The natural laws of existence VERSUS

The sublime design of the great white shark was perfected over 400 million years ago while the first flying insect, Delitzschala bitterfeldensis, continues today, (320 million years later), in the beautifully designed form we recognise as the dragonfly and in both cases and, presumably with every other species on earth, the natural laws of existence and evolution have worked exquisitely in enabling every creature to simply and elegantly reach a state of blissful perfection in the game of life, aside from human beings.

Humans don’t seem to have reached such a level of sublimity. Rather, they seem to represent a species that is, forever, pursuing a form of crisis management; firefighting one battle after another in the endless spinning plates style panic of righting the wrongs, (and collateral damage), of whatever clever thing they thought they might have created prior. Call it technology, innovation or progress but are such words merely a way to hide the fact that humans just fail miserably in the art of perfecting anything approaching the design of the great white shark?

Humans brush over such failings by rewriting the fundamental acts of nature they cannot perfect or no longer wish to be associated with. It begs the question; are hornets racist for attacking bees? Are dolphin gangs rapists for violating female dolphins and are chimpanzees sex offenders for blatantly displaying their privates publicly?

It seems the answer would be a resounding “yes” from a human perspective should the animal kingdom ever be put on trial as it actually was back in Victorian times.
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Apparently, we are on the cusp of seeing the act of “down blousing” made a crime, (a phrase highlighted by a Prime Ministerial candidate this week), but, really, is it just plain ridiculous to imagine any such law ever coming into being? I mean; has anyone got any idea how we are supposed to show we are attracted to the opposite sex these days without finding ourselves the wrong side of the law because it seems that every species on earth would be wearing a Wi-Fi security ankle tag or be on the sex offenders list if the natural laws of existence were ever brought into question according to artificial and fabricated human standards.

Yes, we are modern humans BUT we are also animals with courtships, rituals and inbuilt natural needs and desires though soon, perhaps, just looking at someone will be a crime! Thus, even acknowledging reasonable levels of tribal etiquette, how are any of us supposed to resist the entirely natural needs and urges that our chemical, biological and DNA based makeup has evolved over millions of years?

Sure. Wolf whistling or patting someone’s rear, to me, has always seemed a bit naff even from when I was a teenager but is it not a bit bizarre to find ourselves, (as a race or species), to be putting potential acts of courtship, ultimately designed by nature to keep us pro-creating, in some kind of a ‘Twilight Zone” scenario where, depending on the perception one gives or experiences, a red flag is raised and someone might find themselves on the wrong side of the law simply for showing a keen interest in another human being?

OR, (playing Devil’s advocate), with rape prosecutions having a success rate of less than 3% and rape charges up from 16,038 in 2012/13 to a massive 70,330 offences in the 2021/22, should we welcome politically correct, sensible, (or woke), new laws to guide and corral us?

True, as intelligent upright apes, we now hold dominion over the rest of the animal kingdom here on planet Earth but does that mean we also push ourselves further away from nature itself?

I enjoyed reading that On-The-Beach. 

It is precisely the development of the human brain which has caused the anomalies in daily life. Our, supposedly, understanding of right and wrong has become totally skewed. Humans are going against the laws of nature in every possible way.
If a lion cub is misbehaving, it gets a gentle swipe from her mother. Humans have banned any physical punishment to their own children. As a result, criminal behaviour is escalating at an incredible rate, because there is no longer a framework of behaviour to which youngsters can refer to.
In nature sex has the equivalent importance to food and drink, yet humans hide it and, in fact, surround it with so much taboos and obstacles, as to confuse many and has lead to unbelievable weird and unnatural practices.
Nature kills off individuals unfit for life, whilst humans nurture them and let them suffer intolerable pains, in the name of human kindness and compassion, instead of calling it extended cruelty to the individual.
No species, in nature, except us, kills for pleasure their own kind or even excessively their prey, except to satisfy their hunger (if a predator). Except for humans, torture is unknown in nature. In some cases, what seems to be so, it’s to teach youngsters how to hunt (orcas).
Except for our race nature has put in place an extremely well-balanced system of culling numbers in species, to avoid overpopulation and therefore maintain natural imbalances. We however, aided by historical and religious practices, encourage over population instead of curbing it. In the process we destroy the world in numerous ways.
In conclusion: the human race is totally unnatural and needs to be eliminated in due course. It’s gonna be sooner than we think. Then the Earth can start over again. As we have the most advanced brain, it is down to us to avoid that tragedy, but it seems, that we are not evolved enough to see that!

