this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
367 points (95.3% liked)
memes
21607 readers
1188 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'll go further, i reckon i couldve done better than "featherless biped" as the definition of a human.
Honestly they mustve said so much bollocks that people were too embaressed to write down or copy and it was lost to time.
If I recall correctly, "fatherless biped" was an attempt to define a human in the simplest, most basic form, and as short as possible.
I guess they just forgot about gorillas and other primates. Are they classified as bipedal? I mean they don't HAVE to use their arms to move around. It's just more efficient for them...
Of course, I wouldn't have plucked a chicken and presented it ad a fatherless biped, either.. So what do I know lmao
We often take for granted how much information we have about the animal kingdom. Gorillas are native to central Africa; it is highly unlikely Plato ever even met somebody who had seen one. What makes Greek philosophy impressive is how much they were able to accurately describe given the incredibly limited slice of what is now “common knowledge” available to them, and how durable the methods they employed have proven when provided better priors.
At the time, in Greece they thought of apes as monkeys without tails. They also had no reason to think those creatures were particularly bipedal. Or that there was any particular relation to humans. Aristotle was describing Baboons, which walk on all 4s. To Plato, a bird might be the only other creature that walked on two legs. It also has pink skin for what that's worth.
It's easy to forget that the foundation of knowledge we have is so incredibly vast it would be incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks. We learn in elementary school things that people wouldn't work out for centuries.
Imagine telling Diogenes that dolphins are foxes that learned to swim. Or that the giant skulls they keep finding aren't one eyed giants, but the skulls of ancient hairy elephants.
Plato was alive when Greek philosophers decided the earth was round, and it would be a few hundred years before somebody would make the first real calculation of its size.
I doubt Diogenes would care abt the foxes being dolphins so much as how u explained it. If u brought a series of dolphin to fox fossil records he'd accept it but if u come in waving ur hands abt and mumbling something abt dolphins and foxes he'd think ur as insane as him.
Their relationship to humans is irrelevant to being able to walk around just fine on two legs.
My last point was apes fit the "featherles biped" just as much as a plucked chicken, and just as much as we do.
It really just depends on how much knowledge they had of the existence of various primates and how they walk around. I've just seen enough monkeys and apes walking on two legs to consider them a child's understanding of "featherless biped"
My favorite bit of trivia about how much/little we knew about things, we technically discovered steam power thousands of years ago, but only relatively recently in human history figured out how to use it to do things.
Closer to 150 than "a few hundred", don't mind me, just nitpicking a little.
I think geological time, planetary formation & the Big Bang etc would probably be harder to explain and for the greeks to accept than evolution, even though it requires pretty much geological timeframes as well.