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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Interesting thought, but there are a few problems with this:

    • The antichrist was supposed to be a genius military tactician. Trump isn’t a genius anything.
    • The biblical Armageddon wasn’t meant to be a prediction of the distant future, but was prophesied to happen within the lifetime of the original apostles, so 2,000 years ago.
    • The general scholarly consensus is that the Nero was meant to be the antichrist, and that the whole story was descriptive rather than prescriptive.

    It’s a fun theory, though.


  • LillyPip@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzsame as it ever was
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    19 hours ago

    What about caring for the elderly and disabled? We see anthropological evidence of many behaviours that can only be explained by compassion and empathy, some of which would have actually detracted from security.

    The notion that the early formation of societies was based on security rather than empathy is outdated. Compassion has many evolutionary advantages, especially in primate species where offspring are born vulnerable. It’s clearly evident in other primates who live in groups (or ‘societies’), as a driving force of cooperation and group cohesion.

    Here’s a recent paper (2022) by Penny Spikins, PhD at the University of York, Department of Archaeology, that explores how compassion shaped early human evolution and the formation of societies: The Evolutionary Basis for Human Empathy, Compassion and Generosity.

    And here’s another from 2011 by Goetz et al that explores in detail the evolutionary advantages of compassion: Compassion: An Evolutionary Analysis and Empirical Review.

    Those papers are both fascinating reads, and I highly recommend them for a deeper understanding of why and how empathy is crucial to our success as a species.

    e: a word



  • LillyPip@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzsame as it ever was
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    2 days ago

    Millions of years, likely. The whole reason we’re successful is because our pre-human ancestors were empathetic and cooperative enough to build societies.

    We see those same traits in many other primates, and they’re not something it makes sense to evolve, lose, and evolve again. Those traits predate us.

    Language almost certainly predates us, since we see it not only in other primates, but in non-primate species, too. And based on the humour we see in many animals, you can bet we were making dick jokes nearly out of the gate.