this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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Memes

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Post memes here.

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.


Laittakaa meemejä tänne.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

Primitive forms of innoculation, antiseptic, and pasteurizing go back centuries if not millennia. The very idea of the small pox vaccine came out of the recognition that cow pox mitigated the risk of contagion. Milk maids were (unwittingly) vaccinating themselves for some time.

And pasteurization is just cooking your food. Hell, the whole reason primitive people started baking bread, roasting meat, and brewing beer came down to the benefits of sterilization.

These aren't even new ideas, per say. They're advances in technique, understanding of consequence, and means of distribution.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (6 children)

the whole reason primitive people started baking bread, roasting meat,

It's to start the break down of food. We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.

Brewing beer is entirely different though.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (5 children)

It’s to start the break down of food.

That too. But killing parasites in meat and fish is another big benefit.

We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.

To a degree. But we also just died more often to infection and disease. Cooking reduced mortality rates, which spurred a larger population, whose members transmitted the knowledge of how and what to cook before eating.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I mean our evolution really kicked off so to speak from outsourcing our digestion. That meant more calories could go to the brain. That's the aspect I'm focused on.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Well... if you want to get really into anthropology, there's an argument that outsourcing our digestion (via early agriculture) actually made us a lot weaker and dumber. It was social pressure (often explicit enslavement) that forced people into the agricultural lifestyle. But that a booming population powered by cheap, reliable agriculture allowed multitudes to outperform by volume what exceptionally smart and strong but scarce individuals achieved in small tribes.

More advanced forms of sterilization became necessary as populations hit certain critical levels of risk for pathogens and other hygiene problems. And so modern techniques, like vaccination and pasteurization, are really just extensions of this ten-thousand year trend towards urbanization that require health and safety precautions as a condition of our dense population centers.

This wasn't just biological evolution. Our ability to process, transmit, and record information made our species heavily dependent on these technological techniques and the passing down of the instructions to perform them. The health risks are now bound up in our ability to maintain a working, useful library of information and to perform the rituals necessary to keep our food and water sufficiently sterile.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Agriculture is different than cooking.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

We were cooking wayyyyyyyyyyy before agriculture.

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