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One problem with our planet is that it is an immense interdependent network that is a war of all against all.
Nature is mostly an agglomeration of optimistic free-marketers, and species pursue their own self-interest confident that it will all work out, which usually it does. But every once in a (predictable) while, their policies result in the near-extermination of their own kind, and occasionally in a population crash so complete that not one set of genes is left to propagate.
This seems to be an acceptable risk under the generally accepted accounting practices of evolution. The occasional near-obliteration is almost always a near thing, and that is enough for the machinery of the film of life on the skin of this agglutination of heavy elements from the guts of long-deceased alien suns. Nature gets along with a seven-tenths-of-one-percent solution.
Profligate replication is usually enough to ensure survival of a remnant, and if not, the most successful smaller species figure out how to hunker down on a dry rock until the next rains bring the next sucker within which to carry out a self-destructive life cycle.
Complicated species are less fortunate, and just as the social Darwinists point out, every so often one of ‘em is too blind to ultimate consequences to keep itself going.
The species that meet the greatest array of challenges seem to shift their ecological niches with aplomb, and to form adaptive alliances that keep them going for tens of millennia, unless an asteroid arrives or a volcano erupts in a long-dormant stratum.
The absurd combination of contending options for survival in nature has given birth to quite a few similarly self-destructive metaphors for behavior in history, for those who believe that the doings of nature are like the doings of men, or that the doings of men ought to be like the doings of nature.
The doings of nature are always more complex, and less infinitely wise, than metaphor-making human beings are inclined to think.
Which leads logically to destructive and productive metaphors about “man” and nature, and the discussion of Venantius Fortunatus’ great hymn pange lingua gloriosi proelium that I suppressed a number of posts ago. But that is a digression, and I wish to get on, linearly, to Mike Davis’ convincing 2001 book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
This train of thought was triggered by Pico Iyer’s aforementioned book about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, of course. Late Victorian Holocausts was simply sitting on an adjacent shelf.
( continue???????????????? )
Nature is mostly an agglomeration of optimistic free-marketers, and species pursue their own self-interest confident that it will all work out, which usually it does. But every once in a (predictable) while, their policies result in the near-extermination of their own kind, and occasionally in a population crash so complete that not one set of genes is left to propagate.
This seems to be an acceptable risk under the generally accepted accounting practices of evolution. The occasional near-obliteration is almost always a near thing, and that is enough for the machinery of the film of life on the skin of this agglutination of heavy elements from the guts of long-deceased alien suns. Nature gets along with a seven-tenths-of-one-percent solution.
Profligate replication is usually enough to ensure survival of a remnant, and if not, the most successful smaller species figure out how to hunker down on a dry rock until the next rains bring the next sucker within which to carry out a self-destructive life cycle.
Complicated species are less fortunate, and just as the social Darwinists point out, every so often one of ‘em is too blind to ultimate consequences to keep itself going.
The species that meet the greatest array of challenges seem to shift their ecological niches with aplomb, and to form adaptive alliances that keep them going for tens of millennia, unless an asteroid arrives or a volcano erupts in a long-dormant stratum.
The absurd combination of contending options for survival in nature has given birth to quite a few similarly self-destructive metaphors for behavior in history, for those who believe that the doings of nature are like the doings of men, or that the doings of men ought to be like the doings of nature.
The doings of nature are always more complex, and less infinitely wise, than metaphor-making human beings are inclined to think.
Which leads logically to destructive and productive metaphors about “man” and nature, and the discussion of Venantius Fortunatus’ great hymn pange lingua gloriosi proelium that I suppressed a number of posts ago. But that is a digression, and I wish to get on, linearly, to Mike Davis’ convincing 2001 book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
This train of thought was triggered by Pico Iyer’s aforementioned book about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, of course. Late Victorian Holocausts was simply sitting on an adjacent shelf.
( continue???????????????? )
