I am a cat

[Disch]

hear hear @ htirwin

[3qX21hU5]

An animal would instead eat whatever it can find at the time and try to save energy at times of food shortage.

I find this statement untrue from my personal experiences with my dog. I always give him a cup of food before my girlfriend and I leave for work and he will not touch it until we get home from work. The only time he will eat the food is when someone is home.

He also tends to grab mouthfuls of food and litter it around the house (Very annoying) to save it for a day or two.

[helios]

I'm a little unsure how you can see the ability of foresight as "biologically making no sense".

It's not the planning itself that makes no sense. It's the procedures we arrive at that are nonsensical. You need food, so instead of going out to look for food, you sit in a building pressing buttons hoping that a group of lights will change to the right pattern. At some point in time, at regular intervals, you're given pigmented pieces of inedible paper, which you can trade for food. It's absolute nonsense, especially if you add in the time you spent learning how to discern if a pattern of lights is right or wrong.

I find this statement untrue from my personal experiences with my dog.

Of course I was referring to animals in the wild, which have to worry about procuring their own sustenance, which may not always be available. A domesticated animal will likely never suffer hunger, and so can afford to eat whenever it pleases. In the case of your dog, a social component would seem to be involved.

[cire]

Of course I was referring to animals in the wild

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_%28animal_behavior%29

It's not exactly news that all animals in the wild don't conform to the behavior you described.

[LB]

I wish we weren't so strongly controlled by instincts. Some are still useful, but a lot of survival instincts are holding back society.

[chrisname]

Hoarding occurs in the case where the food is in excess or is inedible right now, but will be in shorter supply or more edible later on. AFAIK, hungry animals don't hoard edible food, they eat it.

[Disch]

chrisname wrote:

hungry animals don't hoard edible food, they eat it.

Same is true of hungry humans.

[N36fSL3A]

@LB
Holding back society?

I'd personally say this society is messed up. It's inefficient. Look back at the Native Americans. They didn't put out pollutions as the Europeans did at the same exact time. They survived on less, the Europeans needed more to survive due to their destructive nature.

Now, put a European at that time in the wilderness. I'm sure they wouldn't survive. Put a Native in their place, and they'd survive quite fine.

I'm not saying that we should go back to using bows and spears, but we should really focus on making the world more efficient and not stop trying rushing into advancing to the next technological age.

[Disch]

@Fredbill:

We are remarkably more efficient now.

About 100 years ago, most families had to run their own farm to feed themselves. Today, one farm can feed tens of thousands of families.

We don't need more to survive now... we just use more because we're doing more.

I think you are misdiagnosing the problem as "technology" instead of as "capitalism" which is probably where most of the blame lies.

There's nothing inefficient about technology. In fact it's quite the opposite.

What's inefficient about modern society is not our technology, but how we feel we have to keep people "working" even when there's no work that needs to be done.

[N36fSL3A]

There are pros and cons with technology.

A pro would be using pesticides and genetic engineering to make crops more efficient, but in the long run some species that are important to the ecosystem may die off because the pesticides kill them off and/or eating the crops make them die.

Our technology is inefficient, also people are too hung up on making more money.

Coal plants burn greenhouse gasses. That goes up into the atmosphere, destroying our planet slowly. That's inefficient. Later in the future it requires us to do more work to remove the pollution.

However we do have no-pollution solutions. We have solar energy and we have wind power etc. but we don't convert to those more efficient solutions because companies are too strung up on making more money that caring for the Earth.

[Disch]

Fredbill:

Everything you mentioned in that post summarizes various flaws of Capitalism, not technology.

Specifically this line:

Fredbill30 wrote:

also people are too hung up on making more money.

Money = Capital.

Hence, Capitalism.

I agree completely with everything you said. But the technology is not the problem. The problem is that more efficient technology isn't profitable. Which is a flaw of Capitalism.

[N36fSL3A]

Thanks for correcting me there.

The problem is that more efficient technology isn't profitable.

Exactly. But I guess the day the world cares less about capitalism and more about efficiency is the day we think of our species as whole, not divided into countries and races.

And once that day comes, we will be ready for space travel.

[helios]

It's not exactly news that all animals in the wild don't conform to the behavior you described.

I was trying to make a point about how humans can drastically alter their behavior in ways that are unrelated to biology, not about how animals eat iff they have food.