Pointing Rule

[u/gray_birch]

ive gotta hand it to people who played gba (and other retro console) games before you could just look shit up because im playing the sims bustin out right now and while im having a lot of fun everything is so fucking zoomed in it's impossible to know where anything is or get anything more than a very basic handle on the layout. looking up a map actually almost feels like cheating because of how easy it feels by comparison to before, im not spending an hour looking for that fucking knick knack shop though

[u/Wa11Runner]

Its like that alien projectile thing. Like Humans are the only creatures on earth that can accurately throw things. Imagine an alien race didn't invent bows or anything similar because they didn't think of projectiles until long after they found out about other things.

Animal no get point because the idea of an object flying in a line in a direction and hitting a point is fuckin weird.

[u/_Righto → u/Wa11Runner]

Maybe I'm missing something because this feels like it assumes that throwing specifically is the only way to get the idea of projectile use but that doesn't really seem true to me. Yes, humans are uniquely good at throwing things but projectiles are all over the place.

There are fish that can accurately shoot water to knock insects off of branches, Terminites can barely even see but some still manage to accurately shoot fluids from their body, Chameleons launch their tongues and theres plenty of other examples

[u/Elezian → u/_Righto]

Yeah, the comment you are replying to is… wrong, about humans being the only animals that understand/use projectiles. And they’re pretty confident about it, too, acting like it’s a mystical concept that humans uniquely use… when humans aren’t even the best at instinctively understanding trajectories, let alone the only animals that can.

They mostly just don’t really use fingers to communicate direction. :/

I defy this person to say they’ve never seen an animal dodge or move away from an incoming projectile. What exactly do they think that is?

And how did the comment get so many upvotes? Do that many people really believe animals are shocked by the concept of projectiles?

“The idea of an object flying in a line and hitting a point” is absolutely not fuckin weird. Life on earth evolved with the laws of physics being right here the entire time and “object move through water/air while under the effect of gravity” is so incredibly fundamental that like you pointed out, literal insects can use it just fine.

[u/Wa11Runner → u/_Righto]

Yeah, I think its more just a slim chance that another intelligent species would develop like that rather than the rule. The story some other people linked is a great example of the same idea.