it’s so common for “being straight & cis is normal” people to get hung up on what’s most evolutionarily “efficient” like they come at you with “if Men and Women didn’t have sex and continue the species we wouldn’t have made it this far so it doesn’t make sense to be anything but Straight and Cis,” and I really want to ask them when humans have Ever Ever Ever picked the most efficient route. Why did we ever leave the equator then in the first place, to willfully live on tundras and freezing islands where not much grows?
Why did people move to mountains where future generations needed to be born with bigger lungs to breathe right?
Why have humans historically, for tens of thousands of years, cared for the sick and the disabled and the injured even thought that wouldn’t be an “efficient” use of resources? Why did we ever develop a sense of compassion at all?
Why did any human ever leave home to cross an ocean, or a desert, or a jungle, hoping to find a way to live whether they ended up?
We have never followed the rule of “efficiency.” In fact, read any reputable paper on human evolution and success, and you’ll see it argue that our refusal to follow the “efficient” road is what actually made the human species so successful–that our unrivaled adaptability and unprecedented resilience in an ever-changing world is what put us on top for so long.
So if you can’t keep up with “all these new genders and sexualities,” it seems like you’re the inefficient one, the weak link, and you’re going to get picked out and left behind.
My backyard is a fairly wild and untended little patch of woods, and there’s more than one kind of tree there. There’s maples, oaks, beech, birch, and a couple pines. Which is interesting, because a really naive approach to ecology would suggest that a single Best Tree would exist for the conditions of my backyard, and the woods would optimize themselves to be entirely made up of whatever the Best Tree is.
But more often in the real world, the optimal solution is an equilibrium of multiple species. Asking “which is stronger: oaks or maples?” misses the point that a diverse forest is stronger than a solid block of any one tree. It’s also more true to the history of the land, and more likely to produce a sustainable future.
i’ll never understand why we don’t call countries the names they actually call themselves
like, i know this is a weeaboo-sounding example, but let’s start with Japan. They call themselves Nippon or Nihon depending on… i guess, the speaker’s accent??? or their level of formality while speaking??? I dunno. But we still called them Zipangu for like a few hundred years. And now we call them Japan.
All because Marco Polo asked someone in China about that island over there and they said “oh that’s Cipangu” and Marco Polo was like “Oh, Zipangu, cool.” And then he went back to Italy and said “Y’ALL THERE’S THIS DOPE-ASS ISLAND CALLED ZIPANGU” and people back in Italy were like “An island called Giappone? Dope.”
And this pattern of people mishearing people kept repeating until we got to “Japan.”
And we still call them Japan even though we know better. Because fuck you, Marco Polo asked the wrong person 500 years ago and misheard them and we’re sticking to that, I guess.
that was literally just the world’s worst game of telephone
idk if y’all americans and that know this, but in Australia instead of snow at christmas we get these lil shiny bugs everywhere and they’re attracted to the christmas lights and we call them christmas beetles
and despite being australian they don’t bite or anything they just crawl around on your hand and it’s such a good and pure feeling and yeah
‘despite being australian’
“We know what your thinking but this does not want to kill you”
eucalyptus trees are full of flammable oil that causes the trees to explode during forest fires, killing other trees and spreading its seeds to grow in their place. koalas survive solely because nothing else in their environment Wants To Eat The Fucking Bombs
Ranty-Ramblestein's Tumblr Import 