Species propagation: only a case of species specific advantage?

[narcasse]

It’s things like this article I found here on childfree this morning that really make me wonder about humanity in general.
I won’t go into the article’s logic of larger populations being necessary for industrialisation because as anyone with a passing knowledge of Adam Smith will tell you industrialisation is meant to reach its limit and then collapse in on itself to perpetuate a continuous cycle of grown and degeneration that can be sustained by given resources. I won’t even sneer too much at the admonishment that a loss of blue eyed individuals would be akin to specific species extinction. But what I really don’t understand about this article and the general sentiment that it represents is what exactly is so damn important about humanity that we must propagate at all cost. Because propagation being a DNS issue aside, I simply don’t understand what is so specifically important about humanity’s existence.

Of course humanity has colonised the globe and created a great many wonderful things but what really is so hugely important about that? Because if something happened today and suddenly every human on the face of the earth vanished it isn’t likely to impact on any of the other species all that much. There’d be nuclear meltdowns at various facilities and a sudden abundance of extra space that other species could traverse without undue human interference but other than that would any of the species left behind really care? In the same way that there are no longer dodos on this planet, while that may be regrettable, everything else does actually carry on. Nature adapts and if humanity disappeared then that’s exactly what would happen. There’s no reason for the world to suddenly stop turning just because one species gets wiped out.

So why then is human propagation seen as so terribly important? Of course every species wants to have a population advantage for its own kind; of course new workers are needed to replace the old ones and so on in a great many other species specific advantages but that still doesn’t answer why humanity is allegedly necessary in the greater sense. Because once you step beyond species specific advantages there really isn’t any difference between the existence of one species over another.

Granted, I’m probably just rehashing what I’ve maintained for some time already but every now and again articles like the above seem to crop up where it’s simply taken for granted that the human race must propagate and nobody ever seems to even attempt to explain why. So I ask: what is so damn special about humanity that makes it a necessary component of existence? Because I’m still not seeing it.

Comments

A highly tangential ramble, because I really should go to bed.

[finferwen.livejournal.com]

*sigh* The editorial magnificence of Martin van der Weden strikes again. I'd forgotten that for all his nonsense and conservative outlook, he has a knack for pulling a bit of shock-jockery out of his y-fronts every once in a while when he's running out of more palatable material. I really wish he wouldn't do it; he's just inspiring the Unwashed Masses to complain about something else for the week.

I cannot take anything in the response to the Walters editorial seriously enough to be annoyed by the content for three reasons - firstly, that Bone woman appears to be nothing more than an unshaven whinging lefty with no background in population health and no reason to be reading the MJA; secondly, Barry Walters' specialty is Obstetrics/Gynaecology and he's listed as a Clinical Lecturer, which means that he's the practical, duck in once in a while to scare the med students sort rather than a deep thinker and is also highly unqualified to pass comment on the sort of issues he framed his editorial around, and thirdly, I know the Editor of the Medical Journal of Australia and exactly how the journal's editorials are put together.

Nothing that appears as an MJA editorial is ever meant to be taken all that seriously, and there's often a caveat insisting that the author not be quoted. Most of them are arranged by cold calling someone transparently relevant in the month preceding publication. Many academics enjoy writing them because they can have a bit of a ramble on a topic that interests them without having to qualify any of their statements or list any references.

Basically, this is an unqualified pain in the arse complaining about an unqualified opinion published in the one place in the MJA where it's perfectly acceptable to talk about whatever you can be arsed talking about. I'm horribly, horribly amused that she's gotten so much mileage out of it.

Slightly more relevantly, I also fail to understand why maintaining the human population is so bloody important. I like houses much more than shoebox-sized flats, and would very much like to keep my house for as long as possible. You're right - why do we matter in the grand scheme of things? We're just another species. Of course, I could always take the cop-out approach and say that it's none of my concern since I won't be around when it becomes a "problem" anyway, but I guess that would be a little too un-PC for Ms. Bone.

Yes, definitely tangential. Oh well, it is rather late. Think I might rat this woman out to Captain Tweed on Monday, just for shits and giggles.

Re: A highly tangential ramble, because I really should go to bed.

[reichsfreiherr.livejournal.com]

I suppose people are following the argument that published in academic journal = all academics think this and this is the sort of thing they’re paid to research. Which generally is the case though of course an editorial generally tends to be somebody’s opinion in just about every place the term is used. But then this reminds me of the furore over that Sunday Times Pratchett article (http://imperial-artist.livejournal.com/469508.html) on Fandom Wank were nobody seemed to quite get this was the bloody Times arts section and that’s just how they do things. It just comes back to the argument that the unversed in the matter should leave the matter, whatever it may be, well alone or they’ll make a pig’s ear of it. I don’t know what’s worse: the deliberately unaware of rational fucking debate or the ones who are aware of it and don’t have a bloody clue how to handle it. I think I’ve rapidly gone from wanting to share the relevant information with the unwashed masses to wanting to keep them the fuck out of my epistemic community, thankyouverymuch.

Of course, I could always take the cop-out approach and say that it's none of my concern since I won't be around when it becomes a "problem" anyway, but I guess that would be a little too un-PC for Ms. Bone.

Tokyo is the only city that’s enjoying itself on the way to destruction? Something like that anyway, though yes, that would be terribly not-shitting-out-more-Aryan-babies of you as far as the article author is seemingly concerned. I mean, I do my obligatory bit of recycling and generally don’t throw my slop out into the street from an appropriately high window and so on but I like my creature comforts far too much to give them up and move into a mud hut in the middle of nowhere and scrounge my living from roadkill. And what the interesting trend of TV programs on the topic seem to infer is that the only people who do engage in this living off the land malarkey are the sort of folk who own the land they’re living on as well as several villages for miles around anyway. I presume that they’re the ones who took Land Management for their degree too because they’re the only people who have the means to use it. Besides, what’s the use of devolving society if we did all go live in mud huts because eventually someone’s going to have the idea that industrialisation might be a useful idea and we’ll just start over again anyway. We’ll probably destroy ourselves again soon enough anyway but before we do I’m going to keep right on enjoying my electricity and central heating for some time to come.