I know I’m not the only one that has heard this. I get comic book and Sci-fi/fantasy writers probably lean left for the most part but I seem to remember liberals of the past being big on free speech and against censorship. Also I’ve heard SJWs complain about the original Star Trek because they had moved beyond race and you know everything today has to talk about race.
Stan Lee and Kirby are white males so they wouldn’t last today and on and on.
So what is a good response to this?
I've been saying for a while now that human exceptionalism isn't what it seems to be - Man is just a technologically-adept ape, who has become addicted and too dependent upon his own technology.
Technology isn't magic, and doesn't break any natural rules. It exists because the laws of nature allow it to exist as just another possible survival path any preadapted animal can adopt, like flight, or gathering together and digging complex underground structures, or building dams, or running real fast to catch your food. And a lot of non-humans actually use very low levels of tech, from birds using sticks to scratch themselves, or to dig bugs out of holes (woodpecker finches), and yes, birds dropping shelled creatures onto rocks counts, just because they don't use things the same way 'round as humans .. it does take practice to get it right, lots of other examples out there. Pretty much every population of chimpanzee uses something, whether termite sticks, hammers and anvils, or the sharpened sticks of savannah chimps ... Think about it - is a beaver dam "natural" or "artificial"? A bird's nest? A city? Why should researchers doing the "Universe" studies be surprised that rats grouped together in little "cities" rather than spreading out? Should the castaways of, say, Gilligan's Island be expected to carve up the island and live every man for himself, too?
But humans are specialists, no different than the koala or the panda, and have put themselves in the same precarious position every super-specialist winds up in, especially since about 1800, and the beginning of a very slow population bomb (Man being a large mammal, it turns its generations over very slow, he only gets five or six generations per century. A rat can have that many in a year, a raccoon in a decade.
Yeah, something is eventually going to break, and in the meantime, it looks like rats, corvids and raccoons are evolving to make use of humans and their stuff for their own ends. Ever read Wolfen?
Are you talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolfen ?
It looks wicked interesting, I haven't read it, but plan on looking it up in my local library.
Agreed on the rest.
Yep, it's well worth the read (though I don't recommend the movie.)
It's basically the idea that nature will evolve around humans, in response to the intense selective pressure that human activities cause, especially once populations start establishing themselves in more civilized areas (witness coyotes, raccoons, squirrels, any number of birds, etc).
I doubt we'll see anything like a Doctor Rat or Zoo scenario (direct confrontation of humans), it'll be more like other species making use of humans, or more importantly, their stuff.
And of course, there's always going to be predators that take direct advantage of excess humans (the street people that have a habit of disappearing - see the Vancouver missing women deal, though I haven't heard much about it since Willie Pickton got caught ...) But they'd have to be on the serious down-low, and their activities easy to mistake for something else.
Think of this - rats don't need sticks and stones to make fire. They can make it by chewing through wires, which then elicits predictable behaviour from humans ....