Maybe we just taste bad? Other predators like tigers and leopards also usually don’t eat humans unless they are injured and can’t chase any other prey.
If the earth enters a state where most of the water is locked up in glaciers (‘snowball earth’), then it is unlikely that it will be able to exit it. Similarly, if it becomes too hot, it is again unlikely that it will return to what it is now. The earth can handle small disturbances in CO2 / temp, but a sufficiently large swing can lock us into one of the extreme situations.
To be fair, they couldn’t industrialise before they split off. Their industries wouldn’t have been competitive with the well-established ones already existing in the north. Only ways they could become competitive were (a) secede and put up tariffs, or (b) get a huge aid package from the federal government so they can run things at a loss for a few years. And the northern states would not have been happy with (b), so …
Making predictions and conducting manipulation experiments isn’t possible / practical in all fields of science. Medicine, astronomy, archaeology, evolution and climate studies are other examples.
Evolutionary psychology is very much a real science. But like every other science, it is based on a lot of assumptions. So the actual scientists work mostly on boring theoretical questions, while the frauds often come up in the news pushing some pseudoscientific defence for their bigotry.
Yes. It is unethical to give someone a disease so you can study it. Best we have are case studies of people who got the disease and are being treated for it.
In climate studies, it is not practical to increase temperature or humidity by x% and see the effects. Again, you have case studies - either from the past or from parts of the world that are warming much faster than the rest. Or you can do mesocosm experiments where you warm, say, a square metre of grassland, and see the effects. But then there is a lot of uncertainity in scaling up the findings of such small-scale studies.
You explained the limitations astronomers and medical researchers face. Psychologists face similar problems, which is why all their results should be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. But that does not mean their work is worthless; just that it is hard. A lot of traditional psychology was based on what one person thought, rather than logical arguments or experimental evidence. Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to place the study of the brain’s workings in the context of evolution.
I’ve never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
Individual human behaviours depend on a lot of other factors. All you can do from an evolutionary perspective is to explain some common trends. For example, in almost all cultures, some people are gay / ace. Traditional psychologists long thought of this as some sort of mental condition. But if you think of society in the context of inclusive fitness and r/K strategy, it makes a lot of sense to have a certain percentage of the population not reproduce. Is this why some people are gay / ace? I don’t know, and I don’t think we’ll ever know. But at least we can try to explain some things.
Astro Boy / Mighty Atom is a manga series drawn by Osamu Tezuka in the 1950s and 60s. It was popular among young boys (both in Japan and outside) due to its action sequences, but has complex themes such as consciousness, human-robot conflict, war and the morality of violence.
The sun isn’t massive enough to explode. It will just expand and get hotter, making Earth too hot to support life, and then burn out, making Earth too cold to support life. And even a supernova probably won’t destroy atoms. Most of our atoms will probably survive the ‘death’ of the sun.
That’s not entirely true. Yes, trees lose most of the Carbon they fix when they die, but a part goes into the soil and can remain there for hundreds of years. Also, the type of forest matters - as a forest matures, or if you let a monoculture plantation rewild into a forest, it will be able to suck CO2 even without increasing in area.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who worked on number theory, infinite series and analysis. He said that he would have dreams of drops of blood (a symbol of his village deity, the goddess Namagiri Thayar), followed by complex mathematical equations. Even with the help of his formally-trained friend GH Hardy, he was only able to prove a small fraction of his insights.
Gregori Perelman is a Russian mathematician best known for solving the Poincare conjecture. He posted his results on arXiv in 2002-03, but never published them in a journal and never accepted any prize or money. He has expressed dismay over the lack of ethics in research.
Anon is a /sci/ user who in 2011 proved the current lower bound of a superpermutation for any size greater than 2 (the Haruhi Problem). Their proof has been archived for posterity, but we don’t know anything more about them.
Communist Filth/Capitalist Filth (lemmy.ml)
It's almost like a zombie movie for them (startrek.website)
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Pretty interesting, huh? (mander.xyz)
Vegan food: The west vs India (lemmy.ml)
Roots of Mother Appalachia (mander.xyz)
cntraveler.com/…/appalachian-mountains-may-have-o…...
Should of built a better foundation (lemmy.world)
Lemmy, recommend me a good budget Android phone please
I need one for general purposes only, NOT for gaming, so I don’t really care about gaming-related features....
Get gud (lemmy.zip)
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Rock scientists' world tour (sh.itjust.works)
Our model suggests that rainforests aren’t real and that most of the earth is heavily populated.
What are some modern bullshit jobs?
Jobs that either don’t contribute in any meaningful way or jobs where one would be better off if they were paid to be on call.
I'm a dissolved man on a Halifax pier. (lemmy.world)
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No, the natural log doesn’t distribute!! (i.imgur.com)
1+2+3=1x2x3
xkcd: Sign Combo (imgs.xkcd.com)
Title text: Speed Limit: 45 MPH / Minimum: 65 MPH...
Asking mathematicians about their proofs (sh.itjust.works)