(July 20, 2019 at 6:05 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote:(July 20, 2019 at 10:16 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: Humans are not part of nature?
Humans are not the fruit of nature’s unstinting and ongoing effort to formulate ever more sophisticated and ingenious mechanisms to affect ever crueler tortures upon, well, previous generations of less sophisticated and less ingenious torturers?
Point taken. Colloquially, we sometimes divide humans from "the rest of nature" to do comparing/contrasting. That's what I was doing.
But, yup, humans are a part of nature, and (in the final analysis) human cruelties are also nature's cruelties.
If we use human sensibilities to assess degrees of cruelty, then it has to be admitted that the climb up the ladder of degrees cruelty between life on earth began long before the first mammal, much less primate, ever swam or trod on earth, and in some of its refinements are seldom matched even in the most medieval of human torture chamber.
Look up sacculina carcini, it is a specie of arthropod that in adulthood lost any resemblance to arthropod just so it can better torture other Arthropoda to death.
It would be as if a variety of humans have evolved not to use, to become thumb screws, in their adulthood.
