Sad Swan Story
-Wee Rocket
-Rock http://www.rockyfrisco.com
--
The World's Best Free News Service: http://www.rationalreview.com/
Brian Howlett
> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2264994.html
>
Sad, possibly. But how can you take seriously a site which can't spell
"pedal" properly?
--
Brian Howlett - Email to From: address deleted unseen
-------------------------------------------------------------
People who live in glass houses should undress in the dark...
Nigel Stapley
> On 2 Apr, -Wee Rocket wrote:
>
>> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2264994.html
>>
> Sad, possibly. But how can you take seriously a site which can't spell
> "pedal" properly?
Depends what sort of material they're pedalling, doesn't it?
--
Regards
Nigel Stapley
<reply-to will bounce>
-Wee Rocket
> On 2 Apr, -Wee Rocket wrote:
>
>> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2264994.html
>>
> Sad, possibly. But how can you take seriously a site which can't spell
> "pedal" properly?
I just figured they were selling something out of the boat.
Sofia
>> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2264994.html
>>
> Sad, possibly. But how can you take seriously a site which can't spell
> "pedal" properly?
Yes, kinda really sad, but it looks more like it's following it's mother
in the story of the ugly duckling to me, not falling madly in love with
it!
Sofie
--
Please visit my deviantART page: http://sofen.deviantart.com/
Clare
This story is not new, but certain details seem to be different from
the story I originally saw in a newspaper some months ago.
In that story, it was a mute swan, not the black swan shown here, and
it was male! So is it possible that the story was muddled, or are
there two confused swans for whom a small AA-style meeting might solve
a couple of problems?
Furthermore, it would seem that the pedalos are realistic enough
images that they convince real swans, so perhaps the zoo could do
worse than redesign the boats!
On the subject of zoos, apparently at Longleat the seals share a large
stretch of water with hippos, which they would not in nature meet.
They are said to get on really well, although the hippos don't like
the seals taking piggy-back rides...
Len Oil
> This story is not new, but certain details seem to be different from
> the story I originally saw in a newspaper some months ago.
>
> In that story, it was a mute swan, not the black swan shown here, and
> it was male! So is it possible that the story was muddled, or are
> there two confused swans for whom a small AA-style meeting might solve
> a couple of problems?
>
> Furthermore, it would seem that the pedalos are realistic enough
> images that they convince real swans, so perhaps the zoo could do
> worse than redesign the boats!
There was (at the canal near the place I used to work) a swan who was
(by all interpretations, at least) smitten with a pink plastic flamingo,
or something, that it could see in a live-in narrow-boat's porthole.
It would go away and come back, as the seasons demanded, but would tend
to float around the side of the narrow-boat when it wasn't getting on
with the rest of its life's needs.
I've no idea if that situation continues, however.
Anery
> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2264994.html
>
Recently a colleague told me another sad story of animals that were
confused in a somewhat similar way. A female elephant had adopted a
herd of buffaloes and they did accept her.
The problem was that she didn't tolerate when the buffaloes wanted to
make sex, and she attacked them. She also killed newborn babies. So
after a time the buffalo females with young learned to separate from
the herd for a while. The buffalos older than a year or so weren't
attacked more. However, many baby buffaloes were killed by predators
because they lacked the usual support of the herd.
Another problem was that elephants are contact animals and buffaloes
aren't. The female elephant constantly made attempts to touch the
buffaloes but she was always refused, what made her unhappy.
I don't know the reason why she was separated from her herd at the
beginning, but she was not able to return to an elephant herd more.
The elephants attacked her and she was afraid of them.
Anery
Lesley Weston
c...@medphysics.leeds.ac.uk wrote on 04/04/2007 10:26 AM:
<snip>
> On the subject of zoos, apparently at Longleat the seals share a large
> stretch of water with hippos, which they would not in nature meet.
> They are said to get on really well, although the hippos don't like
> the seals taking piggy-back rides...
>
Seals are noted for their sense of humour. I've watched two seals working
together to tease a fisherman net-fishing for smelt off a local beach; one
would make as if to disrupt his net, and while he was distracted by throwing
stones at it (they couldn't possibly reach it), the other would go into the
net, grab some fish and leave. They took it in turns. I've also watched a
seal body-surfing on the waves breaking on the beach, with an amused
expression on its face. They do expressions rather well.
--
Lesley Weston.
Brightly_coloured_blob is real, but I don't often check even the few bits
that get through Yahoo's filters. To reach me, use leswes att shaw dott ca,
changing spelling and spacing as required.
Sofia
> Another problem was that elephants are contact animals and buffaloes
> aren't. The female elephant constantly made attempts to touch the
> buffaloes but she was always refused, what made her unhappy. I don't
> know the reason why she was separated from her herd at the beginning,
> but she was not able to return to an elephant herd more. The elephants
> attacked her and she was afraid of them.
This really is one of the saddest animal stories I've ever heard. I don't
know if you were watching David Attenborough's "Planet Earth" series on
TV throughout early this year but another baby elephant got separated
from it's mother, and therefore it's entire herd a different way - whilst
walking through some large desert (forget which one) on their quest to
find water.
It was very sad, as the baby elephant was left travelling all alone in
this massive desert by itself without any mother, any food, or any water,
and so eventually died.
I just wished there was something they could have done for baby, but
hubby said they weren't allowed to meddle with nature - shame!
Lesley Weston
Who aren't? I've seen film made by Jane Goodall's husband of them rescuing a
wild-dog pup from a similar situation, and also Jaques Cousteau's diver
Falco running and shouting and waving things to keep the predatory seagulls
off baby turtles as they made their way down the beach to the sea, while the
commentator said disapproving things. Sod Nature; it's not as if we weren't
already interfering with her.
Jeff Howell
Is that meant to be a justification? We're already screwing with
nature, so why not just keep doing it?
To pick just one example from your set - if too many baby turtles
survive, they'll consume far more than the normal amount when there are
more adult turtles than usual.. their food supply will dwindle even as
the turtle predator population rises with the glut of yummy turtles to
chow down on. Then the turtle population crashes, since their food is
in shorter supply and there are more predators than before. Then the
predator population crashes because the food disappeared...
For the most part, the system will find its way back to equilibrium, but
push too hard, and the equilibrium it'll find is at 0 population.
Better by far to try to avoid screwing with nature as much as possible
to begin with.
--
Jeff
-Wee Rocket
> in article pan.2007.04...@ALLCAPSyahoo.com, Sofia at
> pinkmonste...@ALLCAPSyahoo.com wrote on 06/04/2007 8:58 AM:
>> I just wished there was something they could have done for baby, but
>> hubby said they weren't allowed to meddle with nature - shame!
>
> Who aren't? I've seen film made by Jane Goodall's husband of them rescuing a
> wild-dog pup from a similar situation, and also Jaques Cousteau's diver
> Falco running and shouting and waving things to keep the predatory seagulls
> off baby turtles as they made their way down the beach to the sea, while the
> commentator said disapproving things. Sod Nature; it's not as if we weren't
> already interfering with her.
My opinion too. Thanks!
Lesley Weston
Not really, or at least not by itself. We are messing with Nature so hugely
and in so many ways that rescuing one elephant or wild dog is really not too
important in terms of species survival, but it is tremendously important in
terms of one's own well-being.
>
> To pick just one example from your set - if too many baby turtles
> survive, they'll consume far more than the normal amount when there are
> more adult turtles than usual.. their food supply will dwindle even as
> the turtle predator population rises with the glut of yummy turtles to
> chow down on. Then the turtle population crashes, since their food is
> in shorter supply and there are more predators than before. Then the
> predator population crashes because the food disappeared...
The turtles are endangered, largely because of human activity, so saving a
few of them will undo a tiny part of the harm we have already done by
screwing with Nature. Are you among the people who say that the baby polar
bear in that German zoo should have been killed because that's the natural
way to handle the situation of a zoo animal rejecting its young that was
born in that same zoo?
>
> For the most part, the system will find its way back to equilibrium, but
> push too hard, and the equilibrium it'll find is at 0 population.
> Better by far to try to avoid screwing with nature as much as possible
> to begin with.
Well yes, but it's a bit late to do that. Don't forget that we are ourselves
a part of Nature - whatever we do is also part of Nature. One definition of
life is that living things alter their surroundings in ways that are
advantageous to themselves; we just happen to be rather good at that.
Jeff Howell
One, I'll agree with. But then again, what do you mean by 'rescuing'?
Removing it to a zoo and taking care of it from that point on? Sure,
I'll buy that. Zoos are outside Nature to begin with, and can be useful
in helping a species recover. Rescuing it from a predator once, then
leaving it to fend for itself? That doesn't even matter. It's likely
to get picked off soon after you leave anyway. At worst, you've saved
an individual or a group with poor survival instincts, who will then
pass those on to their children, where children with better instincts
might have been born instead. Maybe it's not likely to cause a lot of
harm if done once, but continual interference could certainly cause
long-term harm to the species.
>> To pick just one example from your set - if too many baby turtles
>> survive, they'll consume far more than the normal amount when there are
>> more adult turtles than usual.. their food supply will dwindle even as
>> the turtle predator population rises with the glut of yummy turtles to
>> chow down on. Then the turtle population crashes, since their food is
>> in shorter supply and there are more predators than before. Then the
>> predator population crashes because the food disappeared...
>
> The turtles are endangered, largely because of human activity, so saving a
> few of them will undo a tiny part of the harm we have already done by
> screwing with Nature. Are you among the people who say that the baby polar
> bear in that German zoo should have been killed because that's the natural
> way to handle the situation of a zoo animal rejecting its young that was
> born in that same zoo?
Scaring off predators one time doesn't even make any difference. If
you're doing it to feel better about yourself, you're feeling better
about a lie. That's not healthy for you *or* the turtles. Better by
far to change our behaviour to stop causing further harm.
And for the record, no, I don't think the baby polar bear should have
been killed. It's in a *zoo*! This is not a place where natural
selection takes place, and there's no point in pretending that it is.
>> For the most part, the system will find its way back to equilibrium, but
>> push too hard, and the equilibrium it'll find is at 0 population.
>> Better by far to try to avoid screwing with nature as much as possible
>> to begin with.
>
> Well yes, but it's a bit late to do that. Don't forget that we are ourselves
> a part of Nature - whatever we do is also part of Nature. One definition of
> life is that living things alter their surroundings in ways that are
> advantageous to themselves; we just happen to be rather good at that.
>
We took ourselves out of Nature quite some time ago. We affect Nature,
we are affected by it, but we are not part of it (in general as a
species, anyway.) In the long run, I'm not particularly sure that our
actions are going to be advantageous to the species, by the way. We're
also pretty good at self-destruction, as you may have noticed.
--
Jeff
Sofia
> One, I'll agree with. But then again, what do you mean by 'rescuing'?
> Removing it to a zoo and taking care of it from that point on? Sure,
> I'll buy that.
If you were watching "Planet Earth", the camera-people were filming both
the herd of elephants walking one way through the desert, and the baby
elephant that had accidentally strayed off and took a U turn to walk off
in the wrong direction by itself.
They could have manually put it in the right direction again before it
had strayed too far away (they're all animal experts, surely they could
think of something )from the rest of the herd before it starved and died
of thirst, but instead they just seemed to let it go further and further
into the desert to see if it could survive by itself instead - although
unfortunately, it couldn't. I think maybe they just left it there alone
though because they wanted to make a good documentary and no other
reason!
Alec Cawley
No. The prevailing belief is that observers should not intervene to
prevent individual tragedies, sad though they may be. In many cases, it
is simply necessary that a certain proportion of the young die though
the normal vicissitudes of life. While some species have natural
population control - the birth rate falls when the population reaches
the carrying capacity of its food source - most species depend upon
natural culling to keep the population appropriate to the resources. If
you preserve all the darling cuddly little babies, when they grow up
they will overload their environment, probably causing a population
crash both for themselves and for other species.
Ans, except for severely endangered species, saving the individuals it
working at the wrong level. You go home feeling all warm and cozy about
the one you have saved, but ignore the remainder of the population. If
you want to save the <species>, save its habitat, not one individual.
Tours in highly protected areas such as the Galapagos instruct visitors
firmly *not* to rescue stray animals, however tempting it may be.
Sofia
I think maybe they just left it there alone
>> though because they wanted to make a good documentary and no other
>> reason!
>
> No. The prevailing belief is that observers should not intervene to
> prevent individual tragedies, sad though they may be. In many cases, it
> is simply necessary that a certain proportion of the young die though
> the normal vicissitudes of life.
Yes, I do know that really, and I do apologise - I was just sulking like
a baby, I'm sorry. I'm afraid you're going to have to put up with me
sometimes, I'm just a bit of a softy at heart! :-(
8'FED
> Is that meant to be a justification? We're already screwing with nature, so
> why not just keep doing it?
Not all interference is screwing.
Sometimes it really is *un*screwing.
Adrian.
Lesley Weston
notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 10/04/2007 6:39 AM:
> Lesley Weston wrote:
>> in article ev64vc$8a6$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 06/04/2007 11:53 AM:
>>
>>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>>> in article pan.2007.04...@ALLCAPSyahoo.com, Sofia at
>>>> pinkmonste...@ALLCAPSyahoo.com wrote on 06/04/2007 8:58 AM:
<snip>
>>>>> I just wished there was something they could have done for baby, but
>>>>> hubby said they weren't allowed to meddle with nature - shame!
>>>> Who aren't? I've seen film made by Jane Goodall's husband of them rescuing
>>>> a
>>>> wild-dog pup from a similar situation, and also Jaques Cousteau's diver
>>>> Falco running and shouting and waving things to keep the predatory seagulls
>>>> off baby turtles as they made their way down the beach to the sea, while
>>>> the
>>>> commentator said disapproving things. Sod Nature; it's not as if we weren't
>>>> already interfering with her.
>>> Is that meant to be a justification? We're already screwing with
>>> nature, so why not just keep doing it?
>>
>> Not really, or at least not by itself. We are messing with Nature so hugely
>> and in so many ways that rescuing one elephant or wild dog is really not too
>> important in terms of species survival, but it is tremendously important in
>> terms of one's own well-being.
>
> One, I'll agree with. But then again, what do you mean by 'rescuing'?
The wild dog was a pup who hadn't been able to keep up with the pack as they
migrated from one part of their territory to another. Jane Goodall and her
husband agonised on camera about the ethics of the situation, and then
picked up the pup and restored it to its family. I would have too.
