[HN Gopher] Darwin's children drew all over the "On the Origin o...
___________________________________________________________________
Darwin's children drew all over the "On the Origin of Species"
manuscript (2014)
Author : arbesman
Score : 476 points
Date : 2025-04-16 14:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theappendix.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (theappendix.net)
| impish9208 wrote:
| My favorite Darwin fun fact is his detailed pros and cons list on
| whether to get married.
|
| https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-a...
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| "better than a dog anyhow"
| fullstop wrote:
| Darwin was a real catch.
|
| It always blows my mind how many people, historically,
| married their cousins. I guess smaller towns had shallower
| gene pools.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Everyone who marries marries their cousin, it's just a
| matter of degree. Before the advent of the automobile,
| people traveled a lot less. Even more so as you go further
| back. Combine that with families having a lot more kids
| (you might have 36-64 _surviving_ first cousins), and you
| 've got a situation where nearly everyone you interact with
| might well be only a couple degrees of separation by blood.
| Marriage between first cousins has historically been a bit
| taboo, but so called third and fourth degree (aunts and
| uncles, first cousins) marriages were still pretty common.
| It wasn't really until the rise of the eugenics movement
| that the modern taboos and legal prohibitions were
| established.
|
| I've been doing a fair bit of genealogy lately, and you can
| see on the family tree pretty clearly when people moved
| from from smaller, insulated communities to larger cities.
| Above that point, the tree fans out a lot less.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Well, this hit harder than I thought it would
| My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one's whole
| life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.
| -- No, no won't do.
| ty6853 wrote:
| In those those days though I'm not sure the calculus of
| working for the sake of the children was quite the same.
|
| You might have kids, and then they work the farm, then you
| manage the farm and slowly the children take over the manual
| labor and hard work of it. In old age the investment in the
| children pays off and a reciprocal relationship is formed
| where you take care of the grandchildren and your own
| children take care of you.
|
| Now that is flipped on its head. The parent makes the lions
| share of the investment in the child, but the benefits of the
| child is largely socialized. Want daycare, food,
| recreational, extra-cirricular activities -- basically
| anything other than public schooling you pay taxes for
| already? Go fuck yourself.
|
| But once the children is grown up, well well well we are a
| society here! Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social
| security benefits around to everyone including people that
| didn't raise any children. And if you directly want a piece
| of the investment from the children, as people got in the old
| days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
| -- it is only morally right when all of society does the
| exact same thing to the kid.
|
| There is every possible incentive in today's society to
| encourage others to have kids, ensuring your own retirement,
| but to reneg on doing it yourself because some other poor
| bastard can front most the costs and then you can tax the
| shit out of the kid for your retirement / social benefits. I
| think children were a rational decision in Darwin's day, now
| they are definitely not, because you are on the sucker end of
| a tragedy of the commons deal.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| None of this applies to Darwin though, he was wealthy and
| didn't need to think about "working the farm".
| lukan wrote:
| But apparently he needed to think about having to work
| for income to sustain a family.
| nartho wrote:
| A farm, in the middle of 19th century London ?
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Charles Darwin actually only lived in London for a few
| years, and spent most of his life in what was at that
| time the county of Kent. Although in any case, as you
| say, his home did not involve a farm.
| Always42 wrote:
| You can see the consequences of this playing out in highly
| developed countries
| lurk2 wrote:
| Another interesting cultural development here is that the
| scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into
| what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating
| parents to pay for their child's post-secondary education.
| By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations
| to their parents in old age. This privileges those who
| invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children,
| since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the
| investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their
| old age.
