xssve
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Joined: 10/10/2009 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Termyn8or "In the end, as much as we value conformity, the only reason any species goes extinct, is overspecialization " That seems contradictory in a way. The conformity is good and then bad. But then I think you mean specialization in the sense of all being specialized the same way, no ? "The Dodo's went extinct because there was no population of suspicious and curmudgeonly Dodo deviates " Perhaps it would be good to look into exactly why they went extinct. If the climate is acceptable and there is suitable food the only other reason for extinction is what ? Inability (or unwillingness) to reproduce ? Like koala bears that apparently can only eat eucalyptus leaves or something like that. Speaking of which, why ? Is their digestive system so specialized or are they simply addicted ? And if the former, is that what happened to the dodo ? If the latter, would the withdrawal kill them ? I doubt there are any basic nutrients peculiar to the plant needed only by the koala. I'm not sure what the theory de jure' is about the dinosaurs but I don't think one meteor did it. Pangea was a big place. Ice ages and things OK. There are still a few things unexplained about that as well. Of course none of us were there. And this is not really the issue. The thing here is - what do you accept ? What do I accept ? There are some things out there for which there are [supposedly] equally valid contending theories, many mutually exclusive. What causes one person to accept one while another accepts the other ? T^T Occams Razor, generally, plausibility, process of elimination, the only thing that explains a sudden mass extinction is massive and sudden climate change, a meteor is the most plausible cause of such a sudden shift, and there is evidence of such a meteor. Yes, conformity is good - and bad - if all it was all good, we'd still be swinging from the trees, or swimming in the ocean - but that only works under condition of a perfectly homogenous environment. In the real world, environment varies: with latitude and longitude, with altitude and season, even during the 24 hour rotation of the sun. In order to adapt to different niches, created by the variability of environment, some individual of a population adapted to a particular niche has to develop the adaptations that allow them to occupy the new niche, or adjust to some alteration in the old niche, making essentially a new niche - some sulfur eating metabolite had to wander away from a volcanic vent and adapt to temperatures a couples of degrees cooler, and Three and a half Billion years later, give or take, here you are: the product of so many tiny little adaptations, I can only speculate, some very large numbers - every single one of which was a deviation from some "norm", which was itself a deviation from a previous norm, etc., etc., and so on, ad infinitum. And humans are really the inevitable result of that process, a bipedal generalist, we are the most optimally unspecialized species that has evolved to date - we evolved to be flexible, and science is just another tool, it's a systematic method of predictive analysis, that allows us to anticipate and adapt to stressors before they occur - we've found a way even around natural selection.
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