Re: Liebig's Law and the limits to growth

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

     I apologize to the list for getting into this again, 
but I must say that I have never seen anywhere any claim 
that the dinosaurs had been declining for two million years 
prior to the asteroid hit, much less any credible data on 
why such a decline was occurring.   Could you provide the 
source where you read this, please, Ricardo?
Barkley Rosser
On Tue, 28 Apr 1998 16:01:21 -0400 Ricardo Duchesne 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > Date sent:      Tue, 28 Apr 1998 09:59:59 -0700
> > Send reply to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > From:           James Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To:             [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject:        Re: Liebig's Law and the limits to growth
> 
> > The more I think about question of the causes of the mass extinction of the
> > dinosaurs, the more I think that it may be like that of the fall of the
> > Roman Empire. There are lots of good reasons why the Empire fell -- but
> > there's no reason to presume that (absent these causes) it would have
> > lasted forever. So maybe the question should be "why did the Roman Empire
> > last so long?" Similarly, I think Barkley is right that the scientific
> > community may be reaching a consensus that the "comet done them in." But
> > that may be only what Aristotle called the "efficient cause," the trigger
> > that caused a slide that was already ready to happen. It's possible that
> > dinosaurs had become over-specialized in a way that made them especially
> > vulnerable to shocks of the sort that comets cause. (Think of T. Rex, the
> > over-specialized eating machine.) The normal predator-prey cycle may have
> > become unstable, ready to be pushed off the region of regular fluctuation
> > into the region where the predators eat all the prey, killing off their
> > food supply and thus their own futures. If this is so, enquiring minds want
> > to know. 
> 
> 
> Yes, I think this is a much better way of stating this issue than the 
> catastrophe theory would have it. One problem with this 
> theory, so I read, is that the end of the dinosaurs, once the 
> decline started,  occurred over a period of two million years. 
> Afterall, that they were already in decline when the 
> asteroid hit (due to their overspecialization, as Jim suggests) is 
> simply part of the normal rise and fall of species.   
> 
> A more fundamental theoretical problem with this theory is that it 
> ignores the *internal* dynamics of evolution. Gould puts too much 
> emphasis on the external environment (and accidental changes 
> thereof). He is so against any notion of evolutionary "progress" that 
> he can make no distinction between humans and bacteria!
> 
> ricardo
>  
> > I think that the dinosaurs' fate is quite relevant to pen-l. After all, our
> > non-socialist friends and colleagues think of us as dinosaurs! We should
> > show some inter-species solidarity. More seriously, past mass extinctions
> > are quite relevant to understanding the current on-going mass extinction.
> > 
> > I think biology and evolutionary theory are quite relevant to understanding
> > economics and political economy (though I'm no Herb Gintis, who currently
> > seems to want to reduce it all to evolution). The "dialectics of nature"
> > (the regularities of evolution, etc.) can help us understand the dialectics
> > of human society (class conflict, crisis, change, etc.) -- as long as we
> > don't pretend that the dialectics of human society are the _same_ as those
> > of non-human nature. We have consciousness and language, while we "evolve"
> > mostly by developing culture, technology, and institutions, which follow
> > more of a Lamarkian process in which "aquired traits are inherited" than a
> > Darwinian one. 
> > 
> > in antediluvian solidarity,
> > 
> > Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
> > http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
> > "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damned
> > greedy." -- Herbert Hoover
> > 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]