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| > _And if you directly want a piece of the investment from
| the children, as people got in the old days, well then go
| fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard_
|
| consider the following: if your children don't care about
| you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the
| primary reason.
|
| To put it in words close to finance: it is not an early
| cash investment in daycare and food, but lifelong kin work,
| that is rewarded with emotional bonds and long term
| dividends.
|
| Living together in multi-generational homes facilitates kin
| work, there i agree, but it is not a strictly necessary
| requirement.
|
| There are also other effects at work, especially
| psychological. Many adults don't grasp that their elders
| have increased demands, because they are used to see them
| in a providing role. They understand it on a abstract and
| logical level, it is so obvious and well known, but to
| truly understand it on a personal level is far more
| difficult. In the same way people growing older often try
| to stay in this providing role as long as possible, as they
| for many years defined themselves through it.
|
| There comes a time in life when easter invitations switch
| direction. If you live together on a farm, this changes
| gradually.
| ty6853 wrote:
| I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about
| the parent but is unable to financially assist them
| because they're being taxed 20-30% by "society" (who as a
| kid basically left them high and dry), in addition to
| paying a large amount for their own children due to
| society imposed costs like paying out regulatory /
| licensing / tax overhead for daycare which is now
| required because being a latchkey kid or going to
| unlicensed daycare is effectively illegal -- leaving
| nothing left over to assist the parents financially.
|
| If you killed off social benefits, desirable or not,
| there would be lot more left over for intra-familial
| support and the incentive would come back for people to
| invest in their own children. Or alternatively under a
| more society-driven system, make a proportional societal
| investment in children to what you ultimately take from
| them so that the incentives are not skewed. Ultimately
| the issue here is not individualistic or social systems
| for raising children but rather shoving almost all the
| costs on the individuals and then totally changing the
| system to being societal as soon as society can extract
| benefit.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's ok: you can just say you don't like taxes.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Personally I prefer the low-tax individualistic model,
| but my point is that I would also defer that a high-tax
| model would also present balanced incentives if they
| better reciprocated an investment in children.
|
| The argument for taxes is usually something along the
| lines of forming a society, but society is almost totally
| gone when you make the investment in a child to become
| productive but then magically appears as soon as the kid
| is productive. As we are finding out this bastardized
| model is not working out for kids or parents.
| Brybry wrote:
| Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially
| in order to assist them in their old age?
|
| In my experience friends and family have helped take care
| of elderly parents without that. I help my parents
| without giving them money.
|
| Even if the elderly are destitute they generally have
| social security and medicare. If you need to you
| temporarily move in with them or they move in with you.
|
| Also latchkey kids are very much so legal in most states:
| ~37 states have no statutory age limit. Your real issue
| there is probably liability if something _does_ go wrong.
|
| And unlicensed (license-exempt) daycare is perfectly
| legal in many (most?) states, usually with limits on the
| number of children and the location. In my state you can
| legally pay (or not) the stay-at-home mom neighbor with
| kids to watch your kid after school and she doesn't need
| a license.
|
| I agree with the idea that smaller family sizes and
| cultural changes (outside of some communities like
| immigrants) have led to child raising changing in
| negative ways compared to communal approaches.
|
| And I agree the financial calculus of having kids does
| not lean in favor of having kids (mainly because of high
| cost of living compared to wages, especially in certain
| regions).
|
| But the rest of it doesn't seem to have strong supporting
| evidence. While personal income tax rates in the US can
| be high compared to some countries, overall tax burden as
| a % of GDP (25.2%) is below average (33.9%) [oecd].
|
| I don't think there is any evidence that shows family
| size changes or multi-generational living are correlated
| with tax rate. That's usually correlated with other
| factors like women's wage
| employment/rights/education/ethnicity.
|
| And the return value of a society where life expectancy
| at birth is not in our 40s seems pretty good.[1] There's
| no left over money from taxes you didn't have to pay if
| you or the family members you would spend it on are
| already dead.
|
| [1]
| https://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html
| ty6853 wrote:
| Let's rewind and see how we got here:
|
| >>>> And if you directly want a piece of the investment
| from the children, as people got in the old days, well
| then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard
|
| >>> consider the following: if your children don't care
| about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not
| be the primary reason.
