Doubtful. Climate change and our own ignorant stupidity will wipe us out long before weβll ever evolve past idiocracy.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Only if we were forced to and had our free will taken away.
No, not if we existed for another million years. It seems pretty fundamental to how we work, and how animals work in general. We basically discriminate along most possible lines. Few enough people even aspire to anything else.
Bold to assume that it's an instinct and not a taught and learned behavior.
There's a book I read a few years ago named "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" that delvs into this a bit and why humans are so tribal instinctively. Would highly recommend.
I just finished this one today! Introduced me to a lot of new ideas and contexts. Good read
I don't think it's an instinct, because it can absolutely be taught.
I encourage my kids to get along with everyone, but at the same time I can see how some of their peers are taught to be racists and other clique behaviours from home by parents who are just like that and don't even think about it when they pass it on.
But by default, nobody is like that from birth. Babies aren't racists or afraid of different kinds of people. The fear of others is taught.
It will take many generations to change.
The way I see it that instinct is the cause behind so much suffering and injustice in the world.
That's just what they want you to think.
Outside perspective. Only when we meet another other.
The "Us vs. Them" mentality is also called the "in-group bias", in which you tend to align with other members of a perceived group (with little to no logical reason, it can be as simple as belts vs. suspenders). Like many other fallacies or biases, it is a built-in feature of our caveman-brains that no longer benefits us. When used in propaganda, it is often paired with the "strawman fallacy" to build the perception of an enemy that is barely even human.
You can learn to recognize these biases in yourself and in others - This is called critical thinking. I recommend the podcast "You Are Not So Smart" to everyone to get more insight on this subject.
I hope so. Knowledge and curiousity feed intelligence feed knowledge feed curiousity. A highly educated society with healthy education sytem and good working socioeconomy (concurency in news coverage) can theoretically get over "us vs. them". Until we someday maybe lose it as evolutionary trait.
This current version of humans? No. But could it ever happen? Absolutely, if we assume our future evolutionary human descendants survive and provided we can supply everyone's needs.
Yes ...and the name will have to change from Homo sapiens to something else.
Homo Evolutis
I've heard from other evolutionary biologists that the next gen will be homo sapiens sapiens, and we'll be renamed something else.
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No
The news feeding propaganda over and over isn't helping.
I think we could if enough effort was put forth into making it happen. The problem is that very same "instinct," or rather the plethora of different experiences and ideals held by individuals seems to make it harder if not impossible to ever come to a global united consensus on anything.
Not unless the fundamentals of human psychology change. Forever is a long time to say that wonβt happen but certainly not in the foreseeable future.
That doesnβt mean it canβt be worked on or mitigated. But itβs not going away completely.
No. There will always be another βthemβ. Thatβs what makes humans so great, but also so destructive. We never settle, and will always look for division, even if we need to create it.
No. That is human nature. In order to overcome that, we would have to evolve into a different species, which I would argue is less appealing than it might sound on the surface.
Instead of trying to overcome it, it makes more sense to build a society that directs that energy in a positive direction.
Maybe a solution could be getting rid of some tribes entirely, so that we're not so divided? We can still have tribes, but we really don't need this many of them
Uhhh are you calling for genny cide ride now my man?
Nutteman! Hey, Nutteman! Race war? Nutteman! Hey, Nutteman!
God dammit why did Trevor have to die? Wkuk sketches bum me out now. Still so fucking funny though.
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It's a good question. I think it's been shown it's in our DNA to have a tribe that we associate with, and anything outside that tribe is a threat. Used to be a literal tribe, now I think it's mostly based on race. Can this be overcome with education? Unfortunately I'm really not sure.
I don't think it needs to be overcome, just applied differently. A more global "us" vs problems like global warming or poverty would be fantastic.
It's also a self preservation instinct - sometimes there's just too much going on and you gotta narrow your focus to the people around you.