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<blockquote data-quote="zubenelgenubi" data-source="post: 4950834" data-attributes="member: 63706">Really? Humans are natural parts of the ecosystem. Our ability to organize things and use tools is natural. &quot;Natural&quot; is just another word that has been misused so much that it doesn&#039;t mean much anymore. Why are some animals able to be domesticated and not others? Why do we ride horses but not zebras?Anyway, I was introduced to the idea of the problem of &quot;overpopulation&quot; when we learned about exponential growth and doubling periods. The example given was bacteria growing in a bottle. Assuming the bacteria grew at such a rate that their doubling period was one day, the bacteria would soon fill the bottle. But eliminating half the bacteria wouldn&#039;t do much, because they would fill the bottle again the next day. Adding another bottle wouldn&#039;t do much, because it would be filled the next day and you would need two more bottles the next day, and so on. This frightened me because the implication is that is what&#039;s happening with human population. Then, I came to realize, while that was a good example for explaining doubling periods, it really had no connection to how bacteria actually live. If you had a bottle with bacteria, left to its own devices, they would starve, dehydrate, or drown in their own waste before they could ever fill the bottle. That&#039;s still a very extreme example that doesn&#039;t directly translate to the human population growth issues, and it&#039;s many, multifaceted factors. The assumption behind your world views is that intelligence is unnatural, meaning bad. That makes zero sense, because humans are nature.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="zubenelgenubi, post: 4950834, member: 63706"] Really? Humans are natural parts of the ecosystem. Our ability to organize things and use tools is natural. "Natural" is just another word that has been misused so much that it doesn't mean much anymore. Why are some animals able to be domesticated and not others? Why do we ride horses but not zebras? Anyway, I was introduced to the idea of the problem of "overpopulation" when we learned about exponential growth and doubling periods. The example given was bacteria growing in a bottle. Assuming the bacteria grew at such a rate that their doubling period was one day, the bacteria would soon fill the bottle. But eliminating half the bacteria wouldn't do much, because they would fill the bottle again the next day. Adding another bottle wouldn't do much, because it would be filled the next day and you would need two more bottles the next day, and so on. This frightened me because the implication is that is what's happening with human population. Then, I came to realize, while that was a good example for explaining doubling periods, it really had no connection to how bacteria actually live. If you had a bottle with bacteria, left to its own devices, they would starve, dehydrate, or drown in their own waste before they could ever fill the bottle. That's still a very extreme example that doesn't directly translate to the human population growth issues, and it's many, multifaceted factors. The assumption behind your world views is that intelligence is unnatural, meaning bad. That makes zero sense, because humans are nature. [/QUOTE]

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