|
| >>I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about
| the parent but is unable to financially assist them b
|
| >Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially
| in order to assist them in their old age?
|
| For one, the law says the kids have to support the
| parents, writ large, in a pooled scheme via SS. If you
| don't pay it, IRS agents seize your bank account and
| possibly even bust down the door and put you in a tiny
| cell. So we're not starting with the premise as a
| question. It is the current reality.
|
| Now, I don't have a personal belief that kids should have
| to support their parents, but to philosphically hold that
| means they shouldn't have to pay SS to them either. The
| difference between children paying parents individually
| and writ large is just different mechanisms (collective
| vs familial), so if you agree with the collective system
| you already agree children should be forced to pay the
| parents.
|
| Now, to be clear -- I didn't believ in the premise that
| if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the
| child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the
| respondent said that vicious straw man, but I totally
| object to it. But I replied based on their fiction so I
| could address the underlying point about support without
| a further argument.
|
| Ultimately elderly do need support. Children are ofter
| going to want to support the elderly. My point is that it
| would make more sense to tie that elderly support to
| investment in children so the incentives are in place to
| put a good investment in children and also to ensure
| people don't just free ride by rejecting children or
| helping children but then gladly gobbling up the
| dividends of the investment. This incentive system can be
| fixed by either an individual or collective approach but
| the bastardized system where we privatize the investment
| and socialize the dividends presents the worst moral
| hazards and anti-natal outcomes.
| dunham wrote:
| I try to remember Vonnegut: "We are here on Earth to fart
| around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
| docmechanic wrote:
| Amen.
| ivell wrote:
| On marriage and partner - "These things good for one's
| health."
|
| Proven by modern science now. At least longer life.
| jkingsman wrote:
| For such a giant of the scientific community, he was after all
| human.
|
| My two favorite journal entries:
|
| "But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody &
| everything."
|
| "I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and
| today I hate them worse than everything."
| rolisz wrote:
| Huh, I feel much closer to Darwin now
| moffkalast wrote:
| "I cannot brain today, I have the dumb"
|
| Me too Charles, me too.
| pfdietz wrote:
| He had chronic nausea (possibly abdominal migraine), so I'm
| not surprised he was feeling poorly.
| zabzonk wrote:
| "I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before"
| boringg wrote:
| Children -- (if it Please God) -- Constant companion, (& friend
| in old age) who will feel interested in one, -- object to be
| beloved & played with. -- better than a dog anyhow.- Home, &
| someone to take care of house -- Charms of music & female chit-
| chat. -- These things good for one's health. --
|
| """but terrible loss of time. --""" !!!!
|
| So ruthless in his calculus. One wonders if he was on the
| spectrum?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _calculus_
|
| It is calculus, it is performed like calculus - it has to.
| qoez wrote:
| I could have sworn that was Ben Franklin that wrote that
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Both Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin are quoted in
| informal Decision Theory. Both used pro-vs-cons tables to
| orient decision; Franklin also used weights.
|
| > _When those difficult cases occur, they are difficult,
| chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all
| the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the
| same time; but sometimes some set present themselves, and at
| other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the
| various purposes or inclinations that alternately prevail,
| and the uncertainty that perplexes us. // To get over this,
| my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two
| columns; writing over the one pro, and over the other con.
| Then during three or four days consideration, I put down
| under the different heads short hits of the different
| motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against
| the measure. // When I have thus got them all together in one
| view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and
| where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike
| them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to two reasons
| con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con,
| equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and
| thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies, and
| if, after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new
| that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a
| determination accordingly_
| Gormo wrote:
| The article makes no mention of the name "Babbage" in Emma's
| diary. Could that relate to Charles Babbage, who was a
| contemporary?
| squeedles wrote:
| I'm wondering about Wednesday April 15, 1840 -- "Much
| flatulence"
|
| Sometimes history provides too much information to future
| generations.
