Antarctica, Greenland ice definitely melting into sea, and speeding up, experts warn

[caseymoz]

33. High mortality rates?

In other words, the environment? Unless it's homicide and suicide you're talking. Breast feeding implies an environment where women produce adequate milk. Environmental again.

Strange you would cite that link, because the last sentence of the abstract points to the Pleistocene expansion. Oh, so the hunter gatherer populations were growing. And the last clauses of the sentence pointed out that this is different from current hunter gatherers! You supported my point. Is there some trick you're going to pull here?

I'll tell you what really happens with current hunter gatherer populations that makes them look stable. First, they're hunting in poorer territory than the ancestral ones did. These are the places that nobody else bothered with. Second, emigration out of the tribe and into civilized areas hasn't been accounted for. That's an option prehistoric hunter gatherers didn't have. Or if they had emigrated to another tribe's territory, those other noble savages would have killed them.

This link makes the physiological deterioration during the transition to agriculture specific:

http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/posters/cslarsen/larsen.html

And I quote the first two sentences under the Growth and Development section:

"The transition from foraging to farming involved a shift to a subsistence spectrum that became narrow. This narrowing of dietary breadth involved a reduced availability of animal protein in combination with an increased reliance on a limited number of domesticated plants."

They went from a rich diet to a poor monotonous one. Just to create surplus leisure time. Read the rest of that section. The paper only goes into the effects of iron deficiency and stunted growth, but it gives you a picture of the overall nutritional quality. I'll repeat, they wouldn't have become farmers if they didn't have to. In nearly every way, early agricultural life sucked.

"Though, mankind has the ability to alter the environment and its carrying capacity, illustrated by agriculture."

Which has no bearing whatsoever on whether any species can limit it's own population. None. All you've done is point to oranges when I talked about apples. Study that point before you make massive moral judgments.

"In natural systems, organisms evolve to be incredibly energy efficient (a hunt should produce just more than the energy it takes to engage in it), but not at the cost of ecological breakdown."

This separation between artificial and natural, is, well artificial. Artificial is usually natural for human beings, and there's no moral superiority between what we do to survive and what termites do. None. A beaver's dam, for another example, will destroy the habitat of all the animals downstream. There is nothing natural or morally superior in what a beaver does compared to what human beings do. The only difference is, human beings do more of it.

Now, that doesn't talk about particulars of behavior. I mean, an atrocity is still an atrocity, but in general behavior, there's no logic in assigning one species behavior as natural/good and another as artificial/bad. You can hold people responsible. But to hold humankind in its entirety responsible, except maybe for you, does nothing for humankind or the environment and can't has no prospect of any positive change.

And no, organisms do not evolve to become "incredibly" anything. They become adapted to their environments. A word like "incredibly" has no place in scientific analysis, and your golly-gee reaction shows you've presumed and haven't looked close enough to confirm.

&quot a hunt should produce just more than the energy it takes to engage in it.)"

There's absolutely no justification for this declaration. First, it's factually untrue. A spider will take it's hunt and produce a hundred more spiders. Therefore, it has taken more energy from its hunt than it has expended. Every living thing does this, or strives to, and you're blind to what it implies for "energy balance."

"Of course mankind has circumvented that general law, which is precisely the fundamental problem."

There is no such general law, no justification for one like it. You've made it up. You're not quite as ignorant of facts as Creationists, but then again, for the ethical system you've adopted, you don't have to be. You still bend and ignore facts when it suits you.

And I see no reason to continue this conversation. I've made my point, and I have other things to do.