You calling him out for making a naturalistic fallacy might carry more weight if he wasn't replying to your (fallacious) dichotomy between 'natural' extinction and human-caused extinction.
Tu quoque(sp) fallacy.
And no. It is not a false dichotomy, if you were capable of reading comprehension you would have noted this. I do not make a distinction between natural, and human caused. Human-Caused is a subset of natural, which is undesirable, because it is so far off-base with the forces that an ecosystem usually sees, that the damage is catastrophic, equivalent to an asteroid strike or other natural disaster. However, while those events are kinda terrible (unless frequent enough that the ecosystem cannot function without them, like lightning-strike fires in Australia) no one is responsible for them. There is no moral onus either way.
WIth us, we ARE responsible. Directly. And because we are responsible, we have to make a choice, and that choice is an ethical one.
That is how human causation, and natural causation are different, even though one is a subset of the other. By Bubble Boy's twisted logic, murder is a natural form of mortality, and rape is just an alternate reproductive strategy. They are. But by his logic we shouldn't give a shit.
Yet, somehow if we avoid investing in the offspring of another species entirely, it's a calamity. Do you not see how your reasoning breaks down entirely?
No. Because you are either incompetent, or deliberately misrepresenting my argument.
His argument was that a lion does not need to kill the cubs of other males. It does. If it wants to pass on its genes, it has no other choice. Human males do the same thing actually, they reduce their investment in the offspring of other males in the case of remarriage and are MUCH more likely to abuse them as the birth father. The costs (to him) of this are higher and the benefits lower, so it is less common than the near 100% rate in lions, but still there. In any case, we also consider child abuse immoral (this is the result of multilevel selection), even though it is selectively advantagous for males to engage in, because it hurts the entire social group.
Humans do not actually need to strip mine the oceans, clear-cut rainforests, and poison/drain every wetland we can find. So, the argument does not even apply. We gain very little from this behavior, and engaging in it in the long run is probably maladaptive. Unlike evolution, we can be forward looking. We can tell in advance what is probably a bad idea, and based on that alone we are justified in not engaging in these behaviors and considering them deeply immoral.
I go a step further and ascribe intrinsic value to nature, and decouple nature from our economic interests. Maybe that is the result of the deep love and reverence I feel for nature, I am not sure how well that generalizes to the rest of the population, but I think, if the tribal religions of our predecessors and cave art is any indication, it is common enough to be considered a moral principle. Even if it is no longer widely applied to our actual behavior.
I am pretty sure our need to use nature can be balanced against nature's intrinsic value. However, that requires that we do actually give a shit, and it takes a very interesting person to not give a shit.
But I digress.(I am what happens when someone reads too many textbooks in environmental ethics)
And here we have another case of special pleading. You state earlier that there's a web of interconnected species and that causing extinctions will harm us eventually, then here you claim that we aren't constrained by other species being rendered extinct. Which is it?
Depends on the instance, and on what level you are looking at.
Example: The near-extinction of wolves and other predators from north america has affected deer populations, causing them to over-browse, this affects watersheds and water quality, causing us to have to spend money hunting deer, fighting fires, and treating water that would normally be filtered by the healthy ecosystem surrounding the watershed. However, our populations have not actually been affected and we have not been placed under any selective pressures due to this.
There are a lot of examples like this. For example the extinction of a certain prairie dog species has affected our ability to graze cattle on state trust land in AZ, because they are a keystone species that aerate the soil and allow plants to you know... grow.
Again, affects us, but not in a way that would cause a nasty selective pressure.
Now, go fuck yourself.
If the web of species is as interconnected as you seem to think, then it seems more likely we just haven't seen the consequences of the extinctions we have caused yet, not that we are completely free of the constraints of the biosphere.
Not subject to selection =/ not affected.
This appeal to emotion relies on preserving species being a worthy goal in and of itself, which is what the original poster actually asked. Can you justify that as a goal, or not?
Yes. I can.
Hold on though, best left to the end.
Technology we evolved the capacity to invent. Stop with the special pleading.
Hardly a special pleading. How is noting that we are not acting under the same constraints as every other organism on this planet a special pleading fallacy? We evolved the ability to invent the technology yes. But through it we have moved beyond the point where we as a cultural group, are subject to the forces that would normally put us in equilibrium with our environment. We continue to expand on an exponential growth curve.
It is not as if evolution can look ahead and say "Oh... shit.... not giving them the ability to make stone tools and fire...)
