Out of Pod Experience

More on topic (though Ms. Dusette is arguably the topic of EVE-O), evolution is all about survival, but not necessarily happiness.

Humans are complicated creatures.

I learned a lot from my cat. He's furry, fat, and a bit dumb. But when I look into his lazy eyes, I see total serenity.

I probably should put on some weight, stop shaving and think much less (except about Ms. Dusette).

I see you too have been to Russia.

Now, if you want to think about a weird feature of human, just think about all the fuss our species does about feeding the younger ones...

Remember: the simplest mammals (platypuses) just ooze milk through their skin; they don't even have a functional nipple.

On the opposite end, a certain primate stores fat and a reinforced ligament system in order to transform their milk producers into massive, cumbersome and tantalizing (to their males) appendages.

Those appendages are so tantalizing, that when one of our serious and smart males figured a name to define animals who feed their younger with milk, he used the word specific to human breast (mamma) rather than the one designing any breast (uber).

Thus, Linneo literally named our milk companions as "animals with boobs like women" (mammalia). That's the power of boobs over the brain!

russia is the place aliens tell to their offspring in children's horror story: "eat your space brocolli, or russians will take you to russia!"

modernizations aside, we could still do it.

People lack empathy for other people in general...

I watched that video and couldn't help thinking that the Kudu didn't stand a chance against our hero Karoe. At the end, the Kudu can't even lift its head to cower, and Karoe just walks up standing straight and finishes it off.

I always thought it's the other way round. That children need to learn to empathize with anything and usually only learn to do so with humans and pets (and by extension other animals maybe).

The key to empathizing is to first understand when someone feels pain or uncomfortable etc.
I think children need to learn this by experiencing pain themselves and observing similar reactions to theirs in others.

This way they learn: "If I do this, then that person feels as bad as I did back then when it happened to me, too"
And also that things which they themselves don't mind might make others feel bad.

If we can't understand or "read" the reactions of others well, then we start to fall back to the "what if that happened to me" thing.
But the larger the difference between us and the "empathy target" is, the less reliable this all gets. We can't intuitively gauge what a certain reaction means and we can't assume they feel like we would in their situation.

So basically I disagree here with you: We can learn empathy with alien creatures by getting to know them, but it's not something we can do from the start.

A kid idly plucking the wings from a dragonfly it caught doesn't do so to cause harm, but because it has no concept that it harms this interesting and strange moving object.

ah yes, things get easier with numbers, but then you hit the barrier called "diminished returns", and then you're forced to hunt more and more and you'll kill all the prey in the area.

maybe that's why our ancestors decided to raise cattle instead hunting it

still, small hunting parties = more prey available = less risk of resource depletion.

Did we actually lose muscle mass, or did we only lose the ability to access it at will?

We've all heard stories of the mother who lifted a car to save her children. I personally, lifted a homemade snowmobile trailer, with two fully loaded and fueled snowmobiles, that had pinned my father underneath. I went back later and could not budge it. To get my father out, I lifted the trailer nearly a foot off the ground.

That was when I was about 13.

Our true physical strength requires a hormonal cocktail that would probably not suit us well using all the time.