4 Totally False Things People Think They Know About Nature

These fascinating accounts from Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You reveal the candid truth about “gentle” Mother Nature’s true colors.

1. Mother Nature is Balanced

Via animals.nationalgeographic.com

It might seem on the surface like animals and plants are coordinating themselves around some kind of innate harmony, but the truth is that all animals are just doing everything they can to pass on copies of their DNA. When you see a balanced ecosystem, you’re seeing those creatures in a stalemate, holding one another back from taking over. Add one new species or take one species out, and you might see the whole house of cards collapse and regrow as some new kind of order. Animals are so hell-bent on passing their own DNA on, that some species will even kill their own siblings. Baby sandtiger sharks kill and eat their brothers and sisters before they’re even born!

2. Mother Nature tells us what relationships should be

Via scribol.com

People talk about heterosexual relationships as “natural,” or defend same-sex relationships with evidence that sometimes animals have homosexual sex. It’s all hogwash. If you allow nature to write your rule book, you open a can of woms that includes a lot of things that don’t belong in a human’s bedroom. Maybe there’s no harm emulating penis-fencing flatwoms, cross-dressing cuttlefish, or even necrophiliac frogs, but there’s certainly no place in our lives for the bedbug habit of stabbing females in the abdomen with a kifelike penis to inject sperm, is there?

3. Mother Nature is trying to make us healthy

Via riversideonline.com

Plants evolved just like we did, under the same set of rules - pass on your DNA to the next generation or you vanish. Plants did not evolve with any intention of helping us survive. Instead, we adapted to the plants that are out there - and not very many of them, frankly. Out of an estimated 250,000 plants in the world, we get 90% of our calories from fifteen (0.006%), and those are largely species that have been bred by humans for millenia to make them healthy for us. If you expand the list to include all the plants we take even a little nibble out of - things like paprika - we still eat less than an eighth of all plant species out there. Chomp a plant at random, and you’ll likely come across thorns, irritating chemical compounds, ant defenders, or worse, poisons like cyanide! All of those are there just to make you UNhealthy!

4. Nature is gentle

Via animals.nationalgeographic.com

There’s this idea that predators in nature only take what they need, but in one instance a wolverine was recorded killing ten reindeer in a single day, and then eight the following day, surely way more food than it needs. Killer whales will beat the living tar out of even baby seals before eating them. Vegetarian animals, like orangutans, sometimes help themselves to a tasty meat snack, even when the victim is as cute as a button They’re not gentle. If anything, evolution favors animals that don’t hesitate to kill when they can (and don’t even get me started on venoms!)

Besides, predators aren’t even the creatures in nature you need to worry about. More than half of all the animals in the world are parasites, many of which feed on humans. You can get an eyeball-eating amoeba, brain-eating amoeba or just your run-of-the-mill African sleeping sickness, malaria, or schistosomiasis.