Greetings Economists,
Thought I would quote from some recent research on the Burgess Shale
in Canada, and the Chengjiang Shale in eastern Yunnan Province, China.
On Apr 26, 2008, at 4:40 PM, Doyle Saylor wrote:
Ecological systems approach to genetic engineering differs from the
current business model to modify cash crops or animals. In an
ecological system various animals and plants are in relation to each
other in using resources in common. Not in the sense of calculated
balance, but long term multi community interactions. A niche is
occupied in the system that circulates the life pattern.
Circulation of species is part of the process in which we don't know
what is happening because much of the scale of time is not in our
methods of activity. Introduction of cane toads happens by accident
as well as design. One can't say this is bad except in the
framework of a large global system functioning.
Doyle;
quoting Physorg short news aggregate located here -
http://www.physorg.com/news128668245.html
"To compare the organization of Cambrian and recent ecosystems, the
team used methods for studying network structure, including new
approaches for analyzing uncertainty in the fossil data.
"Paleontologists have long known that food webs were important but we
have lacked a rigorous method for studying them in deep time,"
comments co-author and paleontologist Doug Erwin of the Santa Fe
Institute and the Smithsonian Institution. "We have shown that we can
reconstruct ancient food webs and compare them to modern webs, opening
up new avenues of paleoecology. We were surprised to see that most
aspects of the basic structure of food webs seem to have become
established during the initial explosion of animal life."
...
"What we don't know," Dunne adds, "is why food webs from different
habitats and across deep time share so many regularities. It could be
that species-level evolution leads to stable community-level patterns,
for example by limiting the number of species with many predators
through selective pressures that result in extinctions or development
of predator defences. Or, patterns may reflect dynamically persistent
configurations of many interacting species, or fundamental physical
constraints on how resources flow through ecological networks." ...
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
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