| criddell wrote:
| It's TMI only because he lived for a long time after. If he
| had died on April 16th, it might point to some type of
| illness or mariticide.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Oh, if you think that's bad, see Samuel Pepy's diary
| (conveniently syndicated in realtime here:
| https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social; think
| they're on the third run through, currently doing 1662). No
| detail of everyday life, no matter how objectionable, left
| uncovered.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > syndicated in realtime here:
| https://bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social
|
| That really is wonderful! Reading how Pepys arranged for
| his diary to be preserved makes me think that he would have
| enjoyed this more modern presentation.
|
| > Found out my uncle Wight and Mr. Rawlinson, and with them
| went to the latter's house to dinner, and there had a good
| dinner of cold meat and good wine, but was troubled in my
| head after the little wine I drank.
|
| "Troubled in the head" is a euphemism due a revival!
| behnamoh wrote:
| This is one of the few things children still do even centuries
| later. In many aspects, we have changed so drastically that I
| think 100-year-ago people would find us weird and unsociable.
| rayiner wrote:
| Not at all. Young children, in particular, do the same things
| they've been doing since modern humans evolved, if not even
| earlier than that. My three and six year old boys wake up in
| the morning and pretend to be puppies. I'm sure kids their age
| were doing that 30,000 years ago when humans domesticated dogs.
|
| They were playing tic tac toe the other day, and asked my dad
| whether he played tic tac toe when he was a kid. My dad--who
| grew up in a village in Bangladesh--explained that he did,
| except they drew the game in the dirt with sticks.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children's
| drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child's drawings
| preserved for us to see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
|
| > ... Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky
| Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or
| 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft
| birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.
|
| I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the
| emergence of anatomically modern humans, you'd find they're just
| like us. I don't think that's particularly controversial or
| surprising, but it's easy to forget that people who came long
| before us were really no different from us (or put differently,
| were no different than them), and it helps to better understand
| history if you think of them that way.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| this is insane. 6 year olds 800 years ago went to school ?
| drysine wrote:
| It's not clear how old he was.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Well, probably not most children. I don't really know
| anything about that particular region at that particular
| time, but based on history _generally_ , literacy was - until
| recently - often reserved for higher social classes.
| skzv wrote:
| From the wiki article:
|
| > Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an
| unusually high level of literacy for the time, with
| literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes
| and among both sexes.
| datameta wrote:
| Novgorod was the only major East Slavic settlement to avoid
| destruction or subjugation by the Golden Horde, so I think it
| is akin to a boy from a well-to-do family in medieval Avignon
| or Strasbourg learning to read and write. Meaning, not just
| any city or any family in the mid/late 13th century had the
| need or means for such schooling, but as pointed out in this
| thread it was more likely in Novgorod.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the
| emergence of anatomically modern humans, you'd find they're
| just like us.
|
| I find this viewpoint surprisingly underutilized in
| institutional history and archeology sometimes. I occasionally
| watch documentaries with distinguished talking heads on e.g.
| egyptology and what not, and they often bend over backwards to
| find complicated explanations that defy all "this is just not
| how humans or human organizations operate" logic. For example,
| analyzing an impressive building and then assuming that the
| same people capable of constructing it also made a basic
| mistake or in other ways assuming they were daft. Or requiring
| a complex lore/spiritual explanation for something that can be
| equally explained by classic big org fuckups.
| methyl wrote:
| For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of
| a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven
| to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they
| were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with
| families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good
| thing by honoring the Pharoah.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| They weren't subhuman slave class. But it's far from
| clear they had economic agency.
| Orbital_Armada wrote:
| Although the laborers working on pyramids and tombs were
| initially mostly corvee labor, they did evolve into a
| more specialized and privileged class of artisans over
| the (very long) course of Egyptian history. The first
| recorded labor strike in history occurred in a village of
| such artisans over lack of pay.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes
| nkrisc wrote:
| Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person,
| how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit
| stones so well together and polished them so smoothly
| without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, "If
| I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do,
| you'd have the faces of those rocks even smoother than
| those others".