Thank you Beach.
I'm posting so you know your thread has been read and appreciated.
I'm afraid you out intellect me when it comes to an indepth response though.

San; 'Except for humans, torture is unknown in nature'

I absolutely beg to differ with this view. Have you never seen a cat play with a mouse simply for amusement? 'Cat and mouse'. Or a fox enter a hen house and mass kill, but not take anything? Any poultry or livestock owner will have experienced that. They even used to kill piglets on farms where I've lived.

Animals kill for fun, torture or torment others until dead and eat their own babies. I'm not sure where you get your information from Sam.

i have thought the same for some time, a certain section of society have been allowed to call the shots for too long, and if it continues for much longer we,ll soon be afraid to step out of our own front doors for fear of some sort of prosecution [ok, a bit ott but i hope you get the drift].

Some animals do kill for fun although more often for the survival of their young, but what about humans, supposedly the most intelligent who cause Much more devastation with rape, torture and murder. Far too may people on this planet, morons over-breeding . SIr David Attenborough's got it right, time people existed for the planet instead of the other way 'round.

Nice to see you posting again OTB, now I'm going to disagree with you and raise points to counter some of your views on evolution, evolution isn't something I see as happening on purely biological terms, but I think our cultures evolve along with us.

I don't really see us as seperating oursleves from nature, although I do understand why you think that and it was a view I shared for a time. I think humans have fallen for a big lie/mistake, in that so many of us believe and are encouraged to believe that there was once a golden age where everything was wonderful and we lived in harmony with each other and nature, I'm sure there were hunter gatherers who thought that these new fangled farmers were taking us away from nature and our "true" selves.

Human cultures have evolved along side our physical being, often faster and in different ways, if ones looks back to Neanderthal sites one finds some basic art, body adornment/modification and symbolic/ritual thinking. By the time you get to anatomically modern humans you see an explosion of what we call culture, both material culture and abstract culture with high levels of symbolic and ritual activity, art and social structures. We make our culture, and sometimes it is at odds with some very basic urges like the need to procreate, but have you ever heard of a culture from any time in history or prehistory that dosen't have some level of social status, for mating, food resourses, land and other natural features? The more I look into and learn about prehistory the more I see that there was never a golden age, there has always been a level of conflict, we might not always know what was doing what to whom why, but we can see human bones with sharp and blunt force trauma injuries, some show a level of healing some not. Some show distinct marks of butchery, we don't know if these marks were caused by corpses being butchered for eating, or if the bodies were defleshed as part of mortuary rituals. We see people doing things that seem odd, abnormal or just plain weird to us, including killing each other and animals in vast numbers, what appear to be signs of feasting with only the choice cuts taken.

People were almost certainly farming to some extent long before the neolithic revolution that introduced cereal farming and animal domestication on a large scale, the only way to get the amount of hazelnuts eaten, from the shells found in middens would be from coppicing the tree's, I'm sure that other things were encouraged in a similar way.

There is a marked difference in culture with the arrival of the Bronze Age, society seem to get much more socially stratified, I'm sure breeding rights/marriage would of been part of this different social structure. But it would be wrong for us to assume that this was something "done" by men to women and that women in prehistoric times had no agency and no say over their bodies or thier lives. We simply do'n't know, all animals have mating rituals and females of many species will vigorously defend themselves from unwanted attention from over bearing males.

Down blousing along with upskirting are highly unpleasant things to experience and I can't see that they would of been tolerated in previous times either. OK, I know people in other ages didn't have mobile phones with high resolution cameras and enabled someone to creep up on an unsuspecting woman and take a photograph up her skirts, nor were they crammed sardine like onto over heated tube trains, barely able to move away from a mobile phone wielding male. I don't see that sort of behaviour as in any way natural or frustrated mating instincts, but the exercise of power over those deemed to have less status than ones self or to try and reduce the status of the woman and increase that of the offending male.

Men and women in all societies have managed to come up with ways of attracting a mate/s without the need for such pointless and petty shows of power. Unfortunately rape and sexual assault

I seem to have been cut off half way through a sentence.

