> 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
>