| number6 wrote:
| For a long time, I also somehow thought that people from
| earlier eras were less intelligent--simply because, in
| retrospect, all those obvious mistakes are so apparent. It
| took considerable mental effort for me to accept that people
| back then were probably just like us today, only living under
| different circumstances.
| cakeface wrote:
| I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions.
| In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge
| key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once
| you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have
| accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a
| hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people
| without it and us.
| pdfernhout wrote:
| Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
| "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who
| recognised only three factors of production: land, labour
| and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these
| factors in production, he considered the "cultural
| inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined
| cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and
| processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the
| origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently,
| mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel".
| "We are merely the administrators of that cultural
| inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance
| is the property of all of us, without exception." ...
| Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative
| [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide
| goods and services] upon which an economic system should
| be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the
| industrial system to be governed by the first two
| objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought
| and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of
| our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of
| goods and services with the least amount of effort, then
| the ability to deliver goods and services with the least
| amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas
| proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of
| machines replacing labour in the productive process, and
| any attempt to reverse this process through policies
| designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our
| cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the
| people displaced from the industrial system through the
| process of mechanization should still have the ability to
| consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested
| that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance,
| and his proposal for a national dividend is directly
| related to this belief."
| trylfthsk wrote:
| Thank you for this; surprised I haven't heard much about
| him prior, since I've been digging into political economy
| lately.
|
| Specifically, his notes on consumption / full employment
| are refreshing - it never sits right with me that the
| goal of economic policy at a high level is so often at
| odds with doing things in a "smart" way (measuring
| projects in jobs created, for example).
| nkrisc wrote:
| The difference between us and them is the accumulated
| knowledge. You and I had no better an idea of what a
| volcano is than an anyone from thousands of years ago until
| someone told us.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic
| analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional
| history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because
|
| 1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us"
| and
|
| 2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions.
|
| Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own.
| There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals"
| despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let
| the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually
| follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X
| has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's
| _fine_ if you 're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's
| a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old
| Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and
| make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple
| centuries of American anthropology as an example.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
| benbreen wrote:
| Author of the original Appendix article here (the one about
| Darwin's kids) - I think it got on HN today because I linked to
| while discussing Onfim here:
| https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-chil...
| dang wrote:
| Hi Ben! I'll email you a repost invite for the Onfim article
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705174) - if you wait
| a week or so and then use it, the repost will go in the
| second-chance pool.
|
| The reason for waiting is to give the hivemind cache time to
| clear. Normally we'd re-up the existing post, but we don't
| want two overly similar threads on the frontpage within a
| short time period.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 2014! Amazing.
| srean wrote:
| That's one of the most endearing article I have read in a
| long time. Thanks for the joy.
| dillydogg wrote:
| It's amazing to think about. I'm sure you could take one of
| more ancient human babies, teleport them to the present day,
| and they would be able to grow up like any other kid. It's
| remarkable. Part of our human-ness is our robust written and
| oral histories.
| stavros wrote:
| You could probably go tens of thousands of years back and
| have this still be the case.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| On the flip side, in the year 1200 the average person would
| likely not have considered the people living 800 years before
| them to be all that different from them (unlike many of us
| today).
|
| Perhaps that's a way in which we're less educated than those
| who came before us
| mr_toad wrote:
| Some people living in the 13th-14th century in Europe
| considered the people who lived prior to the fall of the
| Roman Empire to be _more_ civilised and advanced, if not
| actually more intelligent than they were. From their
| perspective the world had gone through a a dark age of
| ignorance and sin, and was only starting to recover.
|
| It wasn't until much later, in the 15th and 16th century
| onwards, that people began to think that they were more
| advanced and accomplished than the ancient Greeks and
| Romans.
| vik0 wrote:
| >in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have
| considered the people living 800 years before them to be
| all that different from them
|
| How do you know this?
|
| And does the average person today really think someone
| living in the year 1200 to be all that different from them
| living in 2025? If so, in what way does this person think
| people 800 years ago are different from us? (I'm asking
| because I don't share your assumptions if this hypothetical
| person were to think on this matter for more than 5
| seconds)
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Seconded!