> Removing it to a zoo and taking care of it from that point on? Sure,
> I'll buy that.
If there's no other way.
> Zoos are outside Nature to begin with,
See below.
> and can be useful
> in helping a species recover.
Yes, they can.
> Rescuing it from a predator once, then
> leaving it to fend for itself?
No, I don't think so, but maybe that's just my personal sticking point. I do
clap my hands to spoil our cat's pounce when I see her going after a bird in
the garden, but then she's our cat so I feel responsible for her to some
extent.
<snip>
>>> For the most part, the system will find its way back to equilibrium, but
>>> push too hard, and the equilibrium it'll find is at 0 population.
>>> Better by far to try to avoid screwing with nature as much as possible
>>> to begin with.
>>
>> Well yes, but it's a bit late to do that. Don't forget that we are ourselves
>> a part of Nature - whatever we do is also part of Nature. One definition of
>> life is that living things alter their surroundings in ways that are
>> advantageous to themselves; we just happen to be rather good at that.
>>
>
> We took ourselves out of Nature quite some time ago.
We did? How did we manage that? Nature is another word for the planet, with
particular reference to the biosphere.
> We affect Nature,
> we are affected by it, but we are not part of it (in general as a
> species, anyway.)
Of course we are! It's like the people who earnestly try to eradicate what
they call "invasive species" around here, such as Purple Loosestrife. It
didn't evolve on this continent, sure, but neither did we - if it has to go
then so do we. More to the point, what happens about any particular species
is part of Nature; species wander about all over the planet, displacing
other species as they go, with or without our activities.
>In the long run, I'm not particularly sure that our
> actions are going to be advantageous to the species, by the way. We're
> also pretty good at self-destruction, as you may have noticed.
There are more humans alive now than there have been in the whole of human
history. I'd call that pretty successful.
Anery
>
> No. The prevailing belief is that observers should not intervene to
> prevent individual tragedies, sad though they may be. In many cases, it
> is simply necessary that a certain proportion of the young die though
> the normal vicissitudes of life. While some species have natural
> population control - the birth rate falls when the population reaches
> the carrying capacity of its food source - most species depend upon
> natural culling to keep the population appropriate to the resources. If
> you preserve all the darling cuddly little babies, when they grow up
> they will overload their environment, probably causing a population
> crash both for themselves and for other species.
>
> Ans, except for severely endangered species, saving the individuals it
> working at the wrong level. You go home feeling all warm and cozy about
> the one you have saved, but ignore the remainder of the population. If
> you want to save the <species>, save its habitat, not one individual.
>
a stray baby elephant in detail are really the best way to put this
message across.
<snip>
Anery
Hendrik Schober
Can you name a few such unscrewings?
> Adrian.
Schobi
--
Spam...@gmx.de is never read
I'm HSchober at gmx dot org
"My hope is that if more people start reading books,
the world will become a better place."
froarulv in afp
Jeff Howell
> The question is if hearthbreaking stories that show the sufferings of
> a stray baby elephant in detail are really the best way to put this
> message across.
Possibly not. In fact, it probably triggers exactly the wrong sort of
emotional response in most people.
I wonder what it was they were actually attempting to document?
--
Jeff
Jeff Howell
So who's to say it won't have exactly the same problem a day or two
after they 'helped' the pup? There's a good chance they didn't achieve
anything at all. If the dogs run into a situation where there isn't
enough food for the pack, they now have one more mouth to feed as well.
In the end I don't think helping one animal is going to hurt much...
but it's not going to help much either.
>> Removing it to a zoo and taking care of it from that point on? Sure,
>> I'll buy that.
>
> If there's no other way.
Unless you're prepared to take responsibility for everything that animal
does in the wild from that point on, it really *ought* to be the only way.
>> Rescuing it from a predator once, then
>> leaving it to fend for itself?
>
> No, I don't think so, but maybe that's just my personal sticking point. I do
> clap my hands to spoil our cat's pounce when I see her going after a bird in
> the garden, but then she's our cat so I feel responsible for her to some
> extent.
Well, we can agree here. If it weren't for us the modern house cat
wouldn't even exist, so taking responsibility for them as a species
makes sense. If only humans did the same for cows... or goats... or...
well, you get the idea.
>>>> For the most part, the system will find its way back to equilibrium, but
>>>> push too hard, and the equilibrium it'll find is at 0 population.
>>>> Better by far to try to avoid screwing with nature as much as possible
>>>> to begin with.
>>> Well yes, but it's a bit late to do that. Don't forget that we are ourselves
>>> a part of Nature - whatever we do is also part of Nature. One definition of
>>> life is that living things alter their surroundings in ways that are
>>> advantageous to themselves; we just happen to be rather good at that.
>>>
>> We took ourselves out of Nature quite some time ago.
>
> We did? How did we manage that? Nature is another word for the planet, with
> particular reference to the biosphere.
That's one definition. I think you'll find that not everyone defines
Nature in exactly the same way. Except in the most extreme cases, what
happens in the natural world doesn't affect us to the same degree as any
other creature on the planet. We react to extremes in temperature by
inventing artificial means to ignore them. Ditto to all but the most
violent weather patterns.
We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
>> We affect Nature,
>> we are affected by it, but we are not part of it (in general as a
>> species, anyway.)
>
> Of course we are! It's like the people who earnestly try to eradicate what
> they call "invasive species" around here, such as Purple Loosestrife. It
> didn't evolve on this continent, sure, but neither did we - if it has to go
> then so do we. More to the point, what happens about any particular species
> is part of Nature; species wander about all over the planet, displacing
> other species as they go, with or without our activities.
Well, without our assistance, most species aren't really capable of
wandering over the *entire* planet...
We're not like other species. If food runs low in some area, we no
longer tend to leave that area. We bring in food from somewhere else.
What other species does that?
In most significant ways, I don't think we're really part of nature in
the way you mean. We just aren't driven by it the way most everything
else is.
>> In the long run, I'm not particularly sure that our
>> actions are going to be advantageous to the species, by the way. We're
>> also pretty good at self-destruction, as you may have noticed.
>
> There are more humans alive now than there have been in the whole of human
> history. I'd call that pretty successful.
>
Hasn't that more or less always been true, though? Barring massive
epidemics and genocides, anyway? The number of children per parent has
pretty much always been greater than one, right?
Anyway, that's part of the problem.. we've been too good at expanding,
and now we're running out of room and resources, and for the most part
we don't seem interested in slowing down the rate of growth by much.
That's not exactly a survival instinct.
--
Jeff
Jeff Howell
Historically we seem to be really damned bad at deciding which is which. :-/
--
Jeff
Arthur Hagen
"Screw", when followed by "with" means "fuck", not "twist".
So, how do you *un*fuck someone or something?
Regards,
--
*Art
Anery
> Anery wrote:
>
> > The question is if hearthbreaking stories that show the sufferings of
> > a stray baby elephant in detail are really the best way to put this
> > message across.
>
> Possibly not. In fact, it probably triggers exactly the wrong sort of
> emotional response in most people.
>
baby elephant, then it is not wrong in itself. On the contrary, not
feeling sorry for it seems to be somewhat hearthless. A rational
decision in possession of the facts is another thing. Sometimes you
have to be a cold calculating bastard. But it is useful to know that
you are one for good reasons. And documents like the mentioned one are
probably not too helpful at that.
> I wonder what it was they were actually attempting to document?
>
I haven't seen that particular document, but according to Sofia's
description it seems to be that syrupy type that is calculated to
trigger strong emotions in a Hollywood manner, because it is good
business.
If part of the money thus achieved is really going to be invested in
preserving some of the endangered habitats, perhaps it may be
justifiable to a point. After all, most people won't rush to rescue
baby elephants after having seen one document.
Still, I'm not too happy with it.
Anery
Alec Cawley
On the contrary, it was part of the BBC's Planet Earth series, in which
they were trying to document things which you *haven't* seen before.
Part of the same program was very interesting infra-red footage of
hungry lions failing to attack a group of elephants (from which the
aforementioned baby had got lost) but successfully attacking a healthy
but lone elephant. They showed how effective the herd was at self
defence - the lions didn't have a hope - and what massive risks the
lions had to take to pull down the loner. Their intention, AFAICS, was
simply documentary. "This is what happened when we sent the cameras
out". They were tracking the elephants from a helicopter. The baby got
separated, so they documented that.
Richard Bos
> Lesley Weston wrote:
> > in article evg432$pp9$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
> >
> >> We took ourselves out of Nature quite some time ago.
> >
> > We did? How did we manage that? Nature is another word for the planet, with
> > particular reference to the biosphere.
>
> That's one definition. I think you'll find that not everyone defines
> Nature in exactly the same way.
Well no. Many people, especially the green nutcase brigade, more or less
define nature as "anything except us evil, unnatural humans". And yet
we're made of cells.
> We react to extremes in temperature by inventing artificial means to
> ignore them. Ditto to all but the most violent weather patterns.
Yes. Invention is humanity's natural weapon against adversity, much as
procreation is rodents'.
> We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
> up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
Tell it to Malthus.
> We're not like other species. If food runs low in some area, we no
> longer tend to leave that area. We bring in food from somewhere else.
> What other species does that?
Ants.
> Anyway, that's part of the problem.. we've been too good at expanding,
> and now we're running out of room and resources, and for the most part
> we don't seem interested in slowing down the rate of growth by much.
> That's not exactly a survival instinct.
That's what I said. Ants and Malthus.
Richard
Lesley Weston
Spam...@gmx.de wrote on 11/04/2007 4:20 AM:
> 8'FED <dra...@netyp.com.au> wrote:
>> Jeff Howell wrote:
>>
>>> Is that meant to be a justification? We're already screwing with nature, so
>>> why not just keep doing it?
>>
>> Not all interference is screwing.
>>
>> Sometimes it really is *un*screwing.
>
> Can you name a few such unscrewings?
Some years ago, when an intensive cleanup of the Thames was started, someone
offered a large prize for the first salmon caught in it. It was claimed
recently.
Manatees are no longer on the endangered list, as of a few days ago.
There is once again a (very limited) cod fishery off the east coast of
Canada.
Foxes and coyotes are doing very well in cities within their respective
ranges.
The run of Spring Salmon in the Fraser river in recent years has been at
numbers higher than have ever been recorded before.
Some species of whales have increased in numbers to the point where it might
be feasible to take them off the endangered list.
These are all examples (except the foxes) of interfering being unscrewing,
in the sense that we're undoing the harm that we did. The foxes and coyotes
are doing it for themselves, our role being to supply the cities.
Lesley Weston
See Red Dwarf. The backwards episode. That's more of an unshitting, but
close enough.
Sofia
> Well, without our assistance, most species aren't really capable of
> wandering over the *entire* planet...
Are you crazy - we're the last of all the species to join the
evolutionary chain! So what on earth do you think any of these animal and
plant species that the human race has so politely given their assistance
to live on before we finally got here?
More likely we're killing them all off with trash, pollution, global
warming, or simply eating a lot of them for our own survival!
-Wee Rocket
> There are more humans alive now than there have been in the whole of human
> history. I'd call that pretty successful.
My second wife used to explain this phenomenon by saying "everybody
wants to be here for the big finish."
Lesley Weston
Maybe it will, maybe it won't; at least they got it past that particular
problem.
>There's a good chance they didn't achieve
> anything at all. If the dogs run into a situation where there isn't
> enough food for the pack, they now have one more mouth to feed as well.
> In the end I don't think helping one animal is going to hurt much...
> but it's not going to help much either.
If Jane Goodall is OK with it, then so am I. I lean that way anyway, so
having someone so eminent in the field behaving the same way I would makes
me think I might have the right idea.
<snip>
>>> Rescuing it from a predator once, then
>>> leaving it to fend for itself?
>>
>> No, I don't think so, but maybe that's just my personal sticking point. I do
>> clap my hands to spoil our cat's pounce when I see her going after a bird in
>> the garden, but then she's our cat so I feel responsible for her to some
>> extent.
>
> Well, we can agree here. If it weren't for us the modern house cat
> wouldn't even exist, so taking responsibility for them as a species
> makes sense. If only humans did the same for cows... or goats... or...
> well, you get the idea.
We do. Our domestic animals, at least the valuable ones like cows and goats,
are under our protection from the point where we decide they should be
conceived right up to the point where it suits us to kill them - that's
taking responsibility for them.
>
>
>>>>> For the most part, the system will find its way back to equilibrium, but
>>>>> push too hard, and the equilibrium it'll find is at 0 population.
>>>>> Better by far to try to avoid screwing with nature as much as possible
>>>>> to begin with.
>>>> Well yes, but it's a bit late to do that. Don't forget that we are
>>>> ourselves
>>>> a part of Nature - whatever we do is also part of Nature. One definition of
>>>> life is that living things alter their surroundings in ways that are
>>>> advantageous to themselves; we just happen to be rather good at that.
>>>>
>>> We took ourselves out of Nature quite some time ago.
>>
>> We did? How did we manage that? Nature is another word for the planet, with
>> particular reference to the biosphere.
>
> That's one definition. I think you'll find that not everyone defines
> Nature in exactly the same way.
You could be right.
> Except in the most extreme cases, what
> happens in the natural world doesn't affect us to the same degree as any
> other creature on the planet. We react to extremes in temperature by
> inventing artificial means to ignore them. Ditto to all but the most
> violent weather patterns.
No it doesn't, though cockroaches are better than we are at surviving
radiation, and goldfish at surviving freezing. There are also several
species of bacteria (actually archaeons, but close enough) that do fine in
boiling water or volcanoes, plus the flourishing ecologies around the
volcanic vents at the bottom of oceanic trenches. We're not unique in our
abilities to deal with unpleasantness, we just don't have to evolve to do
so.
>
> We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
> up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
Sure we are! People carrying undesirable traits are less attractive than
others, and so less likely to mate. We're not the pinnacle of evolution,
just a part of it; it's still going on.
>
>>> We affect Nature,
>>> we are affected by it, but we are not part of it (in general as a
>>> species, anyway.)
>>
>> Of course we are! It's like the people who earnestly try to eradicate what
>> they call "invasive species" around here, such as Purple Loosestrife. It
>> didn't evolve on this continent, sure, but neither did we - if it has to go
>> then so do we. More to the point, what happens about any particular species
>> is part of Nature; species wander about all over the planet, displacing
>> other species as they go, with or without our activities.
>
> Well, without our assistance, most species aren't really capable of
> wandering over the *entire* planet...
