| ▲ | andai 4 days ago |
| My uncle said yesterday that man's harsh nature goes back to Rome: Homo homini lupus. The article says it goes back a lot further than Rome! > So if it’s a fight, what started it? The original bone of contention is this: you and your nearest relatives are not genetically identical. In the nature of things, this means that you are in competition. And because you live in the same environment, your closest relations are actually your most immediate rivals. |
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| ▲ | wahern 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| In all non-human species selfless cooperation falls off a cliff beyond siblings, and AFAIU this comports well with Game Theory-type models for understanding genetics. Popular examples of non-human cooperation, naked mole rates and bonobos, actually live in communities dominated by sisters. (It's not often noted, though, in the breathless narratives extolling the virtues of cooperation and anthropomorphizing the rest of the animal kingdom.) Human behavior, however, is still a deep, deep mystery in terms of evolutionary biology. I'm always wary of people applying evolutionary principles to human behaviors. Writ large you can see contours of what we would expect to see, but even then it's unclear why the boundaries are where they are, or to what degree we're projecting expectations into the data, etc. The speculation quotient is extreme. I wouldn't put any stock into evolutionary biology-based explanations for human behavior. And just as a practical matter, it's not like most people would leave their most hated cousin to die in a ditch; and though most people wouldn't leave anyone to die in a ditch--at least, if they knew that's what they were doing--I'm betting they're more likely to save a cousin than a stranger. |
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| ▲ | achenet 3 days ago | parent [-] | | my viewpoint is that the human ability to cooperate effectively is why there's currently 8+ billion of us on earth and chimpanzees are an endangered species. Our capacity for stories and language helps us create large cooperation networks, which is a unique evolutionary advantage. Chimps have cooperation limited to "we are genetically close and you give me banana so I give you banana". Humans can create something like the Roman Republic, or modern nation states and corporations, based on a shared set of stories and language (culture, also includes stuff like rituals, socio-sexual taboos, etc), which enables millions of us to collaborate together towards a common goal. Which is why we're so successful as a species. | | |
| ▲ | londons_explore 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Capitalism allows thousands of people who don't know eachother or even speak the same language to work together to make all the components of a pencil. All of those people might be selfish, yet they still work together without even knowing they are doing so. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > My uncle said yesterday that man's harsh nature goes back to Rome: Homo homini lupus. What's "homini" supposed to mean? |
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| ▲ | n3storm 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Homo homini lupus is the latin for "Man is wolf for man", famous quote from Plautus. Homini is the declination of Homo, is dative case. I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give". I know this from Philosophy and Latin (separate) in Highschool around the nineties in Spain. They both were compulsory global subjects. I think Latin is not compulsory this days. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > famous quote from Plautus The quote from Plautus appears to be lupus est homo homini, which is much easier to parse. There's a verb and everything. (I didn't know that; I just looked it up.) > I don't know how to properly translate dative to english, something like "to give". Yes, the word literally means "giving [case]", but the grammatical concept in English is generally called "indirect object". English mostly doesn't have cases, so supplemental arguments to verbs tend to be marked by associated prepositions, making them "indirect". When talking about Latin specifically or languages with noun case in general, it is normal in English to refer to the "dative case"; you don't really need to translate it. I assume the case was named after the action of giving because giving is a very common action that necessarily involves three things. (Giver, gift, and recipient.) The name tells you what it means by example: "if a gift is given, the dative case is the one you'd use for the recipient". | |
| ▲ | anal_reactor 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Homo homini lupus And kiwi kiwi kiwi. Couldn't help myself, being a speaker of a language with grammatical cases, which allows the translation of "homo homini lupus" without changing the grammatical structure. At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > At the same time, some loanwords escape the declination system, giving birth to the joke above. I hope I'm safe in assuming that "kiwi kiwi kiwi" comes off as pure nonsense. But if it's possible for loanwords to come in without being forced into the system, there must be something you could add to the sentence to bring back the effect? What would that look like? | | |
| ▲ | anal_reactor 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Honestly it's an edge case, because there are few loanwords that don't get involved in the declension system. For some reason the government made official guidelines that the system only applies to native words, but that didn't stick, and most loanwords do have declension forms. With "kiwi" being one of the exceptions of course. Going back to the question though, I can't think of words I could add without changing the overall structure. As in, our translation of "homo homini lupus" is "człowiek człowiekowi wilkiem", and it's not like you could "just add something to make it full form". Well, you could say "człowiek człowiekowi jest wilkiem", with "jest" meaning "is", but when you say "kiwi kiwi jest kiwi", it still sounds like garbage. I guess the only way out of this would be to use something different, like "kiwi dla kiwi jest jak kiwi", which is "a kiwi to a kiwi is like a kiwi", but that's not what we want, because when we talk about people and wolves again, it becomes "człowiek dla człowieka jest jak wilk", and now it's clear that the cases have changed. Giving an example of a loanword, the government's official position used to be (or even still is?) that "radio" has only one form, but if you ask me, "radio radiu radiem" sounds clear and natural. |
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| ▲ | dragonwriter 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Homini is the dative of homo, meaning roughly "to (a) man". The phrase is a latin proverb meaning, roughly, "A man is a wolf to another man". | |
| ▲ | azmodeus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Man man’s wolf
Homo homini lupus |
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