Yes, it’s possible but undesirable for both pigs and fruits to survive without assistance from humans. In both cases, that assistance is offered because humans eat the creatures they assist.
You still haven’t explained why this relationship is good for fruits but bad for pigs.
By that reasoning, fruit is not in a biologically obligatory symbiosis with the animals that eat it. There are many cases of fruit falling to the ground uneaten and forming a new plant near its parent. Those plants eke out an existence just as feral pigs do.
Why does the length of time matter? Domesticated varieties of cows and pigs would go extinct if humans stopped raising them for meat. The only niche where they can survive is a farm. They are in symbiosis now even if they weren’t 10,000 years ago.
So cows and pigs - like many fruiting plants - co-evolved with the creatures that fed on them. In both cases, those creatures became necessary for their long-term survival.
If you want to make a teleological argument, then you could equally ask why agricultural animals, compared to wild animals, have much higher fat content and other characteristics that humans find delicious.
All evidence suggests those features are favored by humans, who are the animals currently responsible for ensuring their continued reproduction.
You just asserted that the fruit is freely given, but you haven’t supported that.
I mean, one could also say that cows and pigs willingly sacrifice themselves so humans will continue to feed their descendants, but there isn’t any evidence of that either.
It’s freely given by a plant just as human sacrifices are freely given by a cult.
The stinky place isn’t soil. It’s a sewer or a landfill, because that’s where human waste ends up. Neither can support plant life because they are devoid of light, just like the realm of Cthulhu.
And the deal with Cthulhu is that he gets to devour whoever you’ve sacrificed, and in return he provides a benefit to the survivors: allowing them to live long enough to provide more sacrifices. It’s basically the same deal.
Also, if anyone reading this happens to be a seed on a fruit meant to be devoured by humans then I have bad news about your final destination: it’s rather a stinky place that is not in any way conducive to your growth. The cake is a lie.
In the same way that cultists give human sacrifices to Cthulhu specifically to eat.
I’m pretty sure the fruits are screaming too.
Fun fact: 90% of the cells in your body are bacteria.
Countries have complicated trade for centuries. Free trade is a modern exception, not the historical rule.
And in principle, countries have as much right to restrict trade with Cuba as they do with Russia and Israel. It’s the same principle that allows people to call for boycotts of Amazon and Starbucks. All of these things can affect the lives of millions, in an effort to bring about political change.
For those curious this is not as bonkers as the title suggests. Just run-of-the-mill police state injustice.
The artwork prompted school authorities to file a police report, leading to the investigation of Moskalyov’s social media activity.
Moskalyov was sentenced to two years in prison, following his outspoken online posts against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Is there a scientific “answer” to whether alcohol causes prostate cancer? That too depends on a wide variety of social factors and can be biased by ideological assumptions (eg drinking alcohol is a vice).
Nevertheless biologists develop competing models, use them to form hypotheses, test the hypotheses, subject the results to peer review, and revise their models to arrive at a consensus. Economists do all the same things.
Why should anyone care what Nobel’s descendants think?
I don’t think any field of any research comes down to one person. Nevertheless, academics recognize that some people make greater contributions than others.
This is baked into academia in the form of citation. At the moment you wrote your first bibliography you distinguished those who made significant contributions to your own work. It would have been unacceptable to write an academic bibliography consisting of a single line: “All those who came before”.
And even though research is always a collaborative effort, like soccer and filmmaking, it is natural for humans to recognize those who made the greatest contributions. That’s why we award MVPs to athletes, Oscars to actors, and Nobels to economists.
You did. Is there one economist in particular who you think contributed more to this field than the actual winners?
That’s kind of my point. They didn’t come up with their ideas yesterday, so you shouldn’t expect the results to appear groundbreaking today.
The prize is for research in economics, not history or social science. They may be interested in the same topics, but economists usually take longer to reach a conclusion because their work is usually more data-driven.
Hence their conclusions appear to be “not news” to historians and social scientists who already believed the same things without the benefit of economic data.
And how did you determine what the purpose of fruit is? It certainly can’t communicate its preferences or desires.
All you can observe is that the species as a whole thrives when fruit is consumed. But the same is true of farm animals. You are simply projecting the motivations you want to see, like self-sacrifice, onto one but not the other. After all, many fruits are poisonous. That suggests that fruits don’t want to be eaten, but animals evolved mechanisms to safely eat some fruit.
Finally, factory farms certainly cause animals to suffer but from an evolutionary perspective thriving is not about avoiding suffering. It’s about producing offspring, and in that sense farm animals thrive. And given that the OP is about the potential suffering of plants, I don’t see why fruit farms are any less horrific than animal farms.