of course it has. nature has caused multiple mass extinctions. we're currently losing species at a rate unknown during a non-mass extinction period. and i will concede that part of that may be that we know of more species now, so there are more to lose, but the point remains that species loss is a big fucking deal.Wesley wrote:Species loss we DO play a roll in, but even then should not the question be asked "does species loss matter?" Sure, personally, I think it does for what are essentially personal reasons, but in nature--even though it can take long periods of time--mother nature has adapted, bred, destroyed, and replaced species many times without the help or hindrance of mankind.
ever take aspirin? it comes from salicylic acid, which comes from the bark willow trees. what about diabetics? before some newer molecular techniques we had to grow pig cells from which to extract insulin. we need other species to survive. species need other species to survive. ecological webs are complex, and there is not a linear relationship between number of species and productivity - a community can only take so many hits before it collapses entirely.
Bill, how else do you know if a species is extinct? But it's not random, all species have home ranges, and biologists are well educated on where to look. And that's not quite right about the production of new species. Sometimes new species are formed from hybrids of old species. Sometimes by accumulated genetic change. What allows them to survive is that they have a niche they can exploit. In African lakes there are hundreds of species of cichlids that all coexist and live in the same place, to our eyes, but they feed on different things (algae on rocks, algae on dead fish, etc.) and that has allowed them to become reproductively isolated (unable to breed together) and led to speciation.DollarBill wrote:You know how they tell if species are extinct? They look for them... They look for them in a small area and then expand their findings. It's all guess work. Besides, if species don't die out, how are others to rise up?
we cannot remove ourselves from natural selection no matter how smart we are. natural selection is differential survival and reproduction and there is no way we can stop that - not everyone gets to reproduce, those that do don't have the same number of offspring.Wesley wrote:Are we merely the fittest species to yet come along (and would we not deserve, too, to be wiped out by any superior mechanical species we then construct) and thus we are granted immunity in our dealings with other, less-fit species? OR...have we become so smart as to effectively remove ourself from nature, from our status as "animal," and put ourselves on a course of sheperding that which we see as weaker and susecptible to our own craven ravengings?
sure, Bill, the world will keep on going, and it will change as it has since it was formed. and of course my concern for this is fear for humans - as i said above we depend on other species to live, and i think it's stupid to pretend that we could live without other species. preserving other species is preserving our own existence. and why wouldn't you support that?DollarBill wrote:The world is fine. People who are afraid of global warming aren't fearing for the world. They are fearing for humans. The earth is such a complicated system that we shouldn't pretend to try and understand it, much less have the balls to think that we could destroy it in a hundred years.
