Flaws of humanism

My friend Mengsen discussed how people see amazing things in human society and assume it must have been created in prompt fashion:

For example, the belief that a social contract or something like that suddenly emerged, and only, in human society, is like a theory of “the civilization of atoms” saying “suddenly, a group of special atoms were created. After a short period of chaos or aggressiveness, they finally sit down and discuss how to set things right.  Later they made an agreement called DNA to keep social order. But in local conversations you can still hear something like: ‘you know the ATP girl? She’s completely a whore.  And the clover-looking dude…he talks too much.’”

Oftentimes ‘uniquely human’ is really not something unique to humans.  In a great article, Selin Kesebir notes “slime molds bear a striking resemblance to human beings.”  The context is that “When food is abundant, slime molds are invisibly dispersed on damp forest soils and wander around as single cells. But when the conditions deteriorate, these cells secrete chemicals that make the individual cells coalesce into a multicellular body. This body then crawls as a single superorganism, and once a better spot is found, cells are dispersed again and return to their single-cell life.”  This is similar to how humans behave, when, for example, they “rally around the President” after a perceived threat to the country.