[Taxacom] Extrapolation

[Richard Jensen]

Mesibov wrote:

"More people, too, means more brains and more resources to 'fix' whatever problems are occasioned by the loss of the library."

Only if those people live in environments in which they have the luxury, that those of us in the developed world have, of investing their time and resources in such "immediate- survival-unrelated" tasks as taking time to investigate phylogenetic relationships, etc.  As long as there are famines and wars, more people may translate into more death by starvation, etc.

I don't share your "other species be damned", human progress is inevitable and we'll all be better for it perspective.  I guess it depends on your definition of progress.


Maybe I have missed something and your comments are simply a delayed April 1 exercise.



Richard Jensen, Professor
Department of Biology
Saint Mary’s College
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Tel: 574-284-4674



Bob Mesibov wrote:
> I think I agree with everything you've written except:
>
> 'It's just a matter of shifting the priorities of the people with the
> purse strings.'
>
> 'Just'?
>
> Also, it's very hard to tease out individual causes in a complex world,
> but I reckon I can point to human population growth as an ongoing
> problem underlying the destruction of your library. For 99.99% of our
> species, if more happy, comfortable, well-fed people means fewer
> bugs/fish/fungi/whatever, then so be it. The human world expands at the
> expense of the natural one, and that's progress.  People holding purse-strings have these
> attitudes in spades. That's why they hold purse-strings.
>