Babble much?

"Civilization" is just a thin varnish on Man. When confronted with Nature putting things back where they belong, Humanity will be no different than a pack of wild animals.

Take Las Vegas, cut off all the water, gas and electricity... wait 2 weeks... and come see who has survived.

Today as much as in 1942, "Ashes Ashes" by Barjavel is more real than ever.

"In the year 2052, the world depends entirely on electricity so when the electrical phenomenon unexpectedly disappears, a lot of problems happen. François Deschamps, an engineer specialized in farming, leaves Paris with ten companions and two horses with the hope to reach the south of France. Cholera, huge forest fires and looters will be the main enemies of the group before Deschamps is at last able to create a new rural society depending on people's work and not on mechanical energy."

Non-civilized critters just don't behave that way. Even blood enemies such as lions and hyenas, which war with each other incessantly, never set out to make each other extinct. Animals kill directly for food, for defense, or occasionally (as in the above example) for revenge. They don't make attempts to wipe each other out, either through warfare or cutting off enemies' access to food, or anything of that sort. It's a collection of observed behaviors that has loosely been termed the "law of limited competition," followed by all species except for a very few nasty sorts. Wild species make war - but Total War is an invention of civilized humans.

Sorry, I find this completely wrong.

Speciation, by its very nature, involves wiping out your predecessor.

On the limited time scale we can observe, it appears that lions and hyenas and jaguars coexist with some sort of "limited competition" governing their existence, but this is just an illusion created by the brevity of our humanity.

What happened to the trilobite? The T Rex? The Archeopteryx? The Ichthyosaur?

It's easy to think, "environmental changes" and leave it at that, but that misses the crux of evolution.

The Ichthyosaur is gone because it was driven to extinction by its competitors.

In effect, the mere process of living kills competitors. If you walk through the forest and collect ten thousand acorns to feed your family, then you most certainly killed a squirrel indirectly.

Likewise, the fern type plants that dominated the planet for so long were driven to extinction by the angiosperms.

Humans, with a few exceptions, have never intentionally exterminated a species. We've killed thousands, for sure, but all but a few are simply casualties of our success. WE DRINK THEIR MILKSHAKE.

The point is, after you get past the thylacine and a few other pest-type animals that we hunted to extinction, the rest are no different than the rose killing the daffodil because it drank the water and used the nutrients better.

Don't confuse immorality with intent on this one. We're immoral for letting it happen, but it's not by design, it's collateral.

The crucial difference, the one that makes our collective destructive behaviours almost comedic in their epic scale, is sentience. We've got frontal lobes, we can imagine our own deaths, plan for the future, understand the past, truly know the impact of our actions. Monarchs, and all the other species have an excuse- they haven't got the hardware. That and the fact that they aren't the ones gobbling up all the agar, anyway...

Well, yes, but this isn't exactly the point. Of course species drive other species to extinction - happens all the time. For instance, when any brand new predator is introduced into a territory, several extinctions are likely to follow. Species, of course, compete with each other to the utmost of their ability, and when there is a clash for resources only the most successful get to go move on. But when one species drives another to extinction, it does so either through overhunting that species, or through directly out-competing them for some shared resource. What a wild species does not do is to wage total war on a rival species in order to secure access to a shared resource, which is precisely the example you made above. The monarch butterfly would certainly compete with us for any shared resource to the utmost of its ability, and perhaps even wage war (if it were a more aggressive species) when it came upon us attempting to harvest that resource. But what it would never, ever do is attempt to exterminate us in order to secure access to the resource for which we compete. That sort of behavior is solely the domain of civilized humans, who learned to exterminate the animals that competed with us for our preferred foods, and to exterminate the weeds that were competing with our preferred foods for their shared resource (arable land) - and so on. (Other than us, the only species I can think of off the top of my head that behaves in anything approaching this fashion is the Japanese wasp, which will kill off a whole colony of honeybees to secure access to its preferred food, honey. There are probably a few others that I'm not thinking of, but by and large, wild species simply do not behave the way we do toward our competitors.) This same basic strategy drives our global economy today, whether we are exterminating some weeds or an entire forest with all its inhabitants. Looking at it this way, I cannot view the current rash of extinctions as accidental, "collateral damage." It is deliberate, part and parcel of our basic growth strategy, and has been for the past ten thousand years.

Applying your logic in the world of the sentient human animal, life is a series of conspiracies in other words, Olifatti. Elaborate behaviour camouflaged in a raft of social devices designed to secure prominence in the pecking order.The one that persist despite all the odds is clearly the superior one, am I correct?

Sorry but you haven't a clue. Your post is pure BS. You are just making stuff up and writing fancy-like to make yourself sound smart. You forget that some of us on this world wide web have actual training in evolutionary ecology. You may be able to fool some, but not all.

By the way, it would seem to me a tad difficult for lions and jaguars to compete with each other. I will leave it up to you to figure out why. Here's a hint: think continents.

Regards, from one doc to another.

Well put Dr. Gray! +1

I seem to recollect a problem with illegal Mexican jaguars at the border to the Kruger National Park. Of course, they weren't any match for the resident lions who quickly had them working for minimal pay.

Hilarious!

Scientists warn caribou collapse not unlike disappearance of cod stocks

link

Ahh, the irrepressible Dr. Gray, my old nemesis! How goes thee?

Seriously, the writing you quoted wasn't "fancy" at all. I tone it down for this board.

Good catch on the Jaguar - I was thinking of Leopard, but, when you write off the cuff, these things slip by.

I noticed you said I was completely wrong without saying why. Why? Enlighten us non-trained EE folks.

My premise is simple.

Life is nothing but a fight for survival. Any species will breed to maximum potential, and, to the extent it can, will be happy to wipe out any competitors. The only thing that separates us in this regard from other animals is that we're exceptionally good at it and we have, in theory, a choice.

I didn't realize I was your nemesis, but it does sound kind of cool. Glad to hear you toned down the fancy talk for us. No worries about the Jaguar vs Leopard. Could happen to the best of us.

You are right that I didn't say why. I just didn't know where to start. And wasn't really in the mood to get into it. But your synopsis helps me to focus my thoughts. So here goes:

Life can be a fight for survival, but really these words are an example of anthropomorphism. I feel that you are attributing human characteristics and motivations to non-human animals. Most animals are not out fighting with other animals everyday just to get a meal or a mate or a place to call home. Fights for resources certainly occur, but fighting is extremely energy intensive, and avoided when at all possible. When it occurs, it is more often individuals of the same species rather than lion to hyena, for instance. Instead of competing with other species to win, successful species will instead seek out an unoccupied niche within their ecosystem. And when I say seek, I mean it as an unconscious evolutionary adaptation.

As far as any species breeding to maximum potential and being happy to wipe out any competitors, well that is simplistic and again anthropomorphic. You probably didn't mean it in this way, but happiness is a human emotion that we have no way of knowing if non-human animals experience. (Please, I would appreciate it if no one at this point invokes their domesticated pet as proof of the contrary. The point is not whether they do or not, but that we cannot say for sure.) And if it is a successful, well-established species, they have no need to wipe out competitors per above. Breeding to maximum potential I would agree with. But I disagree with the implied meaning. Life is really about perpetuation of one's genetic material. Thus, it is advantageous to breed to your potential. That does not mean overtaking the world by sheer numbers. It means having offspring that are likely to have offspring. This is dependent on a myriad of factors for a given species and can actually mean having fewer progeny. Overpopulation does not ensure survival.

Actually, there's really very little that separates us from other animals. We are on a short list of those that can make use of tools. And we have an incredibly large brain. But that's about it. Unfortunately, those two things have gotten us into a world of trouble it would seem.

Whether or not we have a choice, that's a tough one. Suffice it to say we actually have much less 'choice' in our behaviours than most of us believe. This is by no means an excuse for bad behaviour. But that is the short version of human ethology. We could literally have a semester long course on choice as it relates to human behaviour.

There you go.
Cheers.

Reminds me an awful lot of Reg Morrisons writings on the genetic imperatives that drive us as a species, amongst our equally driven fellow species, including the tendency to mysticism. Somewhat less anthropocentric and refreshingly objective.