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Re:Japan to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission by mikeash on Thursday December 27, 2018 @11:03AM (#18770242)
Humans are much more selfish than that. Almost nobody cares about the species. They care about themselves, their family, maybe their neighborhood, and if you’re really lucky they might care about their country.
Re:Japan to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission by jstarfish on Thursday December 27, 2018 @02:40PM (#18771941)
> They care about themselves, their family, maybe their neighborhood, and if you’re really lucky they might care about their country.

Most of that is social construct.

Our biological imperative is too simple for most people to fathom-- if you concern yourself only with the welfare of yourself and your family, you're doing your part for the species by expanding it with viable offspring.

If ensuring the survival of you and yours means paying tribute to the local warlord or toeing a party line, then concern for the neighborhood or country will follow.

But make no mistake, it's not in your interests for the species to thrive. It's in your interests for your own offspring to thrive. Nature can't maintain its balance if the sick and infertile reproduce and the boundless demand for limited resources result in us driving everything else to extinction until we all run around sticking punji knives in each others' guts for lack of food anyway.

Re:Japan to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission by tossaccount123 on Thursday December 27, 2018 @11:31AM (#18770461)
Does any other animal species care about things other than themselves? Natural selection would weed out individuals who were too altruistic, if you're looking for something to blame you're going to have to blame thousands of years of evolution selecting for the cruelest and greediest organisms
Re:Japan to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission by paraditedc on Thursday December 27, 2018 @11:05AM (#18770262)
That's actually quite true, come to think of it. Maybe I was actually giving too much credit.