“No, it's not 'normal' for humans to be in competition all the time. It's not normal to work for most of your waking hours during the day. It's not normal to be stressed 24/7. Stop taking a few hundred years of capitalism and pretending that's just how being human is. It's not.” —Hilary Agro, PhD (anthropologist & community organizer)
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[–] 9 points 2 months ago

That’s true. But that’s not what defines being human.

We would have to look at the evolutionary conditions of the species Homo sapiens (whenever we define its beginning) as the evolutionary context, rather than the 4 billion years that came before. In doing so, it would probably still make sense to look at the most recent period during which our neural development was still able to keep pace with our social evolution... so somewhere between the emergence of the various human species and the Bronze Age, I suppose.

After all, we wouldn’t consider the lifestyle of a T-Rex to be a natural context for the evolution of the chicken.

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