http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzaUA2-nHR4

That is why they don’t exist – animal cultures I mean.

If Americans, for example, could find a stick-shift Orca pod as opposed to an automatic-shift pod that would be the clincher.

Now there is culture, in spades!!!

Go seek, young warriors!

(That is probably a video game, by the way )

More problematic, how we value animals as opposed to humans.

I would never hunt a whale, for example, but if I had a choice between a hundred whales dying or one on my sisters the whales are gone every time.

So the earlier posters, who regard animals as being ‘equal’ to humans, are probably people who have never had to make real life choices. Rather they are people who have everything but wonder why they understand little.

Fundamentally, however, I think the point is that, as the anthropologists have pointed out, that if we want to describe what these animals have as ‘culture’, then it is only as a kind of culture which is very different to humans. It isn’t vanity to think that our culture is radically different to that of animals; rather it is vain to think that the acquisition of something parallel to our culture would somehow make animals better.

Just because we use cultured as a term of approval amongst humans (generally), doesn’t mean that animals would derive any value from a human type culture.

But I don’t think you can ignore the fact that mutilating what would otherwise have been millions of years’ worth of cycling life in a (worst case scenario) few days or (more likely scenario) few decades is pretty impressive, and in my opinion pretty damn meaningful.

What is more interessting is that the two groups of Orca are unable to learn or adapt the others strategies and will continue to perform by rote what they learned when very young.

Man is not inherently ‘superior’ to other species but to not recognise that we are markedly different is plainly unhelpful.

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/archives/2010/Feb/?#582

Really?

You think that?

Like I said, the species that happen to exist right now are just a tiny fraction of all life that has or will exist on Earth. Even if we caused a mass extinction with global nuclear war, we would only have matched any of the several mass extinctions that life has recovered from in the past, and the only result would be a different set of diverse species occupying the world than the one we’d have if existing species evolved into extinction instead of being blasted into it.

I guess I’m saying that we shouldn’t worry about damaging life on Earth because we basically can’t damage life on Earth on any meaningful scale. We can only change it, and there’s no reason to prefer the current form over any other possible form besides strictly pragmatic reasons.

You’re right; humanity is just a part of the environment. However, the attitude that we are somehow exempt from responsibility, or shouldn’t bother using our unique power to help out and restore, because “hey, we’re just a part of nature, too you know” is exactly part of the ignorant behavior that is f#cking up the earth to the point where it’s becoming inhabitable, even to our own species. Life must adapt to us, but we also must adapt to other life, and evolution takes a much longer amount of time than we’re leaving to adapt to an earth that is rapidly being destroyed. And it is not as though species around the world AREN’T adapting. It’s that we are destroying them faster than natural adaptation is able to work.

Whether or not we want to think that we’re entitled to do whatever we want and that our mistakes are just ‘part of nature,’ why should we just ignore our unique capability to impact the environment for any purpose but rapid destruction?

The majority of species that have existed so far are already extinct; the majority that ever will exist have yet to evolve. What’s so special about the ones that happen to be alive right now, and why should we favor them over the potential species that would evolve in their place if they did go extinct?

As far as I’m concerned, the existence of humanity is just part of the ever changing environment that life much adapt to, and that we should not feel bad about other species’ inadequacy in that regard.