When we first crossed the land bridge to this continent, we found that
plenty of species had done so ahead of us. The Galapagos islands were
colonised from the sterile [0] volcanic lava they started as by a whole
ecology's worth of species before humans knew that they (the islands)
existed.
>
> We're not like other species. If food runs low in some area, we no
> longer tend to leave that area. We bring in food from somewhere else.
> What other species does that?
Ants.
>
> In most significant ways, I don't think we're really part of nature in
> the way you mean. We just aren't driven by it the way most everything
> else is.
See New Orleans.
>
>>> In the long run, I'm not particularly sure that our
>>> actions are going to be advantageous to the species, by the way. We're
>>> also pretty good at self-destruction, as you may have noticed.
>>
>> There are more humans alive now than there have been in the whole of human
>> history. I'd call that pretty successful.
>>
>
> Hasn't that more or less always been true, though?
I put it badly. I meant that there are more people alive today than there
have been in total in the whole of human history - presumably up until some
fairly recent time, or it becomes a recursive series [1].
> Barring massive
> epidemics and genocides, anyway? The number of children per parent has
> pretty much always been greater than one, right?
Yes, but that doesn't affect it.
>
> Anyway, that's part of the problem.. we've been too good at expanding,
> and now we're running out of room and resources,
No we're not. That was last week; now we're worrying about how all the
future old people are going to manage with so few young people to support
them.
> and for the most part
> we don't seem interested in slowing down the rate of growth by much.
Yes we are. A few places like Africa are having difficulty in managing it,
but that's the fault of other civilisations and can easily be corrected.
> That's not exactly a survival instinct.
More people alive means more people reproducing means more people. That's
success as a species - it doesn't matter what conditions people live in, so
long as they reproduce. Of course, it does matter enormously if one is
interested in other parameters, but not in terms of species success.
[0] Except perhaps for archaeons.
[1] Or something like that. An untenable calculation, anyway.
Lesley Weston
We're not watching the series "Meerkat Manor", which is running on TV now,
even though meerkats have to be the most wonderfully cute animals there are
with endlessly interesting behaviour. We've seen so many objective
documentaries about how animals really behave that we just don't want to see
meerkat babies killing each other, meerkats killing their prey, meerkats
being killed by their predators or any of the rest of it. One knows it
happens, there's no need to watch such unbearable things happening if one
doesn't have to. So if the BBC does have some kind of agenda in showing the
elephants herd's daily life so starkly, it isn't working; not on us anyway.
8'FED
> On the contrary, it was part of the BBC's Planet Earth series, in which
> they were trying to document things which you *haven't* seen before.
Perhaps not having seen a David Attenborough documentary is one of the
disadvantages of living in Slovakia. :-)
But if I were introducing someone to Attenborough, I wouldn't
recommend _Planet Earth_, which I think was one of the weakest series
he's ever done. There were one or two worthwhile scenes in each
episode, but on the whole it failed to illuminate nature from an
original perspective, IMO.
Adrian.
Diane L.
<snip>
> There are more humans alive now than there have been in the whole of
> human history. I'd call that pretty successful.
I'd call it almost certainly a myth.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E5DF1239F935A35753C1A967948260
Diane L.
Diane L.
AFAICS, the only agenda is to show what happened. Baby elephants
that get separated from their mothers don't live happily ever after.
The fact that we might feel better if they did doesn't really matter.
If the purpose of a documentary is to show what life is really like
for a certain group of animals in a certain habitat then that documentary
*will* include such unpleasant things. If the purpose is to show cute
animals living idyllic lives with no prey and no predators and nothing
bad happening to any of them, well, perhaps "documentary" isnt
quite the word we are looking for.
Diane L.
Anery
dont catch it, except of BBC World, so probably with some delay.
Some of them I liked very much, e.g. the series on mammals or birds.
They showed some species and habitats that I haven't seen before, even
in books. And all that in very good graphical quality.
Perhaps I have been a bit too harsh in judging that particular
document, but it reminded me of a type of documents I'm fed (not FED!)
up with. I mean the type where the animals get names, are
antropomorphized to an extent and then their lifes and sufferings are
being followed to the horrible end.
It seems that this one wasn't of that kind. Still, if it deals just
with the big hoofed animals of the African savannas and their
predators, I'm not too sorry for not having seen it. There is too much
of that sort.
I prefer more specialized documents that show less commonly filmed
fauna of a particular area or a systematic group. And I like as much
species as possible named properly, so as to be able to identify them
later in books or elsewhere. From all films on the African fauna I've
seen the most memorable for me are two: a document on various African
species of eagles, and another of kingfishers (rimfishers weren't
mentioned).
Anery
8'FED
> Perhaps I have been a bit too harsh in judging that particular
> document, but it reminded me of a type of documents I'm fed (not FED!)
> up with. I mean the type where the animals get names, are
> antropomorphized to an extent and then their lifes and sufferings are
> being followed to the horrible end.
> It seems that this one wasn't of that kind. Still, if it deals just
> with the big hoofed animals of the African savannas and their
> predators, I'm not too sorry for not having seen it. There is too much
> of that sort.
It was in several episodes. One episode about animals living in
savannahs, one episode about animals living in rainforests, one episode
about animals living in the ocean, and so on.
On the whole it did lack originality (especially the arctic/antarctic
episode), but most episodes contained *something* new to me. The bits
that left the most impression on me were the sprouting of the
ant-infecting fungus, and the running of various little critters
through the Canadian treetops.
BTW, if you don't want to confuse people, the difference between
"document" and "documentary" is important. :-)
Adrian.
Stig M. Valstad
> Their intention, AFAICS, was
> simply documentary. "This is what happened when we sent the cameras
> out". They were tracking the elephants from a helicopter. The baby got
> separated, so they documented that.
Did anyone consider the possibility that the noise from the
helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters are
noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
--
Stig M. Valstad
"Honesty is the best policy; but dishonesty is the better fun."
Jerome K. Jerome
Graycat
We may have increased that percentage though, as there are 6 billion
of us now, iirc.
--
Elin
The world makes perfect sense, as a black comedy
Diane L.
> "Diane L." <dian...@lindquist.plus.com> wrote:
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> There are more humans alive now than there have been in the whole of
>>> human history. I'd call that pretty successful.
>>
>> I'd call it almost certainly a myth.
>> http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E5DF1239F935A35753C1A967948260
>
> We may have increased that percentage though, as there are 6 billion
> of us now, iirc.
Yes, but even without doing the maths it's obvious that if 4.4 billion
people
(when the article was written) comprised 9% of everyone who ever lived,
then 6 billion ain't going to equal 100%+
Diane L.
Jeff Howell
> Jeff Howell <notan...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>> in article evg432$pp9$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>>>
>>>> We took ourselves out of Nature quite some time ago.
>>> We did? How did we manage that? Nature is another word for the planet, with
>>> particular reference to the biosphere.
>> That's one definition. I think you'll find that not everyone defines
>> Nature in exactly the same way.
>
> Well no. Many people, especially the green nutcase brigade, more or less
> define nature as "anything except us evil, unnatural humans". And yet
> we're made of cells.
And everything's made of molecules, but that doesn't make plastic
natural either. ;)
>> We react to extremes in temperature by inventing artificial means to
>> ignore them. Ditto to all but the most violent weather patterns.
>
> Yes. Invention is humanity's natural weapon against adversity, much as
> procreation is rodents'.
That is one interpretation, true.
My problem with the definition of nature that includes *everything* is
that... well, it's not particularly useful, is it? If what you mean by
'nature' is 'everything', why bother with two different words?
>> We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
>> up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
>
> Tell it to Malthus.
Despite Malthus, people continue to have large numbers of children in
situations where the resources don't exist to support all of them.
>> We're not like other species. If food runs low in some area, we no
>> longer tend to leave that area. We bring in food from somewhere else.
>> What other species does that?
>
> Ants.
To a limited degree, sure. But there's a limit to the distance ants
will travel before deciding to move the entire colony, yes? But I
suppose that may just be a matter of scale. I guess we'll see what
happens when/if we have access to useable space outside this planet.
--
Jeff
Jeff Howell
> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:38:25 -0400, Jeff Howell wrote:
>
>
>> Well, without our assistance, most species aren't really capable of
>> wandering over the *entire* planet...
>
>
> Are you crazy - we're the last of all the species to join the
> evolutionary chain! So what on earth do you think any of these animal and
> plant species that the human race has so politely given their assistance
> to live on before we finally got here?
>
> More likely we're killing them all off with trash, pollution, global
> warming, or simply eating a lot of them for our own survival!
>
I'm... not at all sure what you're responding to here. I just meant
that the majority of non-winged, non-swimming creatures on this planet
would have a bit of trouble getting from, for instance, Africa to, for
instance, North America, without humans moving them. Different species
evolved in different places, yes?
--
Jeff
Jeff Howell
> in article eviks2$pn1$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 11/04/2007 5:38 AM:
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>> The wild dog was a pup who hadn't been able to keep up with the pack as they
>>> migrated from one part of their territory to another. Jane Goodall and her
>>> husband agonised on camera about the ethics of the situation, and then
>>> picked up the pup and restored it to its family. I would have too.
>> So who's to say it won't have exactly the same problem a day or two
>> after they 'helped' the pup?
>
> Maybe it will, maybe it won't; at least they got it past that particular
> problem.
Yep. But claiming that doing so was necessarily good for the species or
even helpful to the individual in the long run with any kind of
certainty isn't very honest.
> >There's a good chance they didn't achieve
>> anything at all. If the dogs run into a situation where there isn't
>> enough food for the pack, they now have one more mouth to feed as well.
>> In the end I don't think helping one animal is going to hurt much...
>> but it's not going to help much either.
>
> If Jane Goodall is OK with it, then so am I. I lean that way anyway, so
> having someone so eminent in the field behaving the same way I would makes
> me think I might have the right idea.
Jone Goodall, for all that I do respect her, is not infallible.
>> Well, we can agree here. If it weren't for us the modern house cat
>> wouldn't even exist, so taking responsibility for them as a species
>> makes sense. If only humans did the same for cows... or goats... or...
>> well, you get the idea.
>
> We do. Our domestic animals, at least the valuable ones like cows and goats,
> are under our protection from the point where we decide they should be
> conceived right up to the point where it suits us to kill them - that's
> taking responsibility for them.
Not in the same sense you're using when talking about cats. (although
we've been through this before.. you tend to use a definition of
'responsible' that doesn't feature in any dictionary...) For cats
you're talking about taking responsibility for their actions. For
cattle you're now talking about taking responsibility for their care.
S'not the same. We certainly aren't taking as much responsibility as we
need to for the damage that cows and goats do to the environment.
>> Except in the most extreme cases, what
>> happens in the natural world doesn't affect us to the same degree as any
>> other creature on the planet. We react to extremes in temperature by
>> inventing artificial means to ignore them. Ditto to all but the most
>> violent weather patterns.
>
> No it doesn't, though cockroaches are better than we are at surviving
> radiation, and goldfish at surviving freezing. There are also several
> species of bacteria (actually archaeons, but close enough) that do fine in
> boiling water or volcanoes, plus the flourishing ecologies around the
> volcanic vents at the bottom of oceanic trenches. We're not unique in our
> abilities to deal with unpleasantness, we just don't have to evolve to do
> so.
Which is a difference, innit? ;) All those other species have changed
physically to deal with those situations. Well, the cockroaches and
radiation is probably more of a lucky coincidence for them, since AFAIK,
roaches didn't actually evolve in high-radiation circumstances. We use
tools to adapt, so there's no need to evolve.
>> We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
>> up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
>
> Sure we are! People carrying undesirable traits are less attractive than
> others, and so less likely to mate. We're not the pinnacle of evolution,
> just a part of it; it's still going on.
Pfffft. And what are these 'undesirable traits' that cause people to
mate less often? In the US at least, the undereducated are likely to
have more children than the educated. Are we breeding for ignorance,
then? ;)
>
>>>> We affect Nature,
>>>> we are affected by it, but we are not part of it (in general as a
>>>> species, anyway.)
>>> Of course we are! It's like the people who earnestly try to eradicate what
>>> they call "invasive species" around here, such as Purple Loosestrife. It
>>> didn't evolve on this continent, sure, but neither did we - if it has to go
>>> then so do we. More to the point, what happens about any particular species
>>> is part of Nature; species wander about all over the planet, displacing
>>> other species as they go, with or without our activities.
>> Well, without our assistance, most species aren't really capable of
>> wandering over the *entire* planet...
>
> When we first crossed the land bridge to this continent, we found that
> plenty of species had done so ahead of us. The Galapagos islands were
> colonised from the sterile [0] volcanic lava they started as by a whole
> ecology's worth of species before humans knew that they (the islands)
> existed.
I did say 'most'. A couple of isolated examples doesn't mean that
pandas are suddenly going to show up in Brazil or something...
>> We're not like other species. If food runs low in some area, we no
>> longer tend to leave that area. We bring in food from somewhere else.
>> What other species does that?
>
> Ants.
To the same degree? Move an ant colony to Antarctica. I'll even allow
you to provide as much heat as they need to function. See if they can
manage to bring food in.
>> In most significant ways, I don't think we're really part of nature in
>> the way you mean. We just aren't driven by it the way most everything
>> else is.
>
> See New Orleans.
Affected by. Not driven by.
>> Anyway, that's part of the problem.. we've been too good at expanding,
>> and now we're running out of room and resources,
>
> No we're not. That was last week; now we're worrying about how all the
> future old people are going to manage with so few young people to support
> them.
Import young people from other countries that have lots? :-p
>> and for the most part
>> we don't seem interested in slowing down the rate of growth by much.
>
> Yes we are. A few places like Africa are having difficulty in managing it,
> but that's the fault of other civilisations and can easily be corrected.
Can it? There are people *here* who keep having children despite their
inability to support them. We can't stop that, how can we stop people
in other cultures?
>> That's not exactly a survival instinct.
>
> More people alive means more people reproducing means more people. That's
> success as a species - it doesn't matter what conditions people live in, so
> long as they reproduce. Of course, it does matter enormously if one is
> interested in other parameters, but not in terms of species success.
Erm. No... reproducing to the point of running out of resources causes
a serious crash in population and massive instability. Most species
would end up hitting an equilibrium, but we're more likely to starting
bombing the hell out of each other in an attempt to get the resources we
need.
