Tag Archive: Westercon

Yes, humans are the best predators

Yesterday I stopped by Westercon for the quick whirlwind tour. It being Thursday, the programming was fairly light and I occasionally got the feeling that I was the only person there who wasn’t on a panel, but I’m working through one of the most bizarrely busy weeks ever so yesterday was my one chance to check it out.

I think what most surprised me was the dragon panel, which I went into as kind of placeholder since there wasn’t much else in the timeslot, but turned into a really interesting discussion of the philosophical and psychological role of dragons in human literature. Which, probably inevitably, led to the guy who claims that humans aren’t really Earth’s apex predator, because we got to the top of the food chain by “cheating.”

This idea keeps popping up, and it never makes any sense. The fallacy is pretty basic: You can’t cheat when there are no rules.

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