No, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this.
If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
No, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.
As a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment
No previous era of cruelty has threatened the existence of life itself. Corporate greed is the most hideous, horrific, inhumane era of human culture that has ever been.
In the real world, two out of these four people vote to protect the poisoner because poison is a conspiracy against the freedom to feed children anything you want.
It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
"Better", as in, capable as a civilization of avoiding doing things that are incredibly harmful according to their own morals. Capable of defeating their own Moloch, if you will.
Even looking only at different cultures, saying nothing of nature, the degree to which people are willing to cooperate or defect against the group varies widely. The level of trust varies widely.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
We really are one fucked up species. But can evolution even produce anything better? Anything that's not so prone to coordination problems?
If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
There are too few of us who understand asymmetric risk, and too many in power who are willing to roll the dice for the entire species for profit.
Realistically, it will have to get much, much, worse before it gets any better.
IMO this is part of the natural evolutionary cycle.
glyphosate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
asbestos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc
It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua