Exclusivity...

[tman_ndsu08]

Quote by: Sonart ...but as of right now, however, population remains on the hyperbolic express.

So?!?!

As our population approachs a limit, the rate of population growth will go to zero.

[Plasma Snake[D]]

Yeah, it might reach a peak and start dwindling, or some catastrophic event will do it. But nothing is forever(or at least I think). There are other issues I forgot to explain, like the fact that childbirth sucess rates have been excellent compared to the past(most children died I think, along with moters during childbirth), due to sterile settings and technology. But is this a good thing? is this saying that within our population we are allowing those that have undesirable and unbeneficiary traits to survival to survive, at SOCIETIES EXPENSE. I take part in supporting the elderly, handicapped through taxes. ISNT THIS GOING AGAINST NATURE? under more natural setting half of the people that are alive today would not be here due to the fact that they wouldnt be able to defend against the everyday natural obstacles?

Im just playing devils advocate, ill try to say the things some are afraid to say out of fear of persecution

[gallo]

Quote by: tman_ndsu08 As our population approachs a limit, the rate of population growth will go to zero.

Right. And the reasons that population growth will go to zero is what everyone is talking about. It's called carrying capacity. What will probably happen is that the death rate will begin to grow until it is greater than the birth rate until the population drops below the carrying capacity. The population will then grow again and fall again, etc.

[belverron]

We should start recruiting, Isherwood.

[SteveA]

Quote by: Plasma Snake[D] Yeah, it might reach a peak and start dwindling, or some catastrophic event will do it. But nothing is forever(or at least I think). There are other issues I forgot to explain, like the fact that childbirth sucess rates have been excellent compared to the past(most children died I think, along with moters during childbirth), due to sterile settings and technology. But is this a good thing? is this saying that within our population we are allowing those that have undesirable and unbeneficiary traits to survival to survive, at SOCIETIES EXPENSE. I take part in supporting the elderly, handicapped through taxes. ISNT THIS GOING AGAINST NATURE? under more natural setting half of the people that are alive today would not be here due to the fact that they wouldnt be able to defend against the everyday natural obstacles? Im just playing devils advocate, ill try to say the things some are afraid to say out of fear of persecution

I think there's a problem also, that didn't exist historically, and evolution hasn't been able to plan for it - globalization. Just like we had large plagues in the past when population densities reached a point where a disease could be transmitted and spread faster than than it died off, I think something similar in a social sense can happen also. Historically, bad ideas just like plagues could only spread slowly because most people lived their entire lives within 50 miles of where they were born, except for some rare exceptions. So whether there was a physical or social disease, if it caused problems, it was unlikely to go unresolved for long or the entire community might not recover.

There are other examples of this also - people can bring some parasite or preditor into a new area of the world and cause problems because the local life isn't adept at dealing with this new threat and likely a lot of damage occurs before things can adapt (usually with a costly tradeoff in the process).

On one hand, such events are to some extent unavoidable, and trying to remain isolated isn't always possible nor ideal as things tend to stagnate but I think that trying to make the world into a melting pot, that's vigorously stirred isn't a great idea. It's not hard to see how some cultures are more aggressive or tolerate abuses in some areas that other cultures aren't adept at defending against. This why I see the importance of deterring most attempts at centralization in the world. The 20th Century has plenty of examples of how these pressures to unify/centralize on ever larger scales create worldwide conflicts.

[gallo]

Quote by: SteveA I think there's a problem also, that didn't exist historically, and evolution hasn't been able to plan for it - globalization.

Steve,
evolution doesn't plan. Not now, not then, not ever. NEVER. Evolution is a naturalistic process. Evolution has never, not ever, planned for anything. Not once.

The ideas that you express in the rest of you post would certainly be clarified if you were to take a course in ecology and/or population genetics. Your ideas are a bit muddled so I'm not quite sure what you are saying.

[SteveA]

Quote by: gallo Steve, evolution doesn't plan. Not now, not then, not ever. NEVER. Evolution is a naturalistic process. Evolution has never, not ever, planned for anything. Not once. The ideas that you express in the rest of you post would certainly be clarified if you were to take a course in ecology and/or population genetics. Your ideas are a bit muddled so I'm not quite sure what you are saying.

Evolution doesn't plan but it builds defenses. It's like being innoculated - if a society hasn't been exposed to certain ideas and those ideas are introduced and take hold, it can take some time for people to learn and adapt to them.

For example, if a society has never experienced tyrrany, and someone with less than ideal motives attempts to subjugate the population, it's easier to accomplish than in another society that has learned about these dangers.

One of the main ones I'm thinking of specifically regards trust and charity. Before people were able to migrate easily, people lived in relatively isolated communities. In that environment where societies were small and people grew up knowing each other, there were fewer opportunities for someone to take advantage of a charitable culture, but that's not as true now. Someone can take advantage of those charitable attributes that were developed in the past, and then simply 'move on' to greener pastures once things have soured in some area. Or also, with a lot of the redistribution that's possible now (on a truly global scale) it's now possible for people in some area to no longer be self sufficient if there are people elsewhere willing to subsidize the losses. You can see this happening on the level of states in the U.S. When it comes to a lot of federal funding, there are donor states and recipient states. You can also see this occur with some special/elite government interests - there's little requirement for things to be self-sufficient as long as there's a culture left somewhere that still produces enough to make up for the losses and is charitable (or subdued) enough to pay for these costs.

So we've lost some of the natural social protections we had hundreds of years ago. We don't have physical plagues now but I think there are some social ones.

[Plasma Snake[D]]

Hmm... I see what you are trying to say. Like I think we werent "supposed" to develop plastics and all this other stuff that just seems so unnatural. Who knows what ways all this new technology subconsciously interacts with us. Like we no longer have to hunt for food, we just have to go and buy it(it's kinda remotely like hunting but not really).... I wonder how this affects us??? THERE HAS TO BE SOME TYPE OF NEGATIVE EFFECT ON US. I just don't have the power to think it up!

Your idea sounds alot like the book Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, where he talks about the power of ideas and how they spread just like those frogs in Australia(haha dumb weak aussie habitat).

But wait, nowadays, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are missing in america. Little to no civil strife, little to no famine, little to no disease, but death is always here. These things are what keep populations down usually, So can one say that too little or too much of these evil "four horsemen" there would be disastrous results? Like those hippies with their chants for peace. I dont think a peaceful world is a valid concept. Fighting is what makes us better as a species.

[Jack]

We should start recruiting, Isherwood.

The timing is indeed propitious, belverron. I'll go stand in front of my local grocery store and ask people if they'd like to consider turning gay to save the planet. Should I take flyers and my copy of "Becoming Gay for Dummies" or just wing it?

[SteveA]

Quote by: Plasma Snake[D] Hmm... I see what you are trying to say. Like I think we werent "supposed" to develop plastics and all this other stuff that just seems so unnatural. Who knows what ways all this new technology subconsciously interacts with us. Like we no longer have to hunt for food, we just have to go and buy it(it's kinda remotely like hunting but not really).... I wonder how this affects us??? THERE HAS TO BE SOME TYPE OF NEGATIVE EFFECT ON US. I just don't have the power to think it up! Your idea sounds alot like the book Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, where he talks about the power of ideas and how they spread just like those frogs in Australia(haha dumb weak aussie habitat). But wait, nowadays, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are missing in america. Little to no civil strife, little to no famine, little to no disease, but death is always here. These things are what keep populations down usually, So can one say that too little or too much of these evil "four horsemen" there would be disastrous results? Like those hippies with their chants for peace. I dont think a peaceful world is a valid concept. Fighting is what makes us better as a species.

I agree with most all your post except the last sentence 'Fighting is what makes us better as a species' seems to need cautions as it's overly simplistic.

Change is inevitable and so adapting to it is important. But fighting in itself isn't something 'better' from my view and though conflicts will always exist, a 'better' society could resolve these conflicts without the need for fighting. That's not easy to accomplish and might require fighting to achieve, but the fighting itself is an unnecessary cost and having a system that rarely needed to resort to it would be more prosperous, IMO.

I guess overall it depends on exactly what you mean by 'fighting'. If you mean it in the sense of forcibly inflicting harm, though it might be unavoidable at times, it's not an ideal of a better society as it's simply destructive and (at least mostly) unnecessary. There are ways of resolving most conflicts via. 'healthy' competition instead.

What you want to do is have a system where the evolutionary pressures are against destructive conflict. If you allow people to survive off the value others create, then you're favoring an evolution of a system that tends to culminate in an unsustainable parasitic relationship.

Since you appear more environmentally concerned, look at the effects that property taxes have - they tax more heavily when someone maintains or improves the value of the land. Whereas, it reduces the burden for people who destroy the land value. So if someone torches a forest, their taxes are lowered, whereas people who keep their environment clean have higher valued land and yet pay more. So they pay twice, once for improving things and secondarily in the form of a subsidy to equalize land value with people who trash their land. (There are a ton of other similar examples, but I'll pass on detailing them here but most of them stem from theft of private property values)

So I think the emphasis should be trying to assure the evolutionary pressures in a culture are toward something better, by assuring harmful actions are discouraged, and productive ones, rewarded. Anything else seems to ultimately evolve into a stagnant and declining quality of life for everyone.

[Plasma Snake[D]]

I was thinking in a sense of "weeding out the weaklings", as I heard many times before, and it makes somewhat of sense to me. Darwin described it as natural selection, and I think that it is somehow related to disease, civil strife, and famine, meaning strenous conditions that sort of reduces the unneccesary or unfavorable traits in the survival sense. It grows exponentially inter and intraspecies(whatever). meaning that we(an individual) are tied to a hierarchy of levels, like we belong to a family, which belongs to a country(or whatever)which are a species, which are part of a system of animals working with and against each other.

[Compugasm]

Even plants compete with eachother for sunlight.

[Plasma Snake[D]]

What the heck is that green-thing-avatar you got, Compugasm? It looks like something out of Megaman.