--
Jeff
Len Oil
> On 2007-04-11, Alec Cawley <al...@spamspam.co.uk> wrote:
>> Their intention, AFAICS, was
>> simply documentary. "This is what happened when we sent the cameras
>> out". They were tracking the elephants from a helicopter. The baby got
>> separated, so they documented that.
>
> Did anyone consider the possibility that the noise from the
> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters are
> noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
If it's helicopters being used, then they wouldn't necessarily 'buzz'
the group, but be off a long distance away. c.f. police helicopter
shots of totally oblivious miscreants, and then substitute a bespoke TV
quality camera/mounting system. Even in a far less noisy environment[1]
than a city, wildlife surveillance with a helicopter wouldn't be too
noisy if done correctly.
But then a helicopter is a fuel-hungry solution for flight. Fixed wing
aircraft (relatively quieter[2]) or even balloons (there's a craft
called something like a "Cinéballon" which is a one-man hot-air balloon
with a paraglider-like propeller for manoeuvring, from which you can
film wildlife on the ground or in treetops quite subtly (air conditions
allowing, of course). I also wouldn't be surprised if autogyros weren't
occasionally in use in that sort of situation, although not generally in
favour in the wider world these days.
And there are ground-based methods, like the camera towers that they
deploy at golf tournaments, though I don't know what heights would
attainable by any elevating mechanism they would find practical for use
in the elephants-in-desert situation. A manned tethered balloon[3]
might be another possible solution in the circumstances, again with
suitable support.
I've no doubt that animals have been affected by observers, but I think
the whole point is that the main aim is to /remove/ as much
observation-effect as possible.
The "Meerkat Manor"[4] programme indicates quite clearly in its titles
that the group of animals being observed have been 'desensitised'
against the study-group's interaction, some use of remote surveillance
cameras on poles, but other shots of attacking/retreating in battles are
obviously made by steady-cam from a close-by human keeping pace
(although /probably/ representative footage taken at another time, and
stitched in to build up the 'story', I suspect) and there's a brief shot
of a researcher weighing meerkat pups (meerkittens?) as part of the
study. And of course some of the 'kats have had radio collars[5] put on
and taken off at times.
Thus this documentary is a little different from the 'interactionless
observation' ones[6], and probably not a small amount of narrative is
added to the editing of the footage, but there's no sign that lost pups,
starving exiles, ambushed-by-a-neighbouring-group strays or snake-bit
individuals have been in any way 'artificially' been supported. And it
is this aspect that I think is the important part (at least as long as
the 'kats weren't likely to have problems with any number of
non-studying humans wandering around the Kalahari taking advantage of the
Now, one recent programme I saw advertised (but didn't see) had a
wildlife documentary-maker who had actually rescued (as it was said,
against normal practice) a couple of cheetah cubs orphaned at a /very/
young age, and was trying to get get them back into the wild. 'Born
Free' style. This was a slightly different take on the 'wildlife
documentary' style /again/, of course. More like the "rescued Orang
Utans rehabilitated to the wild" style, of course, invoking some minor
(if insubstantial) [R]elevance to the group, here. (Hmm, just realised,
no tag on this thread. Corrected.)
[1] Of course, in a desert you get loads of sand grains in the wind,
even 'singing dunes', as background noise...
[2] /And/ gets you those nice 'panning' shots, and rotation around the
subjects, which give you a better (if dizzier, sometimes) all round view
of the subjects.
[3] I've been up on one of those. With my Dad, who has been up in a
free-flying one. Apart from the unpredictability of the landing, Dad
much preferred the latter's flight... ;)
[4] At the end of writing this piece, I went to a site for "Meerkat
Manor", http://animal.discovery.com/fansites/meerkat/meerkat.html, left
the room and when I came back in I thought someone was squeegeeing the
window, with the audio accompaniment to the visuals on that page...
[5] I always feel a bit uneasy about radio collars and similar. In one
case where some large but juvenile birds were equipped with 'backpack'
antennas for help in tracking their truly massive 'first migration' from
the North Americas to the South Americas, including a truly momentous
trip across (I think) the Caribbean Sea. One bird may not have made it,
the signal was lost, and I always wondered how much the (undoubtedly
carefully designed, but still mildly encumbering with at least the
non-zero weight) could have tipped the balance and terminated the
marathon trip prematurely.
[6] Though I'm in no doubt there is often a bit of filmic cut'n'pasting
and selective editing in any instance. And they definitely do that in
the "Police Footage" shows, but that's by-the-by. ;)
Lesley Weston
notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 12/04/2007 7:18 AM:
> Lesley Weston wrote:
>> in article eviks2$pn1$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 11/04/2007 5:38 AM:
>>
>>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>>> The wild dog was a pup who hadn't been able to keep up with the pack as
>>>> they
>>>> migrated from one part of their territory to another. Jane Goodall and her
>>>> husband agonised on camera about the ethics of the situation, and then
>>>> picked up the pup and restored it to its family. I would have too.
>>> So who's to say it won't have exactly the same problem a day or two
>>> after they 'helped' the pup?
>>
>> Maybe it will, maybe it won't; at least they got it past that particular
>> problem.
>
> Yep. But claiming that doing so was necessarily good for the species or
> even helpful to the individual in the long run with any kind of
> certainty isn't very honest.
They didn't, and nor did I. I think I said "Sod Nature", meaning that I'm
not going to stand by and not intervene while the young of a species close
enough to ours that the "protect me" triggers work for our species too
slowly starves to death. However worthy and correct doing so might be.
>
>>> There's a good chance they didn't achieve
>>> anything at all. If the dogs run into a situation where there isn't
>>> enough food for the pack, they now have one more mouth to feed as well.
>>> In the end I don't think helping one animal is going to hurt much...
>>> but it's not going to help much either.
>>
>> If Jane Goodall is OK with it, then so am I. I lean that way anyway, so
>> having someone so eminent in the field behaving the same way I would makes
>> me think I might have the right idea.
>
> Jone Goodall, for all that I do respect her, is not infallible.
Of course not, but she does know a hell of a lot more about this than either
you or I do. If she can overcome her scientific training and her knowledge
of what is correct to take what everybody knows is the wrong action because
she can't bear not to, then so can I.
>
>>> Well, we can agree here. If it weren't for us the modern house cat
>>> wouldn't even exist, so taking responsibility for them as a species
>>> makes sense. If only humans did the same for cows... or goats... or...
>>> well, you get the idea.
>>
>> We do. Our domestic animals, at least the valuable ones like cows and goats,
>> are under our protection from the point where we decide they should be
>> conceived right up to the point where it suits us to kill them - that's
>> taking responsibility for them.
>
> Not in the same sense you're using when talking about cats. (although
> we've been through this before.. you tend to use a definition of
> 'responsible' that doesn't feature in any dictionary...)
Let's not go there again. Obviously I don't agree with you on this point.
> For cats
> you're talking about taking responsibility for their actions. For
> cattle you're now talking about taking responsibility for their care.
Fair enough - that is two different uses of a very versatile word. Though
farmers whose cattle stray into someone else's veggie plot (or whatever) are
held responsible for the damage, in any sense of the word.
> S'not the same. We certainly aren't taking as much responsibility as we
> need to for the damage that cows and goats do to the environment.
What damage? Methane emissions? Wild cattle were behaving in this antisocial
way long before we domesticated them, and goats were eating everything they
could get their teeth on, too. Cattle and goats are also part of the
environment, just as we are.
>
>>> Except in the most extreme cases, what
>>> happens in the natural world doesn't affect us to the same degree as any
>>> other creature on the planet. We react to extremes in temperature by
>>> inventing artificial means to ignore them. Ditto to all but the most
>>> violent weather patterns.
>>
>> No it doesn't, though cockroaches are better than we are at surviving
>> radiation, and goldfish at surviving freezing. There are also several
>> species of bacteria (actually archaeons, but close enough) that do fine in
>> boiling water or volcanoes, plus the flourishing ecologies around the
>> volcanic vents at the bottom of oceanic trenches. We're not unique in our
>> abilities to deal with unpleasantness, we just don't have to evolve to do
>> so.
>
> Which is a difference, innit? ;)
Sure, but not an important one.
> All those other species have changed
> physically to deal with those situations. Well, the cockroaches and
> radiation is probably more of a lucky coincidence for them, since AFAIK,
> roaches didn't actually evolve in high-radiation circumstances. We use
> tools to adapt, so there's no need to evolve.
I have a feeling that evolution is happening whether we see the need for it
or not.
>
>>> We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
>>> up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
>>
>> Sure we are! People carrying undesirable traits are less attractive than
>> others, and so less likely to mate. We're not the pinnacle of evolution,
>> just a part of it; it's still going on.
>
> Pfffft.
And thrppppptttt to you too!
> And what are these 'undesirable traits' that cause people to
> mate less often? In the US at least, the undereducated are likely to
> have more children than the educated. Are we breeding for ignorance,
> then? ;)
We're not breeding for anything, it's just happening as it always has and
always will, and education isn't an inborn characteristic, it happens (or
not) during the lifetime of the individual. Most people don't favour
Lamarkism in general, though there is all the epigenetics stuff.
<snip>
>>> Anyway, that's part of the problem.. we've been too good at expanding,
>>> and now we're running out of room and resources,
>>
>> No we're not. That was last week; now we're worrying about how all the
>> future old people are going to manage with so few young people to support
>> them.
>
> Import young people from other countries that have lots? :-p
Thereby reducing the surplus population in those countries, so there still
won't be too many people worldwide. And of course, there will still be all
the old people in the donor countries, who will now have even fewer young
people to support them.
>
>>> and for the most part
>>> we don't seem interested in slowing down the rate of growth by much.
>>
>> Yes we are. A few places like Africa are having difficulty in managing it,
>> but that's the fault of other civilisations and can easily be corrected.
>
> Can it? There are people *here* who keep having children despite their
> inability to support them.
Not enough people to upset the balance. And anyway, all those children will
grow up to pay taxes (well, some of them will anyway), which will support
the old people and so they're a Good Thing.
>
> We can't stop that, how can we stop people
> in other cultures?
What right do we have to even try? My idea was that pretty much the
opposite: People in other cultures would love to stop having more children
than they want, and will do so just as soon as we stop enforcing our weird
religious ideas and/or preventing them from developing a sustainable
agriculture and healing their sick people.
>>> That's not exactly a survival instinct.
>>
>> More people alive means more people reproducing means more people. That's
>> success as a species - it doesn't matter what conditions people live in, so
>> long as they reproduce. Of course, it does matter enormously if one is
>> interested in other parameters, but not in terms of species success.
>
> Erm. No... reproducing to the point of running out of resources causes
> a serious crash in population and massive instability. Most species
> would end up hitting an equilibrium, but we're more likely to starting
> bombing the hell out of each other in an attempt to get the resources we
> need.
Which would lead to equilibrium. So far, we haven't hit a point where a
crash is likely to happen, and it now looks like we never will. In a few
decades, the world's human population will peak and start to decline.
Lesley Weston
I hadn't read that before. Even if he's right, we're still hugely successful
as a species.
Lesley Weston
dian...@lindquist.plus.com wrote on 12/04/2007 1:46 AM:
> Lesley Weston wrote:
<snip>
>> We're not watching the series "Meerkat Manor", which is running on TV
>> now, even though meerkats have to be the most wonderfully cute
>> animals there are with endlessly interesting behaviour. We've seen so
>> many objective documentaries about how animals really behave that we
>> just don't want to see meerkat babies killing each other, meerkats
>> killing their prey, meerkats being killed by their predators or any
>> of the rest of it. One knows it happens, there's no need to watch
>> such unbearable things happening if one doesn't have to. So if the
>> BBC does have some kind of agenda in showing the elephants herd's
>> daily life so starkly, it isn't working; not on us anyway.
>
> AFAICS, the only agenda is to show what happened. Baby elephants
> that get separated from their mothers don't live happily ever after.
> The fact that we might feel better if they did doesn't really matter.
> If the purpose of a documentary is to show what life is really like
> for a certain group of animals in a certain habitat then that documentary
> *will* include such unpleasant things. If the purpose is to show cute
> animals living idyllic lives with no prey and no predators and nothing
> bad happening to any of them, well, perhaps "documentary" isnt
> quite the word we are looking for.
Quite. Which is why we don't watch animal documentaries any more. We don't
watch the other kind either, though.
Lesley Weston
sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
> On 2007-04-11, Alec Cawley <al...@spamspam.co.uk> wrote:
>> Their intention, AFAICS, was
>> simply documentary. "This is what happened when we sent the cameras
>> out". They were tracking the elephants from a helicopter. The baby got
>> separated, so they documented that.
>
> Did anyone consider the possibility that the noise from the
> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters are
> noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
Elephant Child, shirley?
Alec Cawley
Maybe that is because Attenborough didn't do it - he only did the voice
over. He was not part of the planning or design of the series. He only
spoke the commentary, as he has done form many other wildlife films
before other than his own.
Alec Cawley
> I've seen several series by Attenborough. Not on BBC, though, as we
> dont catch it, except of BBC World, so probably with some delay.
> Some of them I liked very much, e.g. the series on mammals or birds.
> They showed some species and habitats that I haven't seen before, even
> in books. And all that in very good graphical quality.
>
> Perhaps I have been a bit too harsh in judging that particular
> document, but it reminded me of a type of documents I'm fed (not FED!)
> up with. I mean the type where the animals get names, are
> antropomorphized to an extent and then their lifes and sufferings are
> being followed to the horrible end.
> It seems that this one wasn't of that kind. Still, if it deals just
> with the big hoofed animals of the African savannas and their
> predators, I'm not too sorry for not having seen it. There is too much
> of that sort.
>
> I prefer more specialized documents that show less commonly filmed
> fauna of a particular area or a systematic group. And I like as much
> species as possible named properly, so as to be able to identify them
> later in books or elsewhere. From all films on the African fauna I've
> seen the most memorable for me are two: a document on various African
> species of eagles, and another of kingfishers (rimfishers weren't
> mentioned).
I think the series was intended to show off what modern photography can
do. Much of the rest of the series showed off much less photogenic
animals. In that context, it would have been prejudice *not* to show the
elephants if you could get more interesting footage of them. The
particular purpose of that segment was to show the real effect of
climatic stress on several groups of large animals. As such, the used
co-ordinated camera work from helicopter and ground cameras. For
example, from the helicopter you could watch the lionesses spreading out
to surround a single deer, and then from the ground camera you could
see the final attack. As it happened, the deer got away by jumping into
a lake; I am sure that was not planned, and they would have shown the
outcome whichever way it fell.
