
There are approximately 3 different human species, if you use the same distance measures that give us dog, wolf, and coyote (which can all interbreed).
The concept of 'species' only exists within the human mind [1]. In nature, there are only slowly accumulating mutations, until two populations become differentiated enough that we arbitrarily assign them different taxa. In fact, that is the central thesis of the aptly-named On the Origin of Species.
[1] And there are plenty of species that we consider distinct, that can and do interbreed and bear fertile offspring.
The quote you are responding to is a reaction to scientific racism. Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you, but you said that you find it amusing that this is still controversial.
> The quote you are responding to is a reaction to scientific racism.
No, it is a reaction to treating humans the same as finches. You give the thing he does a label and then attack the label, instead of attacking the thing itself.
> The concept of 'species' only exists within the human mind [1].
That's a theory, anyway. Yes, biologists (and presumably botanists and all those who study the other kingdoms) have made errors in judgment, and yes, the current definition is very poor (often broken, sometimes unprovable in a practical sense).
It does not follow, however, that all life exists on some continuous spectrum of mutations. Members of Equus caballus have distinct genetic traits that do not occur in Equus asinus.
The reality we see about us is that life seems to group itself into channels or pools of limited genetic variation. But that variation doesn't mean the channels/pools aren't real.
The paper is interesting, but "meek" is the wrongest word they could have chosen - they're territorial, viciously attack intruders, and literally wage war between colonies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_ants
> but how are they to argue that it makes a country less democratic? [..] words mean something!
You misunderstand the purpose of editorials such as these. It is not to communicate, but to push an agenda [1], here by putting PR pressure on the Japanese government. Words are just a tool in pursuit of that goal. So 'democracy' is used because of its positive affect in the minds of the public, and because it can be successfully misused without most people noticing - the line between "a set of policies I like" (how they are using the word) and "rule of the people" (what the word actually means) has been blurred through years of media effort for this very reason.
[1] I use the term neutrally, as in agendas can be either good or bad. E.g. fighting for the right for repair, and tobacco companies deceiving the public about the harm of their product, are both agendas.
A solution that works for nerd parents can be sold by those nerd parents to non-nerd parents if the platform wasn't specifically designed to prevent it.
Open hardware and free software is not about nerds.
You'll notice that whites represent 30% of undergraduates [1], which is significantly more than 0, exactly as you suspected. Granted there is no gender breakdown, and it's about undergraduates, not graduates, but Occam's razor demands we assume the graduate situation is similar, unless shown evidence otherwise.
[1] Making them the most under-represented group, despite having near the best SAT scores.
> I don't know why this article doesn't mention that, but a web search ("fake lease squatter") will show this is routine.
Same reason the article put "empty" in the title to imply they were just sitting around for speculative investing, when there's every indication the houses were intended to be immediately rented out, and are only "empty" because squatters moved in first.
one can combine the above issue with the force recording of leases to require every unit to pay a "residence" tax that if not recorded as being occupied by someone other than the owner is assumed (even if owner has other place of residence) to be occupied by the owner.
This does a few things. 1) it encourages the owner to rent out empty places, as empty places are no longer simply lost opportunity cost, but actually cost money in what they have to pay in this tax 2) requires people record who is legally living in a place to avoid these issues 3) enables areas to discount this tax for poor / disabled (or other logical reasons that they already have procedures for) for people who live in the area that they want to support.
And the competing against nature itself you mention, is often determined by the territory a group is able to claim. Some places get drought, others freeze, and in others food is plentiful. Nature may not be a free-for-all deathmatch, but it's not a pacifist coop either. At least, most species don't behave that way.
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