> The main point of this article is that the archeological record proves that this is the case.
DO you know what they say on Wall Street? "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns"? The same rule applies to biology. The reason the future diverges from the past is because it's guaranteed to be different. As to human population growth, there's no basis for comparing the future to the past. But I will say this -- on at least one occasion in the past, humans were nearly wiped out by just one volcanic eruption:
Quote: "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans."
Ten thousand humans. The only reason we survived as a species is because of chance, not destiny. And that event is easily seen in the genetic record -- it's very likely to be just one of many examples where we survived only by chance, on a planet where 90% of all species have been wiped out.
> Are you sure you're not just harboring a fixed superstition on the subject ...
I just quoted the scientific record. I can also describe the Logistic function, a scientific biological modeling tool that reliably predicts the future of species who try to exceed the carrying capacity of their environments:
DO you know what they say on Wall Street? "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns"? The same rule applies to biology. The reason the future diverges from the past is because it's guaranteed to be different. As to human population growth, there's no basis for comparing the future to the past. But I will say this -- on at least one occasion in the past, humans were nearly wiped out by just one volcanic eruption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
Quote: "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans."
Ten thousand humans. The only reason we survived as a species is because of chance, not destiny. And that event is easily seen in the genetic record -- it's very likely to be just one of many examples where we survived only by chance, on a planet where 90% of all species have been wiped out.
> Are you sure you're not just harboring a fixed superstition on the subject ...
I just quoted the scientific record. I can also describe the Logistic function, a scientific biological modeling tool that reliably predicts the future of species who try to exceed the carrying capacity of their environments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
The curve is nearly flat at the left because there are too few organisms to sustain a higher growth rate.
The curve is nearly flat at the right because mass starvation results in too few surviving organisms to sustain a higher growth rate.
Welcome to natural selection, and to science.