Does the biosphere/gaia/whatever protect itself against humans? Take the case of the tsetse fly (east Africa). This fly carries a disease deadly to humans (African “sleeping sickness”). Because of this fly(which lives in trees, at low elevations), humans had to stay away from these areas. This preserved the native ecosystem (which had humans been able to settle in it, would have been destroyed). Is there any evidence that the ecosystem “sees” humans as predators, and evolves ways to remove the human pests?
Do you have a cite for your example? It’s my understanding that, far from humans historically avoiding tsetse country, there’s plenty enough contact between the tsetse flies and human habitation to make nagana and trypanosomiasis a major public health issue in Africa.
Does The earth protect itself from Humans?
No.
None. No ecosystem can work against a single species. How could it possibly hope to do so without affecting many other species? The tsetse fly first appeared 34 million years ago, tens of millions of years before the first proto-human appeared. Now that’s what I call long-range planning.
It’s hard enough to the give Gaia hypothesis any credence at all beyond the broadest truths that certain feedback mechanisms exist and that life affects other systems. Saying that Gaia can work specifically against humans is beyond any realm of science. It’s fantasy.
“The Earth”, as a whole, doesn’t do anything. Living things on the Earth do do things: They defend themselves against whatever is a threat to their own species. But the tsetse fly, by and large, doesn’t care about the well-being of anything but tsetse flies.
If they did, most ecosystems are very, very bad at it.
If nature saw humans as a threat and protected itself the trees would grow with attached trebuches and pelt us to death before we ever cut them down by now.
“Nature” doesn’t “react.” Well, I mean singular entities react just like everything else does, F[sub]1,2[/sub] = -F[sub]2,1[/sub] etc etc but evolution and “nature” aren’t entities that can see things as a threat – random things generate random mutations that have an off-chance of being good random mutations that benefit whatever random thing had them so they can pass it on until another random mutation in another random thing turns out to defeat the former random mutation… random. I guess if you wanted to stretch what I said to the limits you could make a case nature “protects” itself by accident, but that’s not any sort of active protection we’re talking about. The animals and plants that could survive what’s done to them are still around, and for what couldn’t hack it, go to a natural history museum.
This is just a species that has mutated the ability to exploit a vulnerability in another. This is happening constantly around the world and it’s comically arrogant to assume we’ve been singled out for special treatment.
The Earth is composed of an uncountable number of competing, inter-related systems, whether they be animals, people, lava, weather, corporations, or siblings fighting over an XBox controller. That’s it.
I keep thinking that someday, She will. I want a t-shirt that says “Nature Bats Last.”
