First off, I just saw Avatar yesterday and thought it was great. I highly recommend it. Even if you haven't seen it, I don't think this comment will spoil anything for you.
I have a few problems with this review, because the author assumes that the Na'vi must follow the same cultural development path as humans.
I argue that our path to our current culture didn't start with writing, but with agriculture. Agriculture, and later city-building, is all about destroying nature to build a new environment better suited to our needs. What if, because of the deeply interconnected nature of Pandora, the Na'vi evolved to include the surrounding nature in their in-group? That would imply that, for a Na'vi, morality would apply to a tree as much as another Na'vi. Clearing forests for crops would be tantamount to mass murder.
The Na'vi culture is definitely a "Noble savage" stereotype, but note that they have a warrior culture. This implies that they must regularly go to war with other tribes, even if they don't show it in the movie. I also object to citing Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate here. His arguments only apply to human cultures.
"Agriculture, and later city-building, is all about destroying nature "
Destroying ? That's some bias there. How about "altering nature".
Humans are part of nature, and changing things around us is natural. Sometimes it is an act of destruction, but building homes and planting crops hardly fits that description.
> Destroying ? That's some bias there. How about "altering nature".
"Altering"? That's some political correctness there. Looking at what we do, destroying is a far more accurate description.
> Humans are part of nature, and changing things around us is natural.
Using that definition of natural, everything is natural and unnatural has no meaning at all. Makes communicating a point rather hard. Humans are natural and since they build cars, cars must be natural as well?
I didn't say if people do it it must be anti-nature, only that it usually is. We generally alter our environment to suite our needs, not to improve it. I can't think of many instances where our presence has benefited most of the plants and animals and left them better off then before we arrived; can you?
Who cares about them? That's not snark, I mean it seriously. Humans are intelligent creatures with desires. Trees are leafy lumps cellulose. They have no brain, they have no intellect - a tree cannot feel pain or pleasure, joy or sorrow. Sure, it can live or die, but that life has no moral content. The natural world is only valuable insofar as it's useful for creatures that actually are morally relevant - i.e., humans.
That's not saying we should pave the forests - forests are nice, I like having them around. But it's the human desire to have a forest that's meaningful, not the forest itself. If humans want houses more, then it's perfectly acceptable to knock down the trees, turn them into lumber, and build houses with them, and spit-roast the animals over a wood fire in the backyard for the housewarming party.
Moral considerations aside, if life on another planet had evolved with an interconnected signal network then writing or complex artifice might not yield any particular advantage.
As for how that could happen to begin with, perhaps a high magnetic flux from the nearby gas giant would favor the development of sensory organs for that medium. Birds are sensitive to the earth's comparatively weak magnetic field (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature0...) and there are several varieties of fish that can generate electricity inside their bodies and use it to communicate (http://www.livescience.com/animals/060602_electric_fish.html). That aspect didn't seem far-fetched to me.
I was more perplexed by the morphology of some animals - for example I wasn't clear on the benefit of 4 front legs, 4 eyes, and gill-type breathing...but it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the film, which I'm looking forward to seeing again, probably several times. 'see' being the operative word...people complain about the crudity of the dialog, but the win for me is that you could watch it without knowing a word of English and still 'get' the story - which is far easier said than done.
I have a few problems with this review, because the author assumes that the Na'vi must follow the same cultural development path as humans.
I argue that our path to our current culture didn't start with writing, but with agriculture. Agriculture, and later city-building, is all about destroying nature to build a new environment better suited to our needs. What if, because of the deeply interconnected nature of Pandora, the Na'vi evolved to include the surrounding nature in their in-group? That would imply that, for a Na'vi, morality would apply to a tree as much as another Na'vi. Clearing forests for crops would be tantamount to mass murder.
The Na'vi culture is definitely a "Noble savage" stereotype, but note that they have a warrior culture. This implies that they must regularly go to war with other tribes, even if they don't show it in the movie. I also object to citing Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate here. His arguments only apply to human cultures.