Thread: What is the Great Pacific trash patch? And why dont you care?

Off topic but I just wanted to address this fallacy ...

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

All complex biological organisms are designed to live within their means. Human beings are an exception because oil has temporarily engorged our carrying capacity and when we run out it will shrink back down.

This is a myth that is attributable (I would assume) to people that like to believe that the universe was perfect before western civilization developed. Don't get me wrong as I'm not a huge fan of western civilization but I recognize that it has brought incredible benefits. Can't wait to get beyond it without tossing out the baby too though ...

The fact of the matter is that most organisms will expand to the (ever shifting) carrying capacity of their environment and then keep trying to reproduce beyond that. The lack of available food ratchets up selection pressures for getting food and many members of the species in question suffer and die. At the same time the abundance of consumers ratchets up the selection pressures on whatever the organism in question feeds on and many members of those species fail to make the cut, suffer and die. Populations crash. Populations rebound. Repeat. All species in question evolve due to the selection pressures created.

Nature is a cold, impersonal system that doesn't care about the suffering of the constituent organisms. This seems to be pretty clear. Humans undergoing a population boom by exploiting oil is in principle no different than wolves exploiting an abundance of carribou.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned

Don't get me wrong as I'm not a huge fan of western civilization but I recognize that it has brought incredible benefits. Can't wait to get beyond it without tossing out the baby too though ...

I agree with this completely.

As for the rest of the post, I think it is true most of the time. But you can't deny that there are some predators that simply are incapable of destroying entire species.
Whales, for instance, mostly eat krill. But there's so much krill, it doesn't matter that the whales need tonnes of them a day.

Some sub-systems are in balance. Most, are clearly not though.