User:Quercus solaris/Childlike anthropocentric ontologic confusion regarding biology topics

One area in which we have lots of work yet to do is a certain childlike anthropocentric ontologic confusion regarding biology topics. Some large percentage of Wikipedia articles on biology topics, especially on animalian biology, and most especially on mammalian biology, contain the most glaring and childlike anthropocentric ontologic confusion.

The worst (most glaring) examples have been, that is, continually are being, fixed as we go, but plenty still remain. The easy and archetypical examples, which I place here for the purpose of showing glaringly obvious examples even if those are mostly already fixed, are along the lines of the following, with grossly observable body parts and major categories of substances:

• "The head is the part of a person that ..." (Stop right there—many animals have heads)
• "A bone is a part of the human body that ..." (Stop right there—many animals have bones)
• "A hormone is a substance in the human body that ..." (Stop right there—many animals have hormones, and so do plants)
  • As of 2022, Wikipedia has no article on vasopressin in the wide sense of that term (across taxa) but rather only an article on human vasopressin, which is an instantiation of arginine vasopressin; but Wikipedia does not title that article either "human vasopressin" (most accurately) nor "arginine vasopressin" but rather just "vasopressin", because WP:COMMONNAME allows for such instances whereby natural language often invokes hypernyms to mean their principal hyponymous subsets, where "principal" is defined by human sentience with regard to essentially anthropocentric criteria such as economic importance (applications), human health care and other human interests, and so on. And if Wikipedia someday has an article for the pan-taxon sense, it might end up titling it on some pattern such as "vasopressin ([qualifier])", because the title "vasopressin" will still point to the article on human vasopressin (because WP:COMMONNAME). Which is silly from some logical viewpoints. But there you go.

Other examples:

• When a bacterial species that is ubiquitous in soil and important in the normal breakdown of organic matter (and thus important to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle generally) is misapprehended as being first and foremost a human pathogen. Even when it is commensal among the skin flora and gut flora, infections with it aren't especially common, and, when they do occur, they can usually be successfully treated.
• When a vasoactive substance is defined as a pharmaceutical drug that has vascular activity. Hello? Life invented vasoactive substances hundreds of millions of years before humans ever invented any drug; for example, vasoactive intestinal peptide was vasoactive long before any humans existed to name it with a name that includes the word vasoactive, and angiotensin was busy doing its angio-tensing long before those combining forms existed to describe it. (The same is also true of vasopressin, which was doing its vaso-pressing long before those combining forms existed to describe it.) And even today, the principal example of vasoactivity in humans is still the everyday miracle of human homeostasis via systems like the renin–angiotensin system. Yes, vasoactive drugs are vital for those who need them, and of course the article will contain plenty of coverage of that. But everyone's blood vessels are constantly being tweaked by the endogenous vasoactive substances. You'd be dead in minutes if they weren't, and so would I and everyone else. But gee, because most of us are lucky enough to be able to blithely ignore them most of the time, because they work fine on their own without our conscious intervention, somehow we imagine that vasoactivity is first and foremost (or, according to the way we tend to draft encyclopedia article ledes, solely) "a thing having to do with medications." I think the coining of a word like "autopharmacology" reflects this essentially backward thinking. But somehow people have been surprised at the discovery of "autopharmacologic" analogues to drugs. Probably not so much anymore, now that molecular biology is fairly advanced; but certainly back when that word was coined. It feels analogous to extraterrestrials from a world without grass seeing grass and naming it "naturally occurring Astroturf" or something stupid like that.

As for the Wikipedian instances of such confusion: although the easy examples have been fixed, there are many articles on individual proteins, hormones, enzymes, cells, diseases, and so on that are chock-full of this. And the funny thing is that unless you trout-slap people with the silly obvious ones, they can barely manage to understand the point. They have to stretch their minds to understand the subtler examples—to see what the point is. That's the childlike aspect of the problem, to my mind. It reflects the overly egocentric mindset: "what anything is" is defined by what it is to my most emotionally stirring self-interests. A bone is a part of [my] [human] body that can have something go wrong with it, at which time I will pay attention to its existence and ontologic identity. A hormone is a substance in [my] [human] body that may affect how attractive I look or how much weight I can lose, at which time I will pay attention to its existence and ontologic identity (and its retail price, and what discounts I can finagle). Before that, who gives a shit; who possibly could give a shit, and how and why, when there are playoffs to collect stats on, and gossip to gossip about, and awards shows to bet on, and sports cars to ogle?

Of course, childlike doesn't mean "not present in adults"—not by a long shot. So much of this is the default mode of human cognition. And yes, one can understand why we think this way by default. But it's really creating a ton of inefficiencies and fuck-ups now that we have spread across the planet by the billions and can affect the planet substantially (on industrial and postindustrial scale) with our material habits and choices. What are bacteria? "Bacteria are tiny icky bad things that we need to annihilate to protect our health." Uh, no, that's always been completely wrong, as it is true of only a small subset—and yet it's pretty much the dominant default human understanding of bacteria, even today, a time by which we should have long since known better. And sure, plenty of people do know better—but population-wide, we still haven't managed, in aggregate, to know how to be custodians of antimicrobial use, or of soil, and to effectively implement that knowledge. The emotionally stirring self-interest continues to get in the way.

Which is not to say that centering thoughts on human needs is entirely bad—in fact, it is necessary, but on a level higher than the one where it has typically operated to date—that of the self, and the self's kid, and the self's wallet, and the self's mirror and bathroom scale and sex life and pecking order rank. To manage entire systems in sustainable ways, we have to take centrism to the next level—from self to species; and the species level, to succeed at all, requires the biome and environment as well as the bunch of primates themselves (and each one's wallet and bathroom scale), just as surely as a bunch of sentient fish would have nothing on fish species preservation without water existence and sufficiency and water quality.

Just have to keep chipping away, year after year, decade after decade, and hope progress happens fast enough.

In fairness, it must be admitted that humans are generally as unconfused as they can duly be expected to be, given the constraints, which is to say, given (the limits of) their nature and (the limits of) their circumstances.

If ETs exist, we can hope that they appreciate that fact. And if they are already observing our little petri dish, as some people believe, then we can expect that either (1) they are already showing forbearance that reflects such appreciation or (2) they have agreed among themselves not to introduce any confounding variables (at least not yet).