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[farla]

So hello. It appears I exist again.

I'm violently apathetic, so I'm not really going to make much of an entry.

Basically, we're all screwed, but at least when everything goes to hell, a lot of people are going to deserve it.

Comments

[farla.livejournal.com]

Eh, for a given value of social. A lot of animals are social in the interactive way, but they aren't able to work together. Squirrels, say. They don't get into a group and defend the birdfeeder from others, or work together to get the heaping pile of corn back to their nests. They instead fight over it. They're quite smart and obviously have pretty good communicative ability, but they're not cooperative.

For that matter, a sizable portion of cooperative animals were killed off because it's not a good strategy against humans. Ducks used to be highly social nesting animals. All modern ducks, however, are solitary nesters because group nesters were easier to kill - ducks would be extinct today if it wasn't for the few solitary nesters.

Groups that rely on each other, and that pass knowledge on, which is what made human society develop, are also groups human society excel at destroying. Those groups stop working if you regularly kill many of them because information is lost faster than it can be passed down.

A good sign this has already happened is that, now that there are protections for dolphins, they have started to display new behaviors which are being taught to their young. Either they never thought of this before in the millions of years they've existed, or we killed off all the parents before they could teach their young, and they're having to relearn everything.

It's possible some animals - say, raccoons - might, in absence of humans, develop more communal societies once our selective pressure against it has been removed, and go from there. But there's so much about our own evolution that looks like a fluke, that coupled with the lack of any similar species things do look a bit ominous.

The best bet, I think, would be if monkeys and such did survive, since we know they can produce a space-reaching intelligent species and that they did so last time during climate upheaval, which I figure we'll have in spades. If we're really lucky, rapid evolution might make get them to advanced tool users before our cities are completely gone, at which point they'll have some access to those metals. That might get them advanced enough that they'll be able to cope with the reduced resources they'll have without stagnating at a stone ax level.
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