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| We have some pretty interesting family records, and if I
| look back 200 and 500 (and sometimes longer..) years ago,
| the information we have about family members feels
| remarkably current. There were divorces, economic and
| political challenges, times of prosperity and times of
| struggle. Property changed hands, taxes were levied,
| sometimes family members quarreled and sometimes they
| started new ventures together. The particular skills one
| might need in any one era or the social and political
| environment might change, but the human condition is
| remarkably common throughout the ages.
| nkrisc wrote:
| If you had a time machine and went back 10,000 years and
| adopted a baby from then, no one but geneticists would ever
| know.
|
| Maybe even 100,000.
| sdeframond wrote:
| > you'd find they're just like us.
|
| Yep, and it's good to remember that "us" is still a pretty
| diverse bunch.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| My favorite part of wikipedia's article on Onfim is this
| absurdly understated sentence:
|
| > One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, with
| Onfim's name written next to him, stabbing someone on the
| ground with a lance, with scholars speculating that Onfim
| pictured himself as the knight.
|
| I guess we'll never truly be able to know what Onfim was
| thinking when he drew a knight named "Onfim" stabbing an enemy
| with a lance from horseback. The past is a foreign country, and
| the mind of a child can't be understood anyway.
| archagon wrote:
| It's curious to consider that Onfim probably grew up, toiled,
| had a family, and died with an entire life behind him... yet we
| still think of him as "a boy who lived in Novgorod" because the
| only evidence of his existence is this set of random childhood
| scribbles.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| I think it is pretty controversial and surprising. As Wikipedia
| puts it:
|
| "Debate continues as to whether anatomically modern humans were
| behaviorally modern as well."
|
| Anatomically modern humans emerged 300,000 years ago but
| behaviourally modern humans only date back to 60,000-150,000
| years ago.
| slashdev wrote:
| > I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the
| emergence of anatomically modern humans, you'd find they're
| just like us. I don't think that's particularly controversial
| or surprising, but it's easy to forget that people who came
| long before us were really no different from us (or put
| differently, were no different than them), and it helps to
| better understand history if you think of them that way.
|
| In many ways no different to us, in other ways, knowledge,
| cultural norms, gender roles, morality, etc they are very
| different to us.
|
| We're very tribal and very hostile to people outside of our
| tribe, and what we consider our tribe has slowly expanded over
| time.
|
| Thankfully today we mostly don't form up into raiding parties
| to go kill, rape, and enslave people in the neighboring suburb
| - but that would have been historically a very normal and
| acceptable thing to do.
| ykonstant wrote:
| "If I catch you rascals, I will give you the Darwin award in fine
| arts!"
| anon291 wrote:
| People talk about how hard it is to have kids these days without
| realizing that this sort of chaos was normal for the vast
| majority of humans throughout history and they still achieved
| great things. Part of it is the expectation of others. So what if
| your kids color your book, interrupt your meetings, or cause
| embarrassment in front of your boss. They need to get over it.
|
| Like him or hate, the fact that the Vice President takes his kids
| everywhere is a good reminder of how un-child-friendly our
| societies have become. It's almost transgressive to exist with
| children these days.
| mymacbook wrote:
| Loved this! I took my child to work even when it wasn't the
| specific holiday so she could see what a real exec review
| looked like or how boring work could seem to be. The experiment
| is still running, so I can't tell you the outcome... yet! ;)
| RKFADU_UOFCCLEL wrote:
| This is a good snapshot and piece of history of a mindsets
| freshly tuned into a new way of thinking. Thanks for this, this
| article was a relaxing break in these politically tense times.
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