To put this in perspective, the background rate of extinction is in the double digit species per year. These extinctions are the ones you see due to within-normal-limits climate shifts, migrating organisms that outcompete another on an island, an island being flooded killing the endemic lizard that lives on it, things like that.
Extinction due to competition, or predation was very rare until we came along. This is because the population of predators is dependent on prey population density, and competition is not favorable to either species engaging in it(assuming it is two) and as a result both species will specialize in the subset of a niche. This is why you get 3 different species of lizard that specialize on living in different parts of the same tree, and why when you shake a tree in the amazon you discover 12 new species of beetle.
WHen we came along, we changed that. The selective pressure we place on organisms through both predation and competition is so high, they dont have time to specialize (actually there is nowhere to partition the niche, we typically destroy the entire ecosystem, or alter it into unrecognizability)
It may not be a qualitative difference. The Arete', or qualitative essense of predation and competition does not change necessarily. But the order of magnitude and the Techne' or manner certainly have.
2-3 full orders of magnitude over the baseline rate. Going from 25-100 extinctions per year (2004 was probably a bad year with the Tsunami, for example) to somewhere between 15-30 thousand.
PostPosted: Mon Jun 09, 2008 5:39 am Post subject:
Alyrium Denryle wrote:
Quote:
If you have evidence the existence of humanity is not a natural one, present your proof.
Until then, we can stick to science and logic which dictates that humanity is a product of evolution like all other lifeforms. Ergo, we're a natural force on this planet, regardless if we like our influence on it or not.
Do you know what a strawman is? How about a "naturalistic fallacy"
You calling him out for making a naturalistic fallacy might carry more weight if he wasn't replying to your (fallacious) dichotomy between 'natural' extinction and human-caused extinction.
Alyrium Denryle wrote:
You are a fucking idiot. A male lion does actually need to kill a female's cubs to bring her into heat, and to avoid investing in offspring that are not his.
Yet, somehow if we avoid investing in the offspring of another species entirely, it's a calamity. Do you not see how your reasoning breaks down entirely?
Alyrium Denryle wrote:
Because we do not actually need them to survive, our populations are not constrained by their numbers, and thus neither is our rate of predation. And that does not even consider the countless organisms that have been wiped from the universe forever, because we needlessly destroyed their habitat, or accidentally spread a disease or introduced an invasive organism.
And here we have another case of special pleading. You state earlier that there's a web of interconnected species and that causing extinctions will harm us eventually, then here you claim that we aren't constrained by other species being rendered extinct. Which is it?
If the web of species is as interconnected as you seem to think, then it seems more likely we just haven't seen the consequences of the extinctions we have caused yet, not that we are completely free of the constraints of the biosphere.
Alyrium Denryle wrote:
None of that needed to happen. There is not a single extinction that was not preventable, that we needed to cause in order to survive. We wiped out the Passenger Pigeon, because we liked PIE!
This appeal to emotion relies on preserving species being a worthy goal in and of itself, which is what the original poster actually asked. Can you justify that as a goal, or not?
Alyrium Denryle wrote:
That is because you A) dont know what natural selection means or how it works and B) you are committing a naturalistic fallacy you fucking retard asshat. And even a poor one, because we are not in line with the normal rules that ecosystems operate on. We use technology to surpass and break them.
Technology we evolved the capacity to invent. Stop with the special pleading.
Alyrium Denryle wrote:
No. No it is not. Natural selection is not acting in this system, it has no substrate on which to work. There is no amount of genetic variation that will allow a rainforest biome to resist being clear-cut, or a reef to survive industrial pollutants. Moreover, the rate is such that even if it had the genetic charge to adapt (genetic charge being stored genetic potential in terms of previously neutral variation) there is not enough time to allow for it to be released.
Funny, while rainforests are being clear-cut, calocedrus decurrens that would otherwise not have ever sprouted were planted to line the road leading to the housing complex in which I live, and are being cared for and cultivated.
And this is supposed to detract from the wrongness of clearcutting how?
Natural selection doesn't just work through speciation, you know. If circumstances exist which favor some organism, causing them to reproduce more, while disfavoring others, preventing them from reproducing, that's all that it takes for natural selection. Genetic variation, speciation, et al., are just one method for that to work.
I love when people try to give a biologist a lecture on how natural selection works, then fail.
For Natural Selection To Work, There Must Be Heritable Variation. Heritable Meaning Variation Due To Genetics.
In this case, the fitness of the Cedar is probably zero anyway. Why? Because they will be kept from reproducing. So you used a bad example.
You may not like the criteria which are being used for selection for (look pretty and give decent shade with low water consumption) or against (are in our way), but that doesn't make it not natural selection, at least not without your "hunams are unnatural" special pleading.