It certainly was not anthropomorphising the elephants - as the example
that we started with showed. They made no attempt to make the baby
elephant more cuddly, and the final attitude was "that is how it happens",
Len Oil
> sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
>> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters are
>> noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
>
> Elephant Child, shirley?
I'll ignore the riff on "Elephant Man" that I think you're hinting at
and point out that I know this one, even if I don't know a thing about
what they actually call 'meerkits'... Elephants have Calves.
(Momentarily, that didn't look right, as the plural to Calf, despite it
following the normal pluralisation rules. I obviously don't read the
word often enough in correct context.)
In fact, as they are popularly known to be the only animal with four
knees (rightly or wrongly), then each elephant would have four calves, I
suppose, one below each said joint... ;)
Daibhid Ceanaideach
speaker: Sofia <pinkmonste...@ALLCAPSyahoo.com>
> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:38:25 -0400, Jeff Howell wrote:
>
>
>> Well, without our assistance, most species aren't really
>> capable of wandering over the *entire* planet...
>
> Are you crazy - we're the last of all the species to join
> the evolutionary chain!
Apart from having nothing to do with what Jeff was saying,
that's simply not so. All animals have, pretty much by
definition, been evolving for the same amount of time. We went
one way and the chimps went another, but the chimps were
evolving from our common ancestor at the same time as we were.
--
Dave
Official Absentee of EU Skiffeysoc
http://sesoc.eusa.ed.ac.uk/
"The only thing worse than being talked about
is having nothing to declare except my handbag."
-Oscar Wilde, according to Humphrey Lyttleton
Daibhid Ceanaideach
speaker: Len Oil <len...@lenoil.demon.co.uk>
> Lesley Weston wrote:
> > sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
>>> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters
>>> are noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
>>
>> Elephant Child, shirley?
>
> I'll ignore the riff on "Elephant Man" that I think you're
> hinting at
Nope, I think she's referring to The Elephant's Child, which
was one of Kiplings Just-So Stories.
Arthur Hagen
> in article slrnf1rvns....@siclone.itea.ntnu.no, Stig M. Valstad at
> sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
>
> > On 2007-04-11, Alec Cawley <al...@spamspam.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Their intention, AFAICS, was
> >> simply documentary. "This is what happened when we sent the cameras
> >> out". They were tracking the elephants from a helicopter. The baby got
> >> separated, so they documented that.
> >
> > Did anyone consider the possibility that the noise from the
> > helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters are
> > noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
>
> Elephant Child, shirley?
The mother is an elephant cow and the father an elephant bull, so surely
it must be an elephant calf?
Regards,
--
*Art
Alec Cawley
> On 2007-04-11, Alec Cawley <al...@spamspam.co.uk> wrote:
>> Their intention, AFAICS, was
>> simply documentary. "This is what happened when we sent the cameras
>> out". They were tracking the elephants from a helicopter. The baby got
>> separated, so they documented that.
>
> Did anyone consider the possibility that the noise from the
> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters are
> noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
I imagine they would have thought of that. Part of the point of the
program was the impressive cameras and lenses they were using, which
allowed them to keep well away. It strayed in a sandstorm.
Diane L.
<snip>
> These are all examples (except the foxes) of interfering being
> unscrewing, in the sense that we're undoing the harm that we did. The
> foxes and coyotes are doing it for themselves, our role being to
> supply the cities.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Foxes are doing it for themselves
TTTO 'Sisters are doin' it for themselves'
Now there was a time when they used to say
That behind every "wild fox"
There had to be some "wild country".
But in these times of change you know
That it's no longer true.
So we're comin' into the city
'Cause there's somethin' we forgot to say to you (we say)
Foxes are doin' it for themselves.
Standin' on their own four feet.
And leaving their old dells.
Foxes are doin' it for themselves.
Now this is a song to celebrate
The conscious liberation of the vulpine state!
Foxes, squirrels and coyotes, too.
In your back gardens
We're livin' with you.
The "country fox" moved into the interior
We're in London, Paris and Toronto, too.
Everybody - take a look around.
Can you see - can you see - can you see
There's a fox right next to you.
Chorus repeats.
Now we ain't makin' stories
And we ain't layin' plans
'Cause we're in your yard already
And we're in your garbage cans
(Just a same though)
Diane L.
Daibhid Ceanaideach
> Lesley Weston wrote:
>
> <snip>
>> These are all examples (except the foxes) of interfering
>> being unscrewing, in the sense that we're undoing the harm
>> that we did. The foxes and coyotes are doing it for
>> themselves, our role being to supply the cities.
>
> Sorry, couldn't resist.
>
> Foxes are doing it for themselves
> TTTO 'Sisters are doin' it for themselves'
<applause>
Len Oil
> The time: 12 Apr 2007. The place: alt.fan.pratchett. The
> speaker: Len Oil <len...@lenoil.demon.co.uk>
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>> sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
>>>> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters
>>>> are noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
>>> Elephant Child, shirley?
>> I'll ignore the riff on "Elephant Man" that I think you're
>> hinting at
>
> Nope, I think she's referring to The Elephant's Child, which
> was one of Kiplings Just-So Stories.
Ah, again my own sense of fun takes me past the obvious reference in the
pursuit of my own particularly verbose brand of humour.
(Ages since I've read Kipling, I wonder my parents still have the JSS
collection I used to read?)
Graycat
Anery
>
> I think the series was intended to show off what modern photography can
> do. Much of the rest of the series showed off much less photogenic
> animals. In that context, it would have been prejudice *not* to show the
> elephants if you could get more interesting footage of them. The
> particular purpose of that segment was to show the real effect of
> climatic stress on several groups of large animals. As such, the used
> co-ordinated camera work from helicopter and ground cameras. For
> example, from the helicopter you could watch the lionesses spreading out
> to surround a single deer, and then from the ground camera you could
> see the final attack. As it happened, the deer got away by jumping into
> a lake; I am sure that was not planned, and they would have shown the
> outcome whichever way it fell.
>
of the highlights of technology in portraying of wildlife, I don't
appreciate them to the extent they would probably deserve. I _do_
appreciate high quality of image, or the possibility to show animals
from a close distance or in the twilight of a rain forest. But things
like usage of infrared cameras or digital effects like 3D display of
rotating skeletons are wasted on me. I remember a documentary on
elephants which regularly visited abandoned salt mines to feed on the
salt. It had been highly praised as a recording of a unique and so far
unknown behaviour, which was possible to make only because of the
usage of infrared cameras. Still after ten minutes of watching grey on
grey I had a strong feeling of "so what"? (I've watched it to the end,
though, out of curiosity.)
And I can't imagine very much how lionesses attacking their prey for
the umpteenth time can be made more interesting for me with new
filming techniques. (I suppose that it was some kind of antelope and
not a deer?)
Still I guess I'd probably like some of the other parts of the series
which showed some of the "much less photogenic animals". I wonder
which they could be.
> It certainly was not anthropomorphising the elephants - as the example
> that we started with showed. They made no attempt to make the baby
> elephant more cuddly, and the final attitude was "that is how it happens",
You've reminded me to a story from a children's book called 'Twelve
Smiling Witches'. It deals with a sweet little piglet which was dirty,
and an elephant helped it to wash itself. Towards the end of the
story, the piglet walks through the forest all pink and sweet-
smelling. Suddenly a leopard jumps from a tree, kills the piglet and
eats it.
Lesson: 'Children, are you sorry for the piglet? Do you feel that the
story should have a different ending? But this wasn't a story about a
piglet, but about how a hungry leopard finally got a good meal. And
besides of that, _that is how it really happens in a rain forest_.'
I can't say it was the type of stories I preferred as a child.
Anery
Anery
>
<snip>
> BTW, if you don't want to confuse people, the difference between
> "document" and "documentary" is important. :-)
>
Thanx.
Would the term "film" be appropriate?
What is the correct term for moving pictures with a story, e.g.
"Hogfather"? Movie? Is it still movie if it is being broadcasted on
the TV? Or if it is on a DVD?
Anery
Lesley Weston
dian...@lindquist.plus.com wrote on 12/04/2007 12:28 PM:
> Lesley Weston wrote:
>
> <snip>
>> These are all examples (except the foxes) of interfering being
>> unscrewing, in the sense that we're undoing the harm that we did. The
>> foxes and coyotes are doing it for themselves, our role being to
>> supply the cities.
>
> Sorry, couldn't resist.
>
> Foxes are doing it for themselves
> TTTO 'Sisters are doin' it for themselves'
<snip>
I don't usually bother to read filks, but this one I did. I liked it.
Lesley Weston
len...@lenoil.demon.co.uk wrote on 12/04/2007 11:20 AM:
> Lesley Weston wrote:
>> sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
>>> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters are
>>> noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
>>
>> Elephant Child, shirley?
>
> I'll ignore the riff on "Elephant Man" that I think you're hinting at
That's another one that I hadn't thought of. I meant Kipling's Just So
story.
Lesley Weston
daibhidc...@aol.com wrote on 12/04/2007 11:26 AM:
> The time: 11 Apr 2007. The place: alt.fan.pratchett. The
> speaker: Sofia <pinkmonste...@ALLCAPSyahoo.com>
>
>> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:38:25 -0400, Jeff Howell wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Well, without our assistance, most species aren't really
>>> capable of wandering over the *entire* planet...
>>
>> Are you crazy - we're the last of all the species to join
>> the evolutionary chain!
>
> Apart from having nothing to do with what Jeff was saying,
> that's simply not so. All animals have, pretty much by
> definition, been evolving for the same amount of time. We went
> one way and the chimps went another, but the chimps were
> evolving from our common ancestor at the same time as we were.
And both we and the chimps are still evolving, along with every other
species. Eventually, some individuals in each species will have changed so
much that they form one or more new species, and some of the species
existing now will no longer be able to compete and will become extinct. As
it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.
Lesley Weston
daibhidc...@aol.com wrote on 12/04/2007 11:36 AM:
> The time: 12 Apr 2007. The place: alt.fan.pratchett. The
> speaker: Len Oil <len...@lenoil.demon.co.uk>
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>> sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
>>>> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters
>>>> are noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
>>>
>>> Elephant Child, shirley?
>>
>> I'll ignore the riff on "Elephant Man" that I think you're
>> hinting at
>
> Nope, I think she's referring to The Elephant's Child, which
> was one of Kiplings Just-So Stories.
Yup.
Jeff Howell
> in article evlf4k$c2o$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 12/04/2007 7:18 AM:
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>> in article eviks2$pn1$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 11/04/2007 5:38 AM:
>>>
>>>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>>>> The wild dog was a pup who hadn't been able to keep up with the pack as
>>>>> they
>>>>> migrated from one part of their territory to another. Jane Goodall and her
>>>>> husband agonised on camera about the ethics of the situation, and then
>>>>> picked up the pup and restored it to its family. I would have too.
>>>> So who's to say it won't have exactly the same problem a day or two
>>>> after they 'helped' the pup?
>>> Maybe it will, maybe it won't; at least they got it past that particular
>>> problem.
>> Yep. But claiming that doing so was necessarily good for the species or
>> even helpful to the individual in the long run with any kind of
>> certainty isn't very honest.
>
> They didn't, and nor did I. I think I said "Sod Nature", meaning that I'm
> not going to stand by and not intervene while the young of a species close
> enough to ours that the "protect me" triggers work for our species too
> slowly starves to death. However worthy and correct doing so might be.
Well, so long as you realize that your actions might very well be
completely futile or even harmful, I guess. I suppose I'd rather trust
the process that's been going on for orders of magnitude longer than
there have been humans...
>>>> There's a good chance they didn't achieve
>>>> anything at all. If the dogs run into a situation where there isn't
>>>> enough food for the pack, they now have one more mouth to feed as well.
>>>> In the end I don't think helping one animal is going to hurt much...
>>>> but it's not going to help much either.
>>> If Jane Goodall is OK with it, then so am I. I lean that way anyway, so
>>> having someone so eminent in the field behaving the same way I would makes
>>> me think I might have the right idea.
>> Jone Goodall, for all that I do respect her, is not infallible.
>
> Of course not, but she does know a hell of a lot more about this than either
> you or I do. If she can overcome her scientific training and her knowledge
> of what is correct to take what everybody knows is the wrong action because
> she can't bear not to, then so can I.
Doesn't that assume now that you have the same qualifications to *make*
that judgment that she does? (Okay, now I'm just teasing you...)
>> For cats
>> you're talking about taking responsibility for their actions. For
>> cattle you're now talking about taking responsibility for their care.
>
> Fair enough - that is two different uses of a very versatile word. Though
> farmers whose cattle stray into someone else's veggie plot (or whatever) are
> held responsible for the damage, in any sense of the word.
>
>> S'not the same. We certainly aren't taking as much responsibility as we
>> need to for the damage that cows and goats do to the environment.
>
> What damage? Methane emissions? Wild cattle were behaving in this antisocial
> way long before we domesticated them, and goats were eating everything they
> could get their teeth on, too. Cattle and goats are also part of the
> environment, just as we are.
And were there as many of them? Were they even the same creature?
Modern cattle, at least in the Americas, are utterly unable to fend for
themselves. They're complacent enough for violent youths to get away
with tipping them over as they sleep, which is ridiculous. We've
utterly co-opted any sort of natural evolution for our own ends, and
bred them in insane numbers. That's hardly a natural impact on the
environment.
Goats I know less about... they may very well be closer to the original
creature than cows are. But there are still certainly a lot more of
them, and more concentrated, than would have been if we'd left 'em alone.
>>>> Except in the most extreme cases, what
>>>> happens in the natural world doesn't affect us to the same degree as any
>>>> other creature on the planet. We react to extremes in temperature by
>>>> inventing artificial means to ignore them. Ditto to all but the most
>>>> violent weather patterns.
>>> No it doesn't, though cockroaches are better than we are at surviving
>>> radiation, and goldfish at surviving freezing. There are also several
>>> species of bacteria (actually archaeons, but close enough) that do fine in
>>> boiling water or volcanoes, plus the flourishing ecologies around the
>>> volcanic vents at the bottom of oceanic trenches. We're not unique in our
>>> abilities to deal with unpleasantness, we just don't have to evolve to do
>>> so.
>> Which is a difference, innit? ;)
>
> Sure, but not an important one.
Not having to evolve isn't important? We may be using different
definitions of 'important'...
