Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Lex Clips"
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Life forms in Nature don't care about balance. Balance in Nature is achieved through cut-throat competition, with each individual trying to eat as much and breed as much as possible. They will do this, regardless of the availability of resources.
Your standard population model is the logistic curve. The introduction of a new, viable species to an ecosystem results in near-exponential growth of that population (a curve that gets steeper and steeper (growing faster and faster). This is what I call the "economies of scale" phase. The more there are, the more breeding opportunities for all, and new births far out-strip the death rate. Not only that, but by an ever increasing amount.
There's an inflection point in that growth curve, where the population is still growing, but at a DECREASING rate. The result is an 'S'-shaped curve, that is concave down (sheds water, rather than gathering water, if you imagine rain falling from the sky down on the shape), growing less and less quickly until it levels off just under the absolute limit to growth, called the 'carrying capacity (of the ecosystem). It's all very nice, and you can see a picture of the 'S'-curve here: https://byjus.com/maths/logistic-function/.
The mathematical model for this (see link) puts the inflection point at exactly halfway between 0 and the carrying capacity on the vertical scale. This never happens in Nature, but it's fairly representative of the near-exponential growth at the beginning, to something like a ceiling. All very theoretical and roughly expresses the early versus the long-term growth rates. I use the "economies of scale" description, because it's very similar to the introduction of a new product that's immensely popular in the marketplace. Do you think a company worries about the 'balance of Nature' or the larger economy? Not really. It just has an urge to grow!
After the inflection point, what I call the "limits to growth" phase starts kicking in. Once everybody has a t.v., t.v. production levels off. In the animal kingdom (which we somehow view as distinct from the human economy), competition with other species and availability of food start working their magic, to slow the growth rate. But there is no perfectly smooth approach to the exact carrying capacity. Population/company will not stop trying to maximize itself, even if it grows beyond the ability of the ecosystem to support it. This is what the guest in the video describes in the boom-and-bust reality that we see in predator-prey models.
The prey will breed as much as it can and the predators will grow in number, because life is easier, but the prey population, eating itself literally out of house and home, will eventually crash, causing the predator population to experience a similar crash, and the boom-and-bust cycle begins all over again. There's no "The rabbits and coyotes got together and decided how many of each there would be, for perfect balance."
People always talk about the "balance of nature" and the ACTUAL balance is just chaos. Each species imposes as much of its particular kind of order on as great a domain as possible, and it's the interplay of these species, all at once, that gives us 'the balance.' But the balance itself is changing all the time. A dynamic equilibrium that isn't really an equilibrium at all (Don't let Disney fool you!), but a never-ending transition to the next state. We humans see a snapshot of time and say "balance!" and think that means a single extinction is somehow disruption of Nature's balance, when Nature's balance involves a lot of extinctions. It REQUIRES a lot of extinctions. How arrogant is it of us to believe that yesterday's snapshot MUST match tomorrow's?
It's a paradox. Nature's perfect balance is a state of flux!
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The bad ideas grab a small percentage of people, even "viral videos" that reach millions. We're a planet of BILLIONS. And the bad ideas very quickly reveal their flaws by catastrophic failure when implemented, and unless it's the federal government implementing that bad idea EVERYWHERE AT THE SAME TIME, that failure will only be visited on the relative few who bought into the lie, and those who didn't (and those who did and yet survived) will learn by that lesson.
There is NO meme or viral video that has the reach of the federal government. And even if one DOES, one day, it will still not have the authority to impose itself by force on EVERYone, like the federal government has the exclusive monopoly on doing.
Yes, bad ideas get out there. But bad ideas ALSO come down from the supposed authorities. ALL THE TIME. If you censor ANYbody, you likely censor the people - like Bret and Heather - who correctly decry the bad ideas and rip them apart, point by point. The next time you think the government is all-wise, ask yourself who caused the Dust Bowl or Chernobyl.
The only argument for continued censorship is that decades of behind-the-curtain censorship have eroded the average person's ability to see through bullshit. You look at the world a whole lot more skeptically/critically, when you don't live under the illusion that people smarter and more wise than you are making sure all you get is the complete, objective truth. In the USA, the people have been getting nothing BUT curated facts and cherry-picked evidence from a handful of organizations that all pull in the same direction and never (or rarely) challenge what government insiders want.
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