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On 8/17/15 11:21 AM, Manuel Barrera via Marxism wrote:
As I commented on your blog, Louis, either produce some actual evidence with veritable scientific scholarship to refute the impact of early humans on fauna, flora, and consequent climatic change or incorporate the current evidence in a way that any Marxist revolutionary would do; integrating it scientifically into our theories for emancipating the world from the scourge of economic, social, and political devastation that is our current legacy in the maintenance of profit over human--and biological speciation's--need. Simply concluding that theories of human roles in precipating environmental crises--now and "then"--are invalid because some charlatans bastardize the science is a disservice to scientific socialism.
I supplied a link to an article in my post that I found most convincing especially when I first read it in 2003. Nothing has persuaded me since to the contrary. In fact, as was indicated in the latest computer modeling that is being reported upon now, the overhunting/extinction nexus appears to be primarily an island-based issue. I included a graph that showed the relatively low incidence within continental land masses.
Here is a relevant passage from the article I linked to: The magnitude of prehistoric human-caused vertebrate extinctions on islands came as a surprise when it first began to be described in detail by such scientists as Storrs Olson, Helen James, and David Steadman during the 1980s [73–75,81,84]. Nonetheless, it has long been known that island faunas are in general prone to extinction, and the reasons for this are well understood. Island vertebrates are vulnerable because their populations are small, because they are confined to well-delineated areas of land that may undergo rapid environmental change, because they may have lost (and in some cases have clearly lost) the behavioral mechanisms needed to cope with introduced predators, pathogens, and competitors, and because there is no ready source of conspecific individuals to replenish dwindling populations [11,50, 76,79,82]. Island faunas are, as Paulay has noted, “among the most vulnerable in the world” [76, p. 134]. Martin’s first premise is, then, depressingly true. The initial human colonization of island after island was followed by vertebrate extinction. That this premise is true, however, does not mean that it is relevant to continental extinctions. After all, the factors that make islands prone to vertebrate extinction—small population sizes of resident vertebrates, the lack of a ready source of conspecific colonizers, and so on—do not apply to the continental setting. full: http://faculty.washington.edu/grayson/jas30req.pdf _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
