Beavers fuck up habitats and ecosystems about as much as humans used to before factories, which accelerated what we could fuck up. Beavers wreck shit up. Sometimes elephants do too, for that matter. And let’s be clear, the modifications these animals cause can have overall eventual benefits for an ecosystem, but they change the ecosystem extensively over a huge area, and any benefits you can ascribe to their actions could as easily be applied to human ecosystem modification too. “Oh yeah, the forest is completely gone, but now there’s new homes for different kinds of creatures that couldn’t live there before.” This sentence applies 100% to elephants, beavers, and yes, humans.
Some animals change their environment. We are one of them. Our tool use and brains allow us to do so on a pretty wide scale, but the destruction the elephants caused was pretty darn huge too. Humans also have the capacity to do with intention towards actively helping an ecosystem… elephants don’t have the ability for that kind of intentionality.
Of course, humans are also fully capable of acting without that intentionality too. It is pure coincidence that new ecosystems appear in the wake of elephant or beaver devastation— they weren’t actively trying to help other animals, they just wanted what they wanted. Our destruction can also have unintentional new ecosystems arise in our wake— the problem is that often we don’t LIKE the new ecosystems (bacteria and viruses, for example), and we often DO LIKE the stuff we destroyed.
But it’s not really different from what animals do. Because we aren’t separate from nature, we are nature. If we are bad, nature is bad. If nature is good, we are good. But this kind of binary thinking is too simplistic, life is more complicated than that, and we as humans have an ability to make value judgements and moral distinctions in a way that most animals cannot. We shouldn’t use that power in such a reductive way.
Malaria. Cholera. The black death. Syphilis. I could go on but you probably get the point…
Some examples in no particular order:
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Cowbirds lay eggs in other birds’ nests, and if the other bird kicks their eggs out, the cowbird will come back and destroy the nest.
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You’ve probably heard of female black widows eating the male after mating, but did you know that this is so common among spiders that the males of some species are literally hardwired to automatically die during or after mating? Makes the whole process easier and prevents the male from getting away.
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Toxoplasmosis mind controls mice and makes them seek out cats so they get eaten and the parasite can move on to the cat.
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The hyena birth canal. If you think human childbirth is excruciating… you’d be right actually, we’re pretty high up there on the list of animals with the worst birthing experiences, but hyenas have it even worse.
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There’s a parasite that goes into a fish’s mouth, eats its tongue, and attaches itself to where the tongue used to be and essentially becomes the fish’s tongue.
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Hamsters eat some of their own offspring if they have too many to ensure they have enough resources to properly care for the rest.
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Baby sharks try to kill and eat each other in the mother’s uterus.
Til fish have tongues
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Humans are part of nature.
I always though the distinction between natural/unnatural is completely meaningless. We do not consider animal intelligence and its products “unnatural” but we somehow do this for humans.
I don’t know, plastic feels fairly unnatural
It’s just long dead bio matter with few extra steps.
I agree. The boundary can easily become diffuse or even silly.
However, there’s a reason I asked what I asked. My ultimate purpose is to show that existence is not perfectly designed, that sometimes it is brutal and grotesque. Unfortunately, people often retort saying nature is brutal and grotesque because of humans. So, by focusing on non-human nature, I’m sidestepping the retort.
This feels like homework.
Not to me. Sounds more like someone who’s been in a lot of social media arguments, has a vague understanding of the counter arguments, and is trying to solidify their answer to it.
Pigs. Pigs take one generation to revert to feral state and are naturally pack hunting, intelligent, omnivores. Right now Texas and Florida is dealing with cases of hogs pulling apart horses to eat. There are cases where the hogs followed hunters home and trashed the place in retaliation.
It’s a testament to our hubris that we’ve kept pigs and dogs for so long. Dogs won’t recover, but pigs only need a year to come back for blood.
Here’s some I know:
- Dolphins rape other dolphins https://theconversation.com/dolphin-sexual-politics-gets-the-tabloid-treatment-6063
- Praying mantis females often eat the head of males they have sex with. Some spiders do that too, like the appropriately named black widow spider. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_cannibalism
- Mass extinctions have occurred in the past, way before humans existed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
- Genetic mutations often lead to inviable offspring or awful conditions (I don’t know specific examples off the top of my head)
- Parasites can take control of insects and lead them to drown (also don’t know examples off the top of my head)
Wild animals end up covered in ticks and sometimes even die from it
Predators eating prey alive, like lions eating bison from their bellies first.
