ABEL\'S UNIVERSE (General)

by Abel , Thursday, November 17, 2011, 20:55 (4564 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Thursday, November 17, 2011, 21:05

dhw: "The need to kill or die, a pretty extreme form of self-interest, was therefore present long before us humans, although as any vegetarian will tell you, flesh-eating is not essential for survival. It was, however, deliberately introduced by the creator(s), unless the latter didn’t know what they were doing. In other words, self-interest as the key to survival was already established before we came on the scene, and if you believe as I do that self-interest is the root of evil (I’m open to other suggestions, of course), you are confronted with the question of why any creator(s) would invent predation in the first place. If Abel's theory is correct, and predatory self-interest is an essential precondition for greater intelligence, what does that tell us about the nature of the astonishingly intelligent being(s) that created us?"

To understand life, you must understand the concept of equilibrium. Life and death is part of this equilibrium as the suffering that is part of existence. They are not wanted, they are needed to balance an equation.

Not only does an individual organism exist in a state of dynamic equilbrium on a microscopic scale with its' environment trying to maintain homeostasis, but groups of them are in equilibrium with their macroscopic environment as well. Thus you cannot have oxygen producers for long without adding oxygen consumers. You cannot have just plants, without huge fires and potential extinction events, so you add herbivores. But the herbivores, without predators, soon overpopulate the world stripping it of its' vegetation, risking another extinction event due to massive starvation or oxygen depletion. So predators were added to balance the equation. In EM matter, life forms are long-lived by nature, eventually there became a need for predation to keep the population of herbivores in check.

Without predators, humanity needs to address overpopulation and its future needs itself to maintain this needed equilibrium or eventually it will suffer the consequences.