Cancer cells are cells that keep growing even when they are told to stop. They continue to grow even when they are a detriment to the body. They consume a large amount of resources and they have no regard for the future even though their unsustainable growth will always lead to the death of their host and to themselves.

Humans have a lot of these similarities. Nature has a lot of mechanisms to prevent the unbounded growth of any population either through finite resources (ie. Carnivores die when they are too numerous because they will run out of prey to hunt) or disease and crazy fungi that spread much easier when there is over population. Humans pretty much learned to circumvent these mechanisms, leading to essentially unbounded growth. Humans over consume resources and we don’t stop even when we learn of our over consumption. And despite learning that our way will lead to either mass deaths or extinction we do almost nothing and keep going.

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
4 points

Depends on how low you define it. Many have monetary like transactions for procreation (e.g male insects offering food, some wasps offering service to mix her eggs into the colony eggs, penguins offering stones to mate), so the idea of offering a good/currency for a service is not innately human.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Paying for goods isn’t capitalism in the same way breathing isn’t speech. Currency makes capitalism easier but using currency does not make you capitalist.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Showerthoughts

!showerthoughts@lemmy.world

Create post

A “Showerthought” is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you’re doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

  • All posts must be showerthoughts
  • The entire showerthought must be in the title
  • Posts must be original/unique
  • Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
  • Adhere to Lemmy’s Code of Conduct

Community stats

  • 5.5K

    Monthly active users

  • 1.1K

    Posts

  • 39K

    Comments