Randomnity
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- Joined
- May 8, 2007
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I didnt take ecology in school, but i have watched quite alot of documentaries on wild life. Also its pretty obvious that nature needs both predators and pray to maintain the balance.
What comes to predators and humans. Its true that we dont have any animals that hunt us, but there are other stuff.
First of all bacteria and viruses keep evolving as we try to find cures for them and i dont really see some major epidemies that would kill big part of the population as impossible, since we are kinda making the viruses and bacteria stronger by misusing antibiotics and what ever the virus medicines are called, making them immune to drugs.
Then there is the weakening of our genes which comes with us being now able to pass on malfunctioning genes, this rarerily happen with other animals(except with some diseases).
Also plenty of other stuff, like us recycling water that has estrogen from birth control pills, which raises the estrogen in males, making them to produce malcunctioning sperm, thus infertile(or lowering the chances of being able to make babies). Eating fatty and other foods that are unhealthy too much, which causes heart problems and obesiety(which makes those obese males and females less attractive to opposite sex, thus making it harder for them to reproduce). Computers create nerds that have harder time finding a partner and make babies and possibly die sooner due to health problems that come with lack of physical excercise. Etc etc, could go on all day.
But still human population keeps growing, at least for now, dunno if we manage to create more problems on reproducing in the future that would make the population go down before we destroy the whole place and the population goes down due to lack of food.
Yep, there are a few minor things, and we're much better at keeping the old/ill/weak alive, but marring a major plague, nothing is making any sort of real dent on the population. Even billions of starving people doesn't make a difference globally when people just have more children to make up for it.
It does depend on how you interpret the question. I see it as "a species' behaviours can cause net negative effects on other species" and humans are definitely not the only species to fall into that category.