>>>> We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
>>>> up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
>>> Sure we are! People carrying undesirable traits are less attractive than
>>> others, and so less likely to mate. We're not the pinnacle of evolution,
>>> just a part of it; it's still going on.
>> Pfffft.
>
> And thrppppptttt to you too!
>
>> And what are these 'undesirable traits' that cause people to
>> mate less often? In the US at least, the undereducated are likely to
>> have more children than the educated. Are we breeding for ignorance,
>> then? ;)
>
> We're not breeding for anything, it's just happening as it always has and
> always will, and education isn't an inborn characteristic, it happens (or
> not) during the lifetime of the individual. Most people don't favour
> Lamarkism in general, though there is all the epigenetics stuff.
If we're not breeding in any particular direction, what makes you think
any change will happen at all? Surely in order to head in a particular
direction as a species, there must be some sort of trait that makes an
individual more likely to breed and pass on that trait/genetic mutation?
Education is not, indeed, an inborn characteristic. However, an
individual who hasn't had an education, and who doesn't value education,
is likely to raise children who also don't value education, not because
of genetics, but because parents are the primary role-model. So if the
undereducated have more children than the educated, and their children
learn that education isn't important, they too will tend to be
undereducated. And away we go down the path to ignorance. :-p
Now that I've needless justified that, I'll point out the winking smiley
and clarify that I wasn't particularly serious.
>>>> Anyway, that's part of the problem.. we've been too good at expanding,
>>>> and now we're running out of room and resources,
>>> No we're not. That was last week; now we're worrying about how all the
>>> future old people are going to manage with so few young people to support
>>> them.
>> Import young people from other countries that have lots? :-p
>
> Thereby reducing the surplus population in those countries, so there still
> won't be too many people worldwide. And of course, there will still be all
> the old people in the donor countries, who will now have even fewer young
> people to support them.
You may not have noticed, but here I wasn't attempting to counter your
argument so much as I was attempting some humour. You may very well be
right, and I certainly wasn't disputing it.
>>>> and for the most part
>>>> we don't seem interested in slowing down the rate of growth by much.
>>> Yes we are. A few places like Africa are having difficulty in managing it,
>>> but that's the fault of other civilisations and can easily be corrected.
>> Can it? There are people *here* who keep having children despite their
>> inability to support them.
>
> Not enough people to upset the balance. And anyway, all those children will
> grow up to pay taxes (well, some of them will anyway), which will support
> the old people and so they're a Good Thing.
Wait. It's not enough to upset the balance, but it *is* enough to
support all the old people in the country? That's an odd set of things
that don't seem to match up at all...
>> We can't stop that, how can we stop people
>> in other cultures?
>
> What right do we have to even try? My idea was that pretty much the
> opposite: People in other cultures would love to stop having more children
> than they want, and will do so just as soon as we stop enforcing our weird
> religious ideas and/or preventing them from developing a sustainable
> agriculture and healing their sick people.
Didn't say we should. But nevertheless, population growth here or
there, it's something we have to deal with.
Also - if people in other cultures *really* wanted to stop having
children, there are some really great methods for doing that... not
having sex, for one... Let's not pretend that these people have
absolutely no control over their own bodies, okay?
>>>> That's not exactly a survival instinct.
>>> More people alive means more people reproducing means more people. That's
>>> success as a species - it doesn't matter what conditions people live in, so
>>> long as they reproduce. Of course, it does matter enormously if one is
>>> interested in other parameters, but not in terms of species success.
>> Erm. No... reproducing to the point of running out of resources causes
>> a serious crash in population and massive instability. Most species
>> would end up hitting an equilibrium, but we're more likely to starting
>> bombing the hell out of each other in an attempt to get the resources we
>> need.
>
> Which would lead to equilibrium. So far, we haven't hit a point where a
> crash is likely to happen, and it now looks like we never will. In a few
> decades, the world's human population will peak and start to decline.
Equilibrium? I suppose tending towards 0 is an equilibrium, yes... but
it's hardly *natural*. We might also very well repeat exactly the same
process we've *been* doing, which is to reproduce in ridiculous amounts,
fill up the world, and repeat the whole process over again.
Not an equilibrium at all, that.
Regardless - uncontrolled population growth is never a good thing, which
is why you don't tend to see that in other animals. Whether it's
disease or predators, there's generally something there that keeps 'em
from getting out of control.
--
Jeff
Diane L.
> in article 461e8861$0$8717$ed26...@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net, Diane
> L. at dian...@lindquist.plus.com wrote on 12/04/2007 12:28 PM:
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>> These are all examples (except the foxes) of interfering being
>>> unscrewing, in the sense that we're undoing the harm that we did.
>>> The foxes and coyotes are doing it for themselves, our role being to
>>> supply the cities.
>>
>> Sorry, couldn't resist.
>>
>> Foxes are doing it for themselves
>> TTTO 'Sisters are doin' it for themselves'
>
> <snip>
>
> I don't usually bother to read filks, but this one I did.
That's OK, I don't usually write 'em. In fact, this one brings the grand
total of filks what I have wrote to ... er, one, I think :-)
When I read your sentence the tune came into my head, then when I
was washing up later the words popped in to join them.
> I liked it.
Thank you (and to Daibh, too).
Diane L.
-Wee Rocket
> The time: 12 Apr 2007. The place: alt.fan.pratchett. The
> speaker: Len Oil <len...@lenoil.demon.co.uk>
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>> sti...@siclone.itea.ntnu.no wrote on 12/04/2007 3:00 AM:
>>>> helicopter caused the elephant pup to stray? Helicopters
>>>> are noisy buggers with some weird sound patterns.
>>> Elephant Child, shirley?
>> I'll ignore the riff on "Elephant Man" that I think you're
>> hinting at
>
> Nope, I think she's referring to The Elephant's Child, which
> was one of Kiplings Just-So Stories.
"Along the banks of the great gray-green greasy Limpopo river . . ."
Or some such. My favourite children's story when I were yoong.
-Rock http://www.rockyfrisco.com
--
The World's Best Free News Service: http://www.rationalreview.com/
Arthur Hagen
>
> "Along the banks of the great gray-green greasy Limpopo river . . ."
". . . the lion sleeps tonight" ? :-)
Regards,
--
*Art
Free Lunch
"Arthur Hagen" <a...@broomstick.com> wrote in
<evr03n$v0k$1...@tree.broomstick.com>:
>-Wee Rocket <rockn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Along the banks of the great gray-green greasy Limpopo river . . ."
>
>". . . the lion sleeps tonight" ? :-)
That would be from "Just So Confusing Stories". Authorship is in
dispute.
Lesley Weston
notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 13/04/2007 12:08 PM:
> Lesley Weston wrote:
>> in article evlf4k$c2o$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 12/04/2007 7:18 AM:
>>
>>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>>> in article eviks2$pn1$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>>>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 11/04/2007 5:38 AM:
<snip>
>>> Jone Goodall, for all that I do respect her, is not infallible.
>>
>> Of course not, but she does know a hell of a lot more about this than either
>> you or I do. If she can overcome her scientific training and her knowledge
>> of what is correct to take what everybody knows is the wrong action because
>> she can't bear not to, then so can I.
>
> Doesn't that assume now that you have the same qualifications to *make*
> that judgment that she does? (Okay, now I'm just teasing you...)
No, I'm just blindly following my heroine...
<snip>
>>> S'not the same. We certainly aren't taking as much responsibility as we
>>> need to for the damage that cows and goats do to the environment.
>>
>> What damage? Methane emissions? Wild cattle were behaving in this antisocial
>> way long before we domesticated them, and goats were eating everything they
>> could get their teeth on, too. Cattle and goats are also part of the
>> environment, just as we are.
>
> And were there as many of them?
Who knows?
> Were they even the same creature? Modern cattle, at least in the Americas,
>are utterly unable to fend for
> themselves. They're complacent enough for violent youths to get away
> with tipping them over as they sleep, which is ridiculous. We've
> utterly co-opted any sort of natural evolution for our own ends, and
> bred them in insane numbers. That's hardly a natural impact on the
> environment.
There's been a thread on just this recently. It is now established to afp's
satisfaction that Herefords, Heeland Coos, Aberdeens and Belted Galloways
can manage to deliver their babies just fine without our help, while
Holsteins can't. All breeds emit enormous amounts of methane [1], as do all
other ruminants, so the trick now will be to catch the methane and turn it
into methanol, which can then be burned as fuel. This can be classed as
unscrewing.
>
> Goats I know less about... they may very well be closer to the original
> creature than cows are. But there are still certainly a lot more of
> them, and more concentrated, than would have been if we'd left 'em alone.
How do you know? And if you are right, why does it matter which species has
more numbers, with or without our intervention? Except to the individual
members of that species, who are presumably quite glad to exist.
>
>>>>> We also aren't subject to the same kind of natural selection that makes
>>>>> up such a big part of *reaching* an equilibrium in nature.
>>>> Sure we are! People carrying undesirable traits are less attractive than
>>>> others, and so less likely to mate. We're not the pinnacle of evolution,
>>>> just a part of it; it's still going on.
>>> Pfffft.
>>
>> And thrppppptttt to you too!
>>
>>> And what are these 'undesirable traits' that cause people to
>>> mate less often? In the US at least, the undereducated are likely to
>>> have more children than the educated. Are we breeding for ignorance,
>>> then? ;)
>>
>> We're not breeding for anything, it's just happening as it always has and
>> always will, and education isn't an inborn characteristic, it happens (or
>> not) during the lifetime of the individual. Most people don't favour
>> Lamarkism in general, though there is all the epigenetics stuff.
>
> If we're not breeding in any particular direction, what makes you think
> any change will happen at all? Surely in order to head in a particular
> direction as a species, there must be some sort of trait that makes an
> individual more likely to breed and pass on that trait/genetic mutation?
Mutations are random, though some loci are more likely to mutate than others
and some mutations have a much larger effect than others. If (and it's a
large if) one of these random mutations gives its possessor some advantage,
that organism is more likely to breed and so pass on that mutation. This is
obviously a huge over-simplification, but close enough. So there is no
particular direction that any species, including ours, is moving in; it's
more of a drunkard's walk. I thought of making some kind of reference to
brewer's droop here, but decided against it.
>
> Education is not, indeed, an inborn characteristic. However, an
> individual who hasn't had an education, and who doesn't value education,
> is likely to raise children who also don't value education, not because
> of genetics, but because parents are the primary role-model. So if the
> undereducated have more children than the educated, and their children
> learn that education isn't important, they too will tend to be
> undereducated. And away we go down the path to ignorance. :-p
That's nurture, not nature, even if it's true, which is where Lamarkism
comes into it.
>
> Now that I've needless justified that, I'll point out the winking smiley
> and clarify that I wasn't particularly serious.
Well no! Who is, after all?
<overbreeding>
>>> We can't stop that, how can we stop people
>>> in other cultures?
>>
>> What right do we have to even try? My idea was that pretty much the
>> opposite: People in other cultures would love to stop having more children
>> than they want, and will do so just as soon as we stop enforcing our weird
>> religious ideas and/or preventing them from developing a sustainable
>> agriculture and healing their sick people.
>
> Didn't say we should. But nevertheless, population growth here or
> there, it's something we have to deal with.
Is it? When the world's population peaks during this century and then starts
to decline, the problem will literally go away. Our own population is
already declining, and we don't have the right to "deal with" other
countries' population problems, if any; that's for them to sort out
themselves if they want to.
>
> Also - if people in other cultures *really* wanted to stop having
> children, there are some really great methods for doing that... not
> having sex, for one... Let's not pretend that these people have
> absolutely no control over their own bodies, okay?
Would you want to go that route if you were the person being told that you
had too many children? It's like the prevailing idea that we must have
freezers and SUVs and all the other benefits of an industrial society, but
people in developing nations must not because then *they* are polluting
*our* world.
>
>>>>> That's not exactly a survival instinct.
>>>> More people alive means more people reproducing means more people. That's
>>>> success as a species - it doesn't matter what conditions people live in, so
>>>> long as they reproduce. Of course, it does matter enormously if one is
>>>> interested in other parameters, but not in terms of species success.
>>> Erm. No... reproducing to the point of running out of resources causes
>>> a serious crash in population and massive instability. Most species
>>> would end up hitting an equilibrium, but we're more likely to starting
>>> bombing the hell out of each other in an attempt to get the resources we
>>> need.
>>
>> Which would lead to equilibrium. So far, we haven't hit a point where a
>> crash is likely to happen, and it now looks like we never will. In a few
>> decades, the world's human population will peak and start to decline.
>
> Equilibrium? I suppose tending towards 0 is an equilibrium, yes... but
> it's hardly *natural*.
It is if we do it - we're a part of Nature in every way, including our large
brains and territorial instincts, so whatever we do is natural.
> We might also very well repeat exactly the same
> process we've *been* doing, which is to reproduce in ridiculous amounts,
> fill up the world, and repeat the whole process over again.
Same as every other species. And see the bit about our population peaking.
>
> Not an equilibrium at all, that.
>
> Regardless - uncontrolled population growth is never a good thing, which
> is why you don't tend to see that in other animals. Whether it's
> disease or predators, there's generally something there that keeps 'em
> from getting out of control.
As there is for us - you've described some of the limiting factors yourself.
[1] Mostly through the front end, contrary to popular belief. I found that
out just the other day.
-Wee Rocket
> -Wee Rocket <rockn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Along the banks of the great gray-green greasy Limpopo river . . ."
>
> ". . . the lion sleeps tonight" ? :-)
Damn you. Now I'll have that tune in my head for the next three weeks.
April Goodwin-Smith
> Lesley Weston wrote:
>> There are more humans alive now than there have been in
>> the whole of human history. I'd call that pretty successful.
> "everybody wants to be here for the big finish."
>
Even though we've further down the thread learned that this
is not so, this is still funny, and I'm inclined to like your second
wife just on the strength of this. :)
April.
April Goodwin-Smith
> Lesley Weston wrote:
> <snip>
>> foxes and coyotes are doing it for themselves, our role being to supply
>> the cities.
> Sorry, couldn't resist.
> Foxes are doing it for themselves
> TTTO 'Sisters are doin' it for themselves'
>
Excellent! Brava!
April.
-Wee Rocket
Cat was unquestionably the most gifted artist I have ever encountered.
She was a world-class cartoonist and could capture you in charcoal on
paper (better than any photographer) in about 15 minutes. I'm still
mystified as to why she's not world-famous by now.
