Where to start? I guess I'll pick just the one area of misinformation that irked me the most, and which surfaced right at the start, within the first two minutes. That is the apparently blind belief in both the “humans are so different from other animals” and “nature red in tooth and claw” stupidity, as illustrated by e.g. these quotes:
Hello? Wake up!Like all other animals, human beings want to dominate and exploit the resources around them.
First, (severe selection bias in the video footage) there actually exists also other animals than primates and other large-brained, large-bodied social mammals. The species typical behavior of a dogfish is not too alike that of a dog, and a praying mantis had better not try to behave like a rhinoceros. There's no such thing as “all animals want”, unless we keep ourselves to the absolute basics: food, water, a chance to procreate (which in many cases, especially for colony-living insects, means a chance for the mother/sister and brother/cousin to procreate, not for each individual themselves). A great majority of species thrive precisely because they do not seek to dominate their ecosystem, but flit quietly in the shadows or dig deep in the ground / bottom mud.
Even our very closest relatives have rather opposite “ideologies” when it comes to ensuring their share of resources: chimpanzee males use aggressive shows of strength to gain the alpha position, and females also hit and threaten each other to maintain a pecking order. Bonobos, instead, have developed a “make love not war” social cohesion mechanism - they literally have sex with anyone (male or female), at the drop of any leaf, just for fun or to soothe each other if there has been a scary or confrontational situation. Both chimpanzees and bonobos share food and help protect and teach all the young of their group, and groom, hug and pat each other, but it seems to me that the bonobos get to have a lot more fun...
Second, (severe selection bias in the text) “ human beings want to dominate and exploit” - and nothing more??? So the maker of this video (stefbot?) has not noticed that healthy human beings, who are not under too much stress, typically also want to cuddle, receive appreciation from and feel useful for our fellow humans, have fun (laugh, dance, play), feel safe, play with words and ideas, learn something new, create beautiful things just because it feels good, etc.
The normal life of humans and other social animals (the kind of life we evolved to fit well with) is not a constant fight - such a life would be far too energy consuming and dangerous compared to effective communication and ritualized posturing about status. A heavily aggression and active confrontation driven gene pool would loose in time, against the evolutionary tricks of reading hints and cues instead of loosing energy (and possibly health or one's life) through fighting, against sharing food with one's genetic relatives instead of being completely selfish, and against instinctively responding to the cry of any infant in one's own group instead of only caring for one's own young, etc.
...but then something magical - and terrible - happened to our minds. We became - alone among the animals - afraid of Death.
No, it was not magical. It was a gradual development, greatly enhanced by symbolic language, but still gradual - no magic needed. And yes, also other animals fear death, and the larger their brains the more abstract their understanding and the more far-reaching their concern about death and danger appears to be, based on their repeatedly observed behavior. Wild dolphins have saved humans from drowning and from sharks time and time again, and guided boats to safety - the documentation goes back at least to 600 BCE. Elephants and baboons have been observed apparently mourning their dead. All social mammals teach (in one manner or another) the young of the pack/herd to avoid places known to be dangerous, and those young who are good at learning the lesson have a greater chance to survive to continue the species.To be just a tad more exact: you cannot use symbolic communication about the future to frighten any animal (including humans) beyond it's capacity for symbolic communication about the future. Duh! What exactly was the news here?But you cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, with torture or imprisonment in the future because animals have very little sense of "tomorrow".
If, on the other hand, the claim tries to be that you cannot use fear to control the current and future behavior of non-human animals, it is an outright lie. If you “speak” a “language” that the animal understands - and all animals, also non-mammals, understand both pain and food extremely efficiently - the animal will do what you want, if it at all can. How else would “dumb” cattle stay inside an enclosure that has only a thin wire around it? They have learned that the wire hurts, so they do not go too close - no human needs to be anywhere near. For more “advanced” control of animal behavior through pain and thus fear, we have the testimony of e.g Wildlife SOS's ex-dancing bears in India and e.g. Big Cat Rescue in Florida.
So among many other dubious claims, this video tries to claim (in a sneaky and indirect manner) that most or all animal and human life is a fight for domination and control, and that humans, despite of this, are in a “magical” way different from all other animals. FAIL on both counts, based on the currently available evidence from e.g. ethology, primatology, anthropology, and social psychology.
That stefbot does not address a most prevalent manner of scaring humans with threats of future torture and promises of future bliss, i.e. such organized religions as fundamentalistic islam and catholic and evangelical christianity, is suspicious in itself. Maybe drawing attention to the spreading of non-evidence-based claims by others is not a good idea, when one is spreading non-evidence-based claims oneself...
Thanks again FBM for an interesting thread!
. And then when they come back, they can 