Unfortunately rape and sexual assault have been around for a very long time, probably from the beginings of humanity and so have laws against them, the fact that we don't prosecute as many of the crimes that we could or should says more about the criminal justice system and its breakdown, underfunding and priorities than about nature.

I think we do nature a disservice by blaming it for all the ills of society, a society and culture that we are all jointly responsible for, I don't believe that we as a society or as individuals can abrogate our behaviour by blaming nature, we do have choices, those who seek to have power over others by such brutal acts are not acting because of thier nature, but because they choose to do so and choose conciously. We should be blaming those who have no sense of cultural right and wrong not nature, nature might have given us the urge to procreate, but it also gave us cultural urges to and I think we are as much or more products of our culture than our nature, or Nature, as a defined sense of a being who has endowed us with things that we have rejected.

It is not beyond us as '... intelligent upright apes..' to come up with mating rituals that don't involve coersion, that everybody in that culture understands and can communicate to those of another culture, we do it all the time. We may have a disassociation with some of our natural processes living the sort of city lives we mostly do, but I think mating isn't among them.

Its time to grow up and take responsibity for ourselves, our lives and our planet and stop blaming others, espcially "nature" for our own shortcomings.

Thanks Rach ... and other contributors but how pitiful that folk who spend time and effort creating deep and meaningful posts for others to ponder, rarely get a chance to see them breath let alone flourish on Midsummer these days.

It doesn't matter in one way because I can still continue my creative bursts of writing using the imaginary audience here at Midsummer for a focal point if not for actual inspiration, (and the fruits of my effort will, likely, end up on my personal website anyway), but it is a shame we no longer have members willing to engage in more esoteric subjects.

And I'm devastated at one other revelation.

It is no longer possible to find hundreds / thousands of my original posts, (over the 15 year period the Conversation Rooms have been active), due to the way the site owners have closed down any interogation of the site from a search engine.

Yes. There are recent contributions that show up but if I search for a post I may have uploaded 10 years ago, it is now impossible to find or access it. (Accessing that Midsummer database for my own comprehensive text based content being the true, real reason I wanted to buy the site several years ago)

So ... my life continues to disintegrate ... with even records of my views, thoughts and existence now being purged from Midsummer. :-/

I read the opening post and thought is was a brilliant piece of writing and then scrolled down and realised it wasn't new today but was posted a long time ago. I have to agree with you Beach as it does seem we are a pitiful lot and I'm definitely guilty myself.
Maybe we see too many points raised in your post so tend to reply to none? Maybe, as I think it is in my case, I have views on points raised but not sure I can put them in writing in way that is meaningful and portrays my true thoughts.

If you had bought Midsummer it would probably have been greatly improved although it would have been difficult to take it further downhill.

If you look at the sexual habits of penguins, it's abusive, even necrophilic, they're wired differently. Certainly not acceptable behaviours for us humans. And yet you get cases of course. Sexual sadism, and people wired differently. It's interesting to see Sam blames parenting, however even with good parenting some kids fall off the tracks, follow their group influence into crime or some are wired differently and do not listen to mentoring or respond well to physical punishment. I'm actually really against smacking children.

It's a good thing we do have laws to protect us from sexual harrasment, and those people who can't keep their urges under control. It's needed. Doesn't always work as it should. Human Predators can't control those urges. They do become animalistic when hunting for a victim.

Human attraction is animalistic, and very natural but there has to be a line between what's acceptable and what isn't. Going to work everyday to have some colleague try to look down a blouse or make out of order comments etc.. not acceptable.. 

My daughter can't walk down the street without having some young buy mostly older or middle aged, leering out of his car or van window at her, creepy men can't keep their thoughts to themselves. Usually this happens less when we're together, however yesterday, happend twice in half an hour. There's a difference between admiring someone's beauty respectfully to making a complete spectacle out of yourself and making that person feel uncomfortable and a scared. I feel.its only a matter of time before some Moog ends up wearing a milkshake or whatever I might be holding at that time of them passing. That's my protective instinct kicking in.

Going to work everyday to have some colleague try to look down a blouse or make out of order comments etc.. not acceptable..

That is unacceptable and indefensible. Looking down once when talking to an attractive lady is not the same thing and I would imagine most men will do it a few times during their lives. Of course a woman will often look down at a man's hairy chest which is also ok.
Written rules and actual behaviour can be very different.