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this has always seemed to be kind of a silly quote to me. it's not untrue but it seems to imply that this is something unusual about a cancer cell. growth for t
by leetcrew 7y ago
this has always seemed to be kind of a silly quote to me. it's not untrue but it seems to imply that this is something unusual about a cancer cell. growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of life itself. I don't know of any organisms that are capable of regulating their own species's growth/consumption for long term survival (although now that I've said this, I'm sure someone will respond with the odd exception).
- objectivetruth 7y agoWhat scale do you mean? As individuals, most plants and animals will grow to a certain size, presumably an evolved optimum for their ecosystem. cf. Foster's Rule, insular dwarfism, island gigantism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster%27s_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster%27s_rule. Indeterminate growers are the exception. At the ecosystem level, some species can kind of self-regulate: eating babies or siblings, lack of food driving irregular fertility cycles, etc. And two or more species interacting, like the classic predator-prey dynamic, are usually how they regulate. Now are they consciously doing it? No, but it's arguable how consciously humans are doing The Great Contraction or our various environmental regulatory frameworks. Presumably hunter-gatherers spread when their bands would grow large enough to split, taking more resources from their range than it could support.