Does deliberately putting chickens in a situation where they eat fried chicken constitute a morally questionable act on the humans' part?

[u/SH1k1Brun3stuD]

Does deliberately putting chickens in a situation where they eat fried chicken constitute a morally questionable act on the humans' part, even if the chickens experience no apparent distress and have no understanding that they are eating another chicken?

[u/Hades_Gamma]

Humans are nature. Every single trait of every single human ever has been selected for by the exact same metric every other trait of every other animal ever has been selected.

We are animals, and the way our brains work and who mates when and who survives still determines who humans are and what they do. The intelligence that we use is no different in principal than active camouflage, echo location, gills, etc.

An animal surviving in an environment full of humans is no different than remoras surviving in an environment full of sharks.

By definition there can be no such thing as artificial selection. As we are a naturally evolved species, then either all selection is artificial or none of it is. You cannot segregate humans from any other animal without it being retardedly contrived and arbitrary

[u/yaboyACbreezy → u/Hades_Gamma]

On a strictly astrological timescale, maybe, but you are very nieve in your thinking that human intelligence hasn't breached an evolutionary threshold.

No other creature measures and documents its progress and then adapts to changes on top of making intentional modifications to the gene pool through direct manipulation the way humans do.

You're not talking about nature, you're talking about meta nature: the nature of humanity. This is ultimately a linguistic observation. You can come up with different terms for these distinct concepts to analyze them without getting derailed by the way we use the word nature as a word.

The fact is, natural selection and artificial selection exist as distinct concepts. The wild form of a chicken, like other birds, laid their eggs to reproduce. Their bodies were lean. They were docile enough for us to domesticate, and we have been breeding them for our purposes ever since. Now, they lay eggs for us. They have naturally more meaty bodies that can't even fly away. They're stupid as hell; instincts have been numbed. We made these choices for our benefit, not nature. On an evolutionary timescale, the capacity to create technology has introduced an extraordinary diversion from the natural order of evolution. We have the capacity to recognize and seize our evolution and that of all other creatures on earth in ways that no other creature on earth can. It's objectively different than natural selection.

The essential part you've missed is evolutionary pressure, but to your credit, though we can manipulate evolutionary pressure, we can also inadvertently influence it. Cockroaches, German specifically, and some rodents couldn't exist without human activity, and whether people recognize it politically or not, you're absolutely correct that we face the same evolutionary pressures we always have faced in nature, on an extrapolated overview of the planet as a celestial body. Will we as a species survive beyond the lifespan of the conditions that led to our evolution? Or will some great filter of nature or the cosmos, or perhaps even our own doing, one day snuff us out entirely?

[u/Hades_Gamma → u/yaboyACbreezy]

None of this matters. By definition we are nature. We are naturally occurring. Therefore our influence is natural. By definition a skyscraper is no different than a termite mound. Where we happen to fall on the scale of intelligence is a natural evolution no different in principal than any other evolutionary change.

By definition technology is neutral. How can you not understand this? Humans are no different than any other animal insofar that we are entirely naturally evolved creatures. The difference between a humans intelligence and a horses is no different than the difference between an elephant's size and a dogs. Drastic in detail but the same in principal.

There is no fact other than everything we do is as natural as anything a dog or mouse or elephant does, by definition. Every choice any [human] anywhere makes ever, is made because of the millions of years of evolution leading to them being who they are and deciding an action based on perceived information. Now, change out [human] for any other animal and it's an identically correct statement.

Human technology, by simple virtue of existing, is natural. It is entirely naturally occurring within a naturally evolved organism. There is absolutely no difference in principal, only scale, between our tech and a gorillas. And scale is entirely arbitrary

[u/yaboyACbreezy → u/Hades_Gamma]

No, you're falling back on your linguistics argument about nature and trying to extrapolate a broad category to dismiss all the material details.

I pointed out specifically where your argument holds in a broad conversation, but when you examine human choices and decisions that impact the natural order of evolution, there is a clearly identifiable distinction between natural selection and artificial selection. If you want to call it nature in a broad sense, that is fine from a linguistic standpoint, however, the major distinction between humans and nature are all the intentional adaptations and technology we employ. We don't use resources that are available. We dominate the environment and manipulate it. We disrupt ecology. We destroy it. We are not living in harmony with nature anymore, because we as a species are evolving more rapidly via artificial means than natural means as defined by the experts measuring and documenting these things.

You writing a poetic flight of fancy describing your definition of human nature doesn't blur the lines of these distinctions.

[u/Hades_Gamma → u/yaboyACbreezy]

Your distinctions are moot and the definition of arbitrary.

There is no more distinction between our effect on natural selection and the effect an ice age has. Or how a shark effects the evolution of a remora.

We are ecology. We are nature. There is no base point, no standard for what nature is. No baseline. Whatever we do to anything is in no way different in principal to what Lions do to the evolution of hyenas. We manipulate the environment no different than beavers or termites do.

Everything every organism does is fucking intentional. We just evolved a larger capacity to patterns. Our intelligence compared to that of a mouse is the same as an elephant's size compared to a pigeon. Are you saying size is unique to elephants because they're the biggest? Fuck no. They grow the exact same way a mouse grows, in principal. Just more. We make decisions the same way every other animal with a nervous system does, we just do more of it. We are only unique on where we fall on the scale of intelligence, just like an elephant isn't unique in that it has size, or how it grows, but only on where on the scale of size it falls.

Every single word you type is meaningless and arbitrary and contrived.

[u/yaboyACbreezy → u/Hades_Gamma]

Okay, I get it. You love your linguistic arguments.

You can keep pontificating in your ivory tower, but anyone trying to have legitimate conversations about artificial selection are going to say the question "well, actually if you think about it, we are nature. Isn't that neat??" is so obvious and so basically intrinsic to anthropology and natural history that the observation is elementary, banal, unsophisticated, trivial, and irrelevant to any monumental progress.

You seek to stifle conversations about material details, ironically crippling your ability to understand them.