But what if the system is not interacting and closed looped? What if each species (or family) looks after itself and promotes itself without enhancing or embellishing the others, but really crowding them out and getting rid of them to make room for itself? Gaia may not be primordially cooperative, but primordially inherently viciously competitive. My cerebral, intelligent dinosaur would never have thought that it (he or she) would ever be eclipsed, but there wase a little proto-mammal lurking near by, avoiding being eaten. Then along came a rock from outer space, landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Random? Absolutely.
[snip]
And, apart from not being "adapted" to that rogue asteroid, those dinosaurs may have been quite fit to survive. I doubt that even Leona Helmsley or THe DOnald make a deal to get that asteroid to compete in a different market.
A few years ago, the NYT science section had a feature article: some scientists hypothesized that had it not been for that asteroid, dinosaurs were evolving toward agile erect bipeds about 6 feet tall with large brains, i.e., dinosaurus sapiens! (I'm not sure these dinosaurs were cold-blooded, so it's not clear how well they would have fared on Wall Street.)
As for what happened in reality, crows and ravens are pretty clever (they are, after all, little dinos who did survive).
I think one important question about Gaia believers, like all other beliefs, is: what role does this belief play in the believer's form of life (weltanschauung, etc.). Of course, just because a person has a reason to believe something does not ipso facto make the belief false. All sorts of people believe the world is round today, for all sorts of reasons (like to pass n-th grade science, or because some TV program told them so...), and that does not prove the earth is flat (or donut-shaped, or a CIA deception --
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/VirtualReality.html
-- , etc.).
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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