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.
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