Arthur Hagen
> Arthur Hagen wrote:
>> -Wee Rocket <rockn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> "Along the banks of the great gray-green greasy Limpopo river . . ."
>>
>> ". . . the lion sleeps tonight" ? :-)
>
> Damn you. Now I'll have that tune in my head for the next three weeks.
I'm Sorry[1]. At least I didn't mention "Mr Sandman" or "Sukiyaki".
[1]: Not the Brenda Lee version.
Regards,
--
*Art
Hendrik Schober
> [...]
> You've reminded me to a story from a children's book called 'Twelve
> Smiling Witches'. It deals with a sweet little piglet which was dirty,
> and an elephant helped it to wash itself. Towards the end of the
> story, the piglet walks through the forest all pink and sweet-
> smelling. Suddenly a leopard jumps from a tree, kills the piglet and
> eats it.
> Lesson: 'Children, are you sorry for the piglet? Do you feel that the
> story should have a different ending? But this wasn't a story about a
> piglet, but about how a hungry leopard finally got a good meal. And
> besides of that, _that is how it really happens in a rain forest_.'
>
> I can't say it was the type of stories I preferred as a child.
I probably wouldn't have either. I do,
however, like it now, being an adult.
> Anery
Schobi
--
Spam...@gmx.de is never read
I'm HSchober at gmx dot de
"Lurkerhood is like virginity; you only get to lose it once
(and things get a lot more interesting afterwards)."
Diane L. in afp
Hendrik Schober
> in article eviguu$gcj$1...@murphy.mediascape.de, Hendrik Schober at
> Spam...@gmx.de wrote on 11/04/2007 4:20 AM:
>
> > 8'FED <dra...@netyp.com.au> wrote:
> > > Jeff Howell wrote:
> > >
> > > > Is that meant to be a justification? We're already screwing
> > > > with nature, so why not just keep doing it?
> > >
> > > Not all interference is screwing.
> > >
> > > Sometimes it really is *un*screwing.
> >
> > Can you name a few such unscrewings?
>
> [examples snipped]
What I see on your list doesn't seem to fit my
definition of "interfering with nature". It
seemse more like switching to "interfering less"-
mode.
8'FED
> 8'FED wrote:
>>
> <snip>
>
>> BTW, if you don't want to confuse people, the difference between
>> "document" and "documentary" is important. :-)
>>
> Thanx.
> Would the term "film" be appropriate?
I'd say not ... for "Planet Earth", I'd choose from the following
alternatives:
- Documentary
- Program (or "programme" if you prefer British spellings)
- Series
- Miniseries
I think the exact meaning of words like "film" depends on dialect and
the age of the speaker. To me, calling something a film generally
sounds old-fashioned [1], but someone as old as my parents (or older!)
might use it more.
> What is the correct term for moving pictures with a story, e.g.
> "Hogfather"? Movie? Is it still movie if it is being broadcasted on
> the TV? Or if it is on a DVD?
Yes, it's still a movie if it's on TV or a DVD.
Hogfather is a bit of a strange case, because it was broadcast in two
episodes. You could argue that it's really a two-part miniseries, if
you want to be pedantic.
I tried to define what I think constitutes a movie, but it got longer
and more complicated the longer I thought about it. I would have to
use prototype theory for a definition like that.
Adrian.
[1] I _might_ use "film" to describe non-fiction shown at the cinema,
e.g. "An Inconvenient Truth" and other cinema-documentaries of
that ilk. But those are uncommon.
Arthur Hagen
> in article evokga$r03$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 13/04/2007 12:08 PM:
>
> > Didn't say we should. But nevertheless, population growth here or
> > there, it's something we have to deal with.
>
> Is it? When the world's population peaks during this century and then starts
> to decline, the problem will literally go away. Our own population is
> already declining, and we don't have the right to "deal with" other
> countries' population problems, if any; that's for them to sort out
> themselves if they want to.
On the contrary, most western cultures now /depend/ on other countries
having population problems. The retirement systems have been turned
into pyramid schemes, where we need continuously growing amount of young
workers who pay in to the system without (yet) withdrawing from it.
Similarly, the very nexus of capitalism -- the stock market -- is
dependant on continuous growth. Once the influx of new money halts, the
stock market crashes and burns. If the population declines, the goods
and services per individual must increase at a higher rate than the
population decline, year by year, or there will be a collapse.
> Would you want to go that route if you were the person being told that you
> had too many children? It's like the prevailing idea that we must have
> freezers and SUVs and all the other benefits of an industrial society, but
> people in developing nations must not because then *they* are polluting
> *our* world.
There's one thing I don't understand: If *we* are the ones who buy all
the products from China, why do our politicians say that it's China that
pollutes so much? Isn't it more fair to count the polluter as the one
who ultimately causes the pollution by ordering and buying the products?
Regards,
--
*Art
Lesley Weston
a...@broomstick.com wrote on 14/04/2007 9:39 AM:
> -Wee Rocket <rockn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Along the banks of the great gray-green greasy Limpopo river . . ."
>
> ". . . the lion sleeps tonight" ? :-)
I don't think it mentions lions, though there's quite a lot about
crocodiles.
Lesley Weston
Sofia
> [4] At the end of writing this piece, I went to a site for "Meerkat
> Manor", http://animal.discovery.com/fansites/meerkat/meerkat.html, left
> the room and when I came back in I thought someone was squeegeeing the
> window, with the audio accompaniment to the visuals on that page...
Oh, what a dreadful programme - have you watched it all the way through?
I saw it for the first time last Sunday at my mother-in-law's house, and
they all were given yukky names, like the mother, Flower, who was the
leader and bully of the group who, as far as I could tell from the
narrator, killed the children of her pregnant daughter, Mozart, so that
she would feed her own children for her.
If you've been watching the whole series, please feel free to correct me
if I'm wrong, as it's the only episode I've seen!
Sofie
--
Please visit my deviantART page: http://sofen.deviantart.com/
Sofia
> And both we and the chimps are still evolving, along with every other
> species. Eventually, some individuals in each species will have changed
> so much that they form one or more new species, and some of the species
> existing now will no longer be able to compete and will become extinct.
> As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end,
> amen.
Apes don't really *need* humans to survive though! Any species could have
done just as well without us all these years, or they wouldn't still be
here!
Len Oil
It /is/ 'soapified', even anthropomorphised to some extent.
Calling the alpha female "Flower" is of course something that has no
bearing on what nature 'Flower' actually has. But it helps the
understanding of the viewer better than saying "Female number 65b". If
you're at least a semi-regular visitor of the mother-in-law on Sundays,
and she's at least semi-regular viewer of the same programmes in the
same time-slot, you might have seen the programmes following the
elephants, a few months back, with "Echo" (or whatever the name was) the
matriarch and all her children named names beginning with 'E'. It's a
'latch' to hold onto.
The rest I 'sort of' agree with, but in a different manner. I have no
problem with an alpha female (in this case Flower) having killed
competing offspring. This is a natural thing to happen in such a
societal grouping of creatures where resources are limited and the
effects of 'selfish genes' (or a similar but alternate interpretation of
the process) takes place. Flower and Zaphod[1] are the alpha parents
and while they are in charge of the group it is 'best' that the only
children are their own. What I feel wary about is that the action shots
(even the 'story itself') has probably been (while not completely made
up) pieced together from footage and may not /completely/ echo the way
things are.
In other words, human (i.e. editorial) interpretation is an unknown
factor in the stories being told.
I've not watched the whole series, but I've seen enough of the
programmes to like it (and, for comparison, I don't watch Soap Operas).
I must have missed the "Mozart's offspring" episode (I too, normally
watch it while visiting someone else). In a prior episode another
daughter, Tosca, was evicted with /her/ cubs (fathered by a rival
'Lazuli' male called "Carlos"[2] who seems to be the 'unlawful' parent
of any non-Flower/Zaphod meerkits born to the weak-willed non-alpha
females in the Whiskers clan...) and also suffered (by exile) from the
wrath of Flower for long enough to be fatal to the offspring, I believe.
I believe meerkats can lactate even if not mothers themselves, according
to the need for 'wet-nurse' babysitters, alongside the alpha female who
would be 'naturally' lactating for her latest offspring. If you're
thinking that Flower somehow contrived Mozart's pregnancy and subsequent
loss of her offspring for milk alone (and this, I would agree, sounds
utterly distasteful) then I hope you feel... 'happier' in knowing that
probably the only crime was 'infanticide' of socially unacceptable
offspring. Still not 'nice', but an evolutionary and instinctual drive
might be more acceptable to you, rather than the full 'human-like'
duplicity of the other interpretation. The phrase "Nature in tooth and
claw" comes to play here. Nature is not 'nice', it is practical.
(Humanity is often not 'nice', either, anyway...)
Of course, it depends on the way the story was told via narration. I
assume it was the Bill Nighy/BBC2 version you watched (someone else
apparently narrates on some satellite channel or other, not sure if
that's an American voice). I quite like the manner of his telling the
tale, although (as said a few times already) I'm always aware that the
translation of the happenings to "human" concepts could be a little
misleading, even if they don't selectively 'patch' together the fates of
the unpaid 'actors' in a selective manner, within the soap being played
out to the viewers.
[1] How can you /not/ like a character called 'Zaphod' ;)
[2] You can just imagine the "foreign villain" moustache he should be
sporting. ;)
Len Oil
> daughter, Tosca, was evicted with /her/ cubs (fathered by a rival
> 'Lazuli' male called "Carlos"[2] who seems to be the 'unlawful' parent
> of any non-Flower/Zaphod meerkits born to the weak-willed non-alpha
> females in the Whiskers clan...) and also suffered (by exile) from the
On re-reading what I'd posted, I realised I'd forgotten to add a caveat
to this statement.
It will be a function of the animal instinct that 'unfaithful daughters'
exist, and that promiscuous strangers shall sometimes impregnate them.
Evolutionarily, it could be explainable under such propositions as there
perhaps being a sudden loss of the alpha parents at a time when a
secondary female has become pregnant, then she (if powerful enough to
ascend to power) would provide for a fully-working family unit far
quicker than if the ascension had to pre-date the 'continuity' mating.
It would also apply in the event of 'geographic fissioning' of a group.
In a couple of the episodes that I've seen, the group is temporarily
split (whether by aerial threat or some other cause) between differing
safety-burrow systems. Should the alpha female not accomplish a
reuniting of the two sections of the same group, for some reason, a
illicitly pregnant female in the non-Alpha burrow, especially a female
who is a close contender of the alpha, could make her mark on a new
'tribe' and, assuming there is room/resources, the separation could
become permanent. (Should resources be too tight, then the loyalties of
the non-alpha band might be swayed towards the support of the
newly-created offshoot alpha and direct competition between the alpha
and neo-alpha groups might exist, to whatever end Fate dictates.)
On top of all this, I'm also minded of the idea that it allows (by
'negligence' or uncharacteristic 'allowance' by the alpha female) for
the importation of external genes into an established family unit,
refreshing the gene-pool a little. This is counter to the
selfishness/whatever of the alpha genes, themselves, but at a background
level may provide for healthier groups than ones where the selfishness
is absolute and unbending, so a pregnant daughter who 'lucks out' w.r.t.
parental approval could (regardless of her suitability or proximity to
become the next alpha female) become a progenitor in her own right.
And I've not even touched upon the 'animal psychology' and instinct that
must control the males of the species. Non-alpha males would rightly
(from a genetic POV) make advances in any situation that does not
directly threaten their own existence, regardless of whether their
potential mates are likely to be a successful parent in the light of
matriarchal governance, for it may turn out right on /some/ occasion,
and then their genes (inclusive of such masculine tendencies as are
genetically-transferred) find their way into a new generation. And/or
they attain the position of alpha-male for 'guaranteed' fatherhood.
(And note the "and/" bit... ;)
Erm, yes, so what I /was/ going to say is that "weak-willed" isn't a
judgement upon the females, any more than I'd judge the males "victims
of their libidos", but in transferring the understanding to human terms,
I've perhaps used rather more chauvinistic language than it would be
technically fair to use.
Lesley Weston
a...@broomstick.com wrote on 15/04/2007 8:34 AM:
> On Sat, 2007-04-14 at 17:05 +0000, Lesley Weston wrote:
>> in article evokga$r03$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 13/04/2007 12:08 PM:
>>
>>> Didn't say we should. But nevertheless, population growth here or
>>> there, it's something we have to deal with.
>>
>> Is it? When the world's population peaks during this century and then starts
>> to decline, the problem will literally go away. Our own population is
>> already declining, and we don't have the right to "deal with" other
>> countries' population problems, if any; that's for them to sort out
>> themselves if they want to.
>
> On the contrary, most western cultures now /depend/ on other countries
> having population problems. The retirement systems have been turned
> into pyramid schemes, where we need continuously growing amount of young
> workers who pay in to the system without (yet) withdrawing from it.
And young workers are beginning to feel somewhat annoyed about it, which
doesn't bode well for the future's old people, those very same young
workers.
>
> Similarly, the very nexus of capitalism -- the stock market -- is
> dependant on continuous growth. Once the influx of new money halts, the
> stock market crashes and burns. If the population declines, the goods
> and services per individual must increase at a higher rate than the
> population decline, year by year, or there will be a collapse.
See "The Midas Touch" by Fred Pohl (and Cyril Kornbluth? I can't remember),
for the logical conclusion of this.
>
>> Would you want to go that route if you were the person being told that you
>> had too many children? It's like the prevailing idea that we must have
>> freezers and SUVs and all the other benefits of an industrial society, but
>> people in developing nations must not because then *they* are polluting
>> *our* world.
>
> There's one thing I don't understand: If *we* are the ones who buy all
> the products from China, why do our politicians say that it's China that
> pollutes so much? Isn't it more fair to count the polluter as the one
> who ultimately causes the pollution by ordering and buying the products?
Of course it is, but try convincing any western government of that. Though
presumably some people in China are also enjoying the products they make for
us, unless it's like Britain after the war, when everybody worked their
butts off making things to give in repayment of the money we had borrowed
from various countries to fight the war, so that there was nothing left for
ourselves.
Lesley Weston
pinkmonste...@ALLCAPSyahoo.com wrote on 15/04/2007 5:57 PM:
> On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 15:58:12 +0000, Lesley Weston wrote:
>
>> And both we and the chimps are still evolving, along with every other
>> species. Eventually, some individuals in each species will have changed
>> so much that they form one or more new species, and some of the species
>> existing now will no longer be able to compete and will become extinct.
