Add this to my "weird reasons for hope" tag:

You know, the more I learn about people - about myself, society, psychology, language - the more I begin to think that a truly shocking number of conflicts - interpersonal and large scale - can be explained by some combination of:

Cognitive biases x, x

The fact that we're generally accidentally insulting each other all the time without realizing it, actually x, x, x, x

The fact that there have been a lot of different explanations for How Things Are and How Things Came to Be, believed in very strongly by different groups and people throughout history, and a hell of a lot of those explanations have now been empirically disproven (e.g., the earth is four billion years old, not six thousand) x, x, x

Trauma/intergenerational trauma and epigenetics x, x, x

50% child mortality rate for all of human history until the past 150 years, and much higher rates and younger ages of adult mortality, too x, x

All that constant heavy metal poisoning in Europe and North America from the late 1700s to like the 1970s-1990s (highly correlated with increased aggression and lower IQ*) x, x, x, x *ETA: IQ is a fundamentally flawed concept. It has a lot of issues and has been used to perpetuate a lot of bullshit and justify even more horrible bullshit. However, as the second source argues, it does look like it's a useful measure of cognitive damage and certain neuropsychological processes

Scarcity (x) and especially:

Europeans were historically pretty bad at agriculture and medicine, actually, but they decided they knew best and killed or persecuted everyone who disagreed with them and forced their shitty methods on the whole world via colonialism x, x, x, x, x, x

(Yes, and also capitalism, but everything on that list is older than capitalism, which coalesced in the mid-/late-1700s and early 1800s x, x; the first known use of the word "capitalism" is 1833 x)

i feel like if this was a strategy game, that human culture just moved up a level by creating this; the perfect stew.

By Sailko - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89662026

Living about 2.6-2.5 million years ago, Australopithecus garhi (garhi meaning 'surprise' in the Afar language) lived in the Afar Region of Ethiopia during the early part of the Pleistocene. They were adapted to both living among the trees and walking bipedally like other Australopithecus species, though they have longer legs, possibly indicating a 'delayed adolescent growth spurt' more like modern humans than modern non-human apes, which don't experience such growth spurts. Though this could also mean they either matured more slowly than non-human apes or that their legs grew more rapidly than the rest of their body. Research is still on-going.

When they were described in 1999, there weren't many hominin remains from between about 3-2 million years ago, with the only identified species being A africanus and Paranthropus aethiopicus. The researchers concluded that A garhi was an offshoot rather than a direct ancestor because of the lack of shared traits between the Homo genus and A garhi.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09248

Its power seems inescapable.

So did the divine right of kings.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

Resistance and change often begin in art,

and very often in our art, the art of words."

To start I've seen this talked about a lot in relation to Trump trying to sign an executive order that categorizes people's sex by "the gametes they have at conception" There's so many issues with this. A zygote is not producing gametes at conception, it's a single cell. A zygote carries the genetic coding for which sex you are but genes are not the final determination and only make up part of your sex. For example, you may have an SRY gene which is the catalyst for male development but it may be damaged and not expressed. A person may present entirely as one sex but not be able to produce gametes, Sex isn't just one characteristic.

Once a fetus begins developing its organs it doesn't just start out with female anatomy which can then "become male anatomy if you have the genes for it" We actually start out with undifferentiated gonads (which are still not producing gametes) and two duct systems, one that can become the female reproductive organs and one that can become the male. They're called the Müllerian and Wolffian ducts. (Science illustration so you know I'm not just pulling this out of my ass)

The Princess of Wales attends the attend The Future Workforce Summit, hosted by The Royal Foundation Business Taskforce for Early Childhood, on 18 November 2025 in London, England.

The Summit is set to bring together the UK's most influential business leaders in the hope of driving further action and investment in the early years.

📸 Adrian Dennis - WPA Pool / Ilyas Tayfun Salci / Anadolu / Getty Images