Ouch. Looked it up. Its brutal. https://enviroliteracy.org/do-lions-eat-their-prey-alive/
TIL lions eat some prey alive because it saves the lions energy. They avoid spending too much energy killing a prey that is difficult to kill. Instead, they incapacitate (but not kill) a prey and start eating right away.
There have been a few significant mega-extinction events which have wiped out nearly every living thing on this earth.
Any documentary that talks about the life of insects and smaller animals is a horror film.
First thing that comes to mind is reproduction/labor/birth. Especially ducks, otters, hyenas in no particular order of brutality. Add in spiders, preying mantis, angler fish.
otters. baby otters. otters offering baby otters to be eaten first by predators.
Don’t forget that adult otters are known to maul and rape baby otters for fun.
I think there probably are some things that we could agree are universally disgusting , but it would still be a subjective opinion, just one that no one would argue. What I mean to say is that beauty and ugliness are human constructs, they don’t actually exist. It would be kind of pointless to go back and forth with someone countering examples of beauty with examples of ugliness.
I agree that there’s a layer of human subjectivity in this whole discussion. Within that layer, I think it’s okay to get a gut sense that nature is brutal and grotesque. My goal is to avoid romanticizing nature.
Once we’re able to avoid our human bias of romanticizing nature, we can take the discussion to another layer, a layer that could be called more objective.
For example, we could talk about entropy and evolution’s attempts to fight against it. We could talk about evolution occurring at multiple scales and dimensions simultaneously, such as atomic structures, cells, and multicellular organisms. These are examples of assemblages, and they expand the possible behaviors of the parts. In other words, assemblages make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
So, how does entropy, evolution, and assemblages connect with our discussion? Well, brutality and grotesqueness can usually be translated into the language of entropy and assemblages. Killing someone destroys an assemblage and increases entropy. Torture and trauma reduce the probability of an organism exhibiting variation in their behaviors. They reduce the emergent properties of the assemblage.
Is it always better to choose the language of entropy and assemblages over brutality and grotesqueness? No. Context matters. Again, if the goal is merely to avoid the romanticization of nature, the brutality and grotesqueness layer is appropriate.
Definitely some interesting thoughts here. I do think you need to ask yourself if you aren’t romanticizing in the opposite direction.
After reading what I have posted, it’s totally fair to believe that I do not find beauty or inspiration in nature. However, I can give you some reassurance.
How? Well, I actually I find the battle against entropy amazing and inspiring. A while ago I was sipping tea while my dog nestled next to me, and I was moved thinking about how we make each other so happy. I am also moved by people, people who look beyond their belly button, people who are kind, people who are good at what they do.
It’s not just that we’re doomed to accept brutality and appreciate tiny slivers of beauty. There’s actually steps that we can take to support life. For example, we can become a part of an assemblage that we like. Sometimes that assemblage is a group of friends, a political group, or an organization. You know you’re in the right place when your incentives align with that of the group. There’s an alignment around shared values, shared goals. Your atoms are keeping your structural integrity. Your cells are keeping you alive. Your thoughts are aiding you in problem solving and connecting with others. And your friends are connecting with you.
There’s quite a bit more to this, so if you’re interested in this way of understanding the world, you can check out Prosocial by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and psychologists Paul W. B. Atkins and Steven C. Hayes.
I have to ask what you mean by fight against entropy? Are you referring to the apparent paradox that complex life goes against the idea of entropy tending to increase?
It is, however, only apparent. Assembleages, as you call them, are just possible expressions of energy in the system. Like if you put energy into a double pendulum in can swing in complex patterns. When you make any local reduction to entropy, by assembling order, it necessarily comes at the cost of increased ‘global’ entropy. That’s the meaning of the second law. Nobody can fight against it, without reversing the direction of time.I’d say the fight against entropy is an attempt to retain specific expressions of energy in the system. The expressions of energy are assemblages that have created order. And yes, as you said, the creation of order has a cost: greater global entropy.
In case you’re interested, this way of looking at entropy and life comes from Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.
A lot of other organisms will eat their young. Kinda messed up. Some apes try ripping each other’s genitals off during fights. The insect world in general is pretty brutal tbh.
The insect world is a tiny nightmarish hellscape of armor, weapons, and sudden death.
Also, evolution isn’t maximally efficient, it’s just barely efficient enough. Eyes are a janky, often low-fi is good enough, affair. 99.9% of species that have ever existed are extinct. 99.9999999999% of species alive today do the bare friggin’ minimum to throw DNA into either the wind or a hole and maaaaybe do nothing more than reproduce.
The Helicoprion existed.
Jellyfish. WTF?