>> As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end,
>> amen.
>
>
> Apes don't really *need* humans to survive though!
The apes that are humans do.
> Any species could have
> done just as well without us all these years, or they wouldn't still be
> here!
Except all our domestic and agricultural species - they do much better under
our care, apparently.
Sofia
> And I've not even touched upon the 'animal psychology' and instinct that
> must control the males of the species. Non-alpha males would rightly
> (from a genetic POV) make advances in any situation that does not
> directly threaten their own existence, regardless of whether their
> potential mates are likely to be a successful parent in the light of
> matriarchal governance, for it may turn out right on /some/ occasion,
> and then their genes (inclusive of such masculine tendencies as are
> genetically-transferred) find their way into a new generation. And/or
> they attain the position of alpha-male for 'guaranteed' fatherhood. (And
> note the "and/" bit...
Aaarrrgghhh! I think I must have misunderstood your last paragraph... it
seems to me you're saying that ummm... (I say confused gone all red in
the face) that after the alpha female dies, her mate has sex with his
eldest daughter who becomes his lover from then on?
really confused
Sofia
>> Apes don't really *need* humans to survive though!
>
> The apes that are humans do.
>
>> Any species could have
>> done just as well without us all these years, or they wouldn't still be
>> here!
>
> Except all our domestic and agricultural species - they do much better
> under our care, apparently.
If I remind you of Jeff's statement, it was that most species weren't
really capable of wandering over the *entire* planet without our
assistance, it wasn't that our domestic and agricultural species could do
much better with our help.
Sure, we have vets for our pets, but what about all our wildlife. We
don't go out hunting for our lions and crocodiles, they hunt their own
food, and what about all those rainforests burned every year in Brazil,
are we killing or saving our plant-life now?
Even our vegetarians, such as kangaroos and elephants, sure you might
find one or two in a zoo somewhere, but generally they look after one
another!
Sofie
Len Oil
Not what I intended to say, at all, but at the same time that /could/
happen.
(I was getting at how males, especially those not currently of alpha
status, have a vested interest to be instinctively philandering with
females of other families. Because, as a genetic strategy it would
sometimes work.)
But I was also doing my "stream of consciousness" thing, anyway,
waffling away through the medium of text...
Arthur Hagen
> Even our vegetarians, such as kangaroos and elephants, sure you might
> find one or two in a zoo somewhere, but generally they look after one
> another!
The elephant might be a bad example, considering that there's thousands
of domesticated work elephants, especially in India and Sumatra.
Regards,
--
*Art
Jeff Howell
> On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:04:48 +0000, Lesley Weston wrote:
>
>>> Apes don't really *need* humans to survive though!
>> The apes that are humans do.
>>
>>> Any species could have
>>> done just as well without us all these years, or they wouldn't still be
>>> here!
>> Except all our domestic and agricultural species - they do much better
>> under our care, apparently.
>
>
> If I remind you of Jeff's statement, it was that most species weren't
> really capable of wandering over the *entire* planet without our
> assistance, it wasn't that our domestic and agricultural species could do
> much better with our help.
I don't think I ever claimed that any species was better off because of
humans... the statement about wandering the entire planet was a
throw-away comment more due to Lesley's phrasing than anything else. It
is true, though... most species aren't capable of hopping continents on
a whim. That isn't really a bad thing.
--
Jeff
Jeff Howell
> in article evokga$r03$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 13/04/2007 12:08 PM:
>
>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>> in article evlf4k$c2o$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 12/04/2007 7:18 AM:
>>>
>>>> Lesley Weston wrote:
>>>>> in article eviks2$pn1$1...@prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu, Jeff Howell at
>>>>> notan...@invalid.invalid wrote on 11/04/2007 5:38 AM:
>
> <snip>
>
>>>> Jone Goodall, for all that I do respect her, is not infallible.
>>> Of course not, but she does know a hell of a lot more about this than either
>>> you or I do. If she can overcome her scientific training and her knowledge
>>> of what is correct to take what everybody knows is the wrong action because
>>> she can't bear not to, then so can I.
>> Doesn't that assume now that you have the same qualifications to *make*
>> that judgment that she does? (Okay, now I'm just teasing you...)
>
> No, I'm just blindly following my heroine...
>
> <snip>
Good lord, did I really spell her name 'Jone' earlier in this thread?
How embarrassing.
<ahem>
Well, blindly following anybody is dangerous, yes?
>>>> S'not the same. We certainly aren't taking as much responsibility as we
>>>> need to for the damage that cows and goats do to the environment.
>>> What damage? Methane emissions? Wild cattle were behaving in this antisocial
>>> way long before we domesticated them, and goats were eating everything they
>>> could get their teeth on, too. Cattle and goats are also part of the
>>> environment, just as we are.
>> And were there as many of them?
>
> Who knows?
Erm. I wouldn't think it would be too hard to find out, really. But
certainly a species protected from predators and bred in large numbers
by humans is likely to have a larger population than a species that
doesn't have those advantages, yes?
>> Were they even the same creature? Modern cattle, at least in the Americas,
>> are utterly unable to fend for
>> themselves. They're complacent enough for violent youths to get away
>> with tipping them over as they sleep, which is ridiculous. We've
>> utterly co-opted any sort of natural evolution for our own ends, and
>> bred them in insane numbers. That's hardly a natural impact on the
>> environment.
>
> There's been a thread on just this recently. It is now established to afp's
> satisfaction that Herefords, Heeland Coos, Aberdeens and Belted Galloways
> can manage to deliver their babies just fine without our help, while
> Holsteins can't. All breeds emit enormous amounts of methane [1], as do all
> other ruminants, so the trick now will be to catch the methane and turn it
> into methanol, which can then be burned as fuel. This can be classed as
> unscrewing.
There's a reason I mentioned 'in the Americas'. I remember that thread. ;)
Using the methane in useful ways doesn't help unscrew the cows, though.
If you've done much research into cattle farming in the US, you'll
probably know that they're frequently not treated particularly well.
>> Goats I know less about... they may very well be closer to the original
>> creature than cows are. But there are still certainly a lot more of
>> them, and more concentrated, than would have been if we'd left 'em alone.
>
> How do you know? And if you are right, why does it matter which species has
> more numbers, with or without our intervention? Except to the individual
> members of that species, who are presumably quite glad to exist.
Because goats in large number will eat grass down until it's gone,
destroying the habitats of *other* creatures. And of course we
clear-cut vast areas to provide room for cows and goats, destroying more
habitats. I imagine that matters quite a bit, don't you?
>> If we're not breeding in any particular direction, what makes you think
>> any change will happen at all? Surely in order to head in a particular
>> direction as a species, there must be some sort of trait that makes an
>> individual more likely to breed and pass on that trait/genetic mutation?
>
> Mutations are random, though some loci are more likely to mutate than others
> and some mutations have a much larger effect than others. If (and it's a
> large if) one of these random mutations gives its possessor some advantage,
> that organism is more likely to breed and so pass on that mutation. This is
> obviously a huge over-simplification, but close enough. So there is no
> particular direction that any species, including ours, is moving in; it's
> more of a drunkard's walk. I thought of making some kind of reference to
> brewer's droop here, but decided against it.
My point is that, in the human species, random mutations aren't
particularly likely to give an advantage that makes an individual more
likely to breed. Given that a human woman is perfectly capable of
artificial insemination using sperm from a donor she's never met and
will never meet, and that a lot of humans appear to choose partners
based at least initially on looks... I still don't see how what you're
describing even applies to humans anymore.
>> Education is not, indeed, an inborn characteristic. However, an
>> individual who hasn't had an education, and who doesn't value education,
>> is likely to raise children who also don't value education, not because
>> of genetics, but because parents are the primary role-model. So if the
>> undereducated have more children than the educated, and their children
>> learn that education isn't important, they too will tend to be
>> undereducated. And away we go down the path to ignorance. :-p
>
> That's nurture, not nature, even if it's true, which is where Lamarkism
> comes into it.
Still not Lamarkism. I'm not claiming it's an inborn trait, just one
passed along, as you say, by nurture.
>>>> We can't stop that, how can we stop people
>>>> in other cultures?
>>> What right do we have to even try? My idea was that pretty much the
>>> opposite: People in other cultures would love to stop having more children
>>> than they want, and will do so just as soon as we stop enforcing our weird
>>> religious ideas and/or preventing them from developing a sustainable
>>> agriculture and healing their sick people.
>> Didn't say we should. But nevertheless, population growth here or
>> there, it's something we have to deal with.
>
> Is it? When the world's population peaks during this century and then starts
> to decline, the problem will literally go away. Our own population is
> already declining, and we don't have the right to "deal with" other
> countries' population problems, if any; that's for them to sort out
> themselves if they want to.
Well, what I mean by 'deal with' isn't 'attempt to change', it's 'deal
with the consequences'. More people require more resources to live.
That affects everybody, not just the people in the countries with
population problems. 'Right' doesn't apply. Overpopulation is the
cause, and the entire world has to live with the effect, whatever that
happens to be. No choice, no options.
>> Also - if people in other cultures *really* wanted to stop having
>> children, there are some really great methods for doing that... not
>> having sex, for one... Let's not pretend that these people have
>> absolutely no control over their own bodies, okay?
>
> Would you want to go that route if you were the person being told that you
> had too many children? It's like the prevailing idea that we must have
> freezers and SUVs and all the other benefits of an industrial society, but
> people in developing nations must not because then *they* are polluting
> *our* world.
Out of curiosity - do you think that delivering truckloads of
prophylactics would make any difference at all? I'm not convinced of that.
I was just trying to point out that placing all the blame for another
country's overpopulation on the US is really a bit much.
>>> Which would lead to equilibrium. So far, we haven't hit a point where a
>>> crash is likely to happen, and it now looks like we never will. In a few
>>> decades, the world's human population will peak and start to decline.
>> Equilibrium? I suppose tending towards 0 is an equilibrium, yes... but
>> it's hardly *natural*.
>
> It is if we do it - we're a part of Nature in every way, including our large
> brains and territorial instincts, so whatever we do is natural.
So, wait.. us bombing the heck out of each other is natural? As in
'part of nature'? So asphalt and plastic are natural as well? Your
definition is confusing.
If everything in the world is part of Nature, than what's the point in
distinguishing between 'everything' and 'nature'? It's a waste of a
word, is what it is.
--
Jeff
Kieran Sanders
> My point is that, in the human species, random mutations aren't
> particularly likely to give an advantage that makes an individual more
> likely to breed. Given that a human woman is perfectly capable of
> artificial insemination using sperm from a donor she's never met and
> will never meet, and that a lot of humans appear to choose partners
> based at least initially on looks... I still don't see how what you're
> describing even applies to humans anymore.
So we're being selected for good looks (and probably for brains that
find fertile partners attractive). Natural selection still applies,
circumstances just change which factors are selected.
Artificial insemination is a complicating factor, but just what
percentage of the population is the result of this? my guess is that
it's fairly negligible, for the moment at least. If it becomes more
prevalent, then we'll be selecting for women who are most receptive to
artificial insemination (both physically, and psychologically, as far as
genetics influences psychology).
<snip>
> So, wait.. us bombing the heck out of each other is natural? As in
> 'part of nature'? So asphalt and plastic are natural as well? Your
> definition is confusing.
Rival animals fighting and killing each other is natural, why should one
species of ape doing it be unnatural just because they use tools to do it?
Asphalt & plastic are at least as natural as termite mounds, or the
shaped sticks some chimps apparently use to "fish" for ants. If it's
made by animals, it's natural.
> If everything in the world is part of Nature, than what's the point in
> distinguishing between 'everything' and 'nature'? It's a waste of a
> word, is what it is.
Quite. As a species we seem very eager to set ourselves apart from other
animals. (Cue re-hash of the "can animals be people" argument)
~Kieran
Jeff Howell
> Jeff Howell wrote:
>> My point is that, in the human species, random mutations aren't
>> particularly likely to give an advantage that makes an individual more
>> likely to breed. Given that a human woman is perfectly capable of
>> artificial insemination using sperm from a donor she's never met and
>> will never meet, and that a lot of humans appear to choose partners
>> based at least initially on looks... I still don't see how what you're
>> describing even applies to humans anymore.
>
> So we're being selected for good looks (and probably for brains that
> find fertile partners attractive). Natural selection still applies,
> circumstances just change which factors are selected.
>
> Artificial insemination is a complicating factor, but just what
> percentage of the population is the result of this? my guess is that
> it's fairly negligible, for the moment at least. If it becomes more
> prevalent, then we'll be selecting for women who are most receptive to
> artificial insemination (both physically, and psychologically, as far as
> genetics influences psychology).
Except of course that we're perfectly capable of choosing partners by
compatible personality instead of looks. Since we each have a different
personality, that doesn't seem as though it's much of a directed force.
>> So, wait.. us bombing the heck out of each other is natural? As in
>> 'part of nature'? So asphalt and plastic are natural as well? Your
>> definition is confusing.
>
> Rival animals fighting and killing each other is natural, why should one
> species of ape doing it be unnatural just because they use tools to do it?
>
> Asphalt & plastic are at least as natural as termite mounds, or the
> shaped sticks some chimps apparently use to "fish" for ants. If it's
> made by animals, it's natural.
Last I checked, neither termites nor chimps build factories, and termite
mounds and sticks are actually products of biology...
>> If everything in the world is part of Nature, than what's the point in
>> distinguishing between 'everything' and 'nature'? It's a waste of a
>> word, is what it is.
>
> Quite. As a species we seem very eager to set ourselves apart from other
> animals. (Cue re-hash of the "can animals be people" argument)
If you define 'nature' as 'everything', then there is no discussion to
be had. Except of course the discussion question why in the world you
would bother even *using* the word.
The problem with saying that everything's natural, that everything is
just part of nature including us and all our products... is that you can
then turn around and say that polluting rivers, obliterating entire
species, and dropping nukes is clearly okay, because it's *natural*, innit?
Accepting that we are in fact different than any other species on this
planet means accepting responsibility for the things we do and realizing
that we have more of an impact than any other species. I don't
particularly want to provide convenient excuses for *anyone*.
--
Jeff
Arthur Hagen
> Accepting that we are in fact different than any other species on this
> planet means accepting responsibility for the things we do and realizing
> that we have more of an impact than any other species.
I will never accept that we're "different than" anything.
Regards,
--
*Art