Except that you are committing two strawmen at once. I never once said humans were "unnatural" Not once. Only that we exceed the limits every other species was placed under. The second strawman relates to misrepresenting Bubble Boy's argument.
Next, you are committing a naturalistic fallacy.
Lastly, you are just flat out wrong. To use an unrelated example:
If a species of lizard is wiped out because the island the lizard lives on explodes (and becomes an atol) no natural selection occured. The event was, for lack of a better term, random.
If a gamma ray burst happens and wipes out all life on this planet, no natural selection actually occured to determine which species get wiped out instantly
If we clearcut a forest, no natural selection occurs.
This is because natural selection relies on several factors. The first is that a second generation occurs and there is differential survival. If we kill everything, there is no second generation. The second thing is that a factor in this differential survival must be adaptive or deleterious alleles. The variation must be heritable. If we indiscriminately kill everything in a region, there is no selection. They do not have a Location allele.
That clear-cutting is more akin to is an asteroid strike. What is caught in the blast radius is not selected out. It just dies, its allele composition did not matter. The environmental problems this causes will put selective pressures on other systems and natural selection will act within those.
As for the cedar, again, those trees will never live to see a second generation. If only because their second generation will be cultivated away.
Nore does it detract from the moral wrongness of clearcutting, which you have not been able to see past your naturalistic fallacy long enough notice.
And stop accusing someone of a naturalistic fallacy when they were responding to your claim that the extinctions caused by human actions are 'unnatural' in the first place.
Tu Quoque, and there was no special pleading, because you are using a strawman to accuse me of it, you intellectually dishonest little slime-mold.
(adds: "If you have ever called someone a 'slime-mold' as an insult" to the You Might Be a Biology Nerd if list)
As for the decoupling of the value of nature from human needs...
We have to look at the reason we have moral thought, I can get into it from an evolutionary point of view, but for now I will stick with proximate mechanisms We have moral thought because of one thing. Our emotions. We empathize with others, we value things that have beauty, etc. (it is a bit grittier than this sometimes... but for the sake of simplicity) These are what really guide our moral reasoning. We can try to codify this into ethical systems to aid in decision making (like utilitarianism, or deontology) but all these really are, are tools, or means of rationalization.
(to put it in evolutionary terms, the emotions are what are selected for via genetics. Hardwired into our brains, the ethical systems we use are culturally mediated and are more specific, historically they have been used purely to guide our inter-personal interactions, and most do not adapt well to dealing with other things we place value in, though forms of utilitarianism are more easily applied than the others)
I cant speak for your emotions, but when I go into nature, I cant describe what I am doing with anything but basking in its magnificence. It is like walking into a 14th century cathedral, or listening to the type of music that sends shivers down your spine. Watching ducklings hatch, does the same thing for me. Moreover, I feel empathy for individual organisms.
So, even if it is difficult to justify it with an ethical system that is itself justified purely by reference back to its axiomatic assumptions, there it is.
The moral worth of nature is self-evident given the metaethical framework on which I accept or reject ethical systems. Even if it itself is not within an ethical system (I am working on it. I will probably go with some form of pluralistic ethical pragmatism, in which I take all the moral values I recognize to exist and balance them against eachother)
I'm sorry, but under your criteria for 'natural', are you really insinuating that a highway is a natural occurrence? Because just about every definition I've ever seen for 'natural' involves the specific condition that whatever the term is applied to must exist independently of human interference. That's not 'special case', it's the meaning of the damn word.
Unfortunately it is based on a false premise. That humans are separate from nature. We are not. On the other hand, there are quantitative differences that make up for the lack of qualitative differences.
What is unnatural? Is a Beaver damn unnatural? I'm thinking that's their argument. Humans are animals and the materials they make highways out of come from the earth, so it's natural.
Which is why the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy.
If the premise of your system is that a species going extinct is morally wrong,
If that was my premise, I would have just referenced Peter Singer's preference utilitarianism and been done with it. His position is unassailable if you accept his premises.
Problem is, it is not exactly my premise.
A species extinction is not necessarily wrong.
Unecessary damage to an ecosystem is. Often times a species extinction will do this. So by extension, an avoidable species extinction is also wrong.
Also: killing something can also be wrong, if it is not necessary or is otherwise wanton.
Determining whether those conditions hold is harder and requires stakeholder input, compromise, knowledge of who evolved to do what, and a fair amount of sacrifice and lifestyle changes. If I was on my home computer I would post a case study.... will probably do that when I get home.
