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See also the "Medea Hypothesis" which proposes that organisms are generally suicidal at a population scale, destroying themselves and their own environment if l
by perrygeo 4y ago
See also the "Medea Hypothesis" which proposes that organisms are generally suicidal at a population scale, destroying themselves and their own environment if left unconstrained.
Life's historical record alternates between extinction events and long periods of species-building. So in some ways we can see the Gaia and Medea tendencies as an cyclic pattern but not quite "homeostasis".
The important part is that "life begets life" but occasionally takes it away too. We tend to assume that complex life forms like mammals are inevitable but it's quite amazing we exist at all really, considering the thousands of other species and complex ecological support systems we require to survive. Break down that web of life and the earth would be dominated by bacteria and slime mold.
- coderenegade 4y agoThere are more ways to overshoot or undershoot than there are to be critically damped. Population level tends to be an overshooting system which then collapses back to equilibrium. Doesn't bode too well for us when you look at human population growth over the last century. The troubling part is the scale; even a loss of 10% of the population would be the largest wholesale loss of life in human history. Over a century, that's not a huge deal, but over a decade, it would be a disaster the likes of which we've never experienced.