I was speaking of the global ecosystem, and up to a point of course. We need a certain amount of diversity in the global ecosystem for it to remain healthy as a whole.
Could you expand on this so it makes some sort of sense? At the moment it’s a total non sequitur.
Yes, and we need a certain amount of carbon monoxide in our bloodstream to stay healthy as a whole. That doesn’t in any way justify a claim that the more carbon dioxide, the healthier the indivdidal.
The same is true of your claim regarding the global ecosystem. There is some minimum level of diveristy required for a healthy system. That in no way justifies your claim that the more diveristy the healthier the system.
Haven’t you totally missed the point? If extant species represent 1% of all species that ever existed, how can the loss of a species be catastrophic? It happens all the time, and always has. It is the nature of life on Earth that species go extinct. It’s called evolution.
I’ll be the first to admit, that Darwin is probably rueful and gleeful right now. We’re bringing about our own extinction, so does that make us doubly unworthy of survival? 
If you mean Charles Darwin, the man is dead. Has been for some time.
Cite!
You certainly seem very confused. Much rhetoric. Little apparent understanding.
And what a fascinating exchange of ideas between this GD thread and the MPSIMS thread and story that spawned it.
I refuse to take a position on the issue at debate – because it’s been treated to spin. The river dolphins in question have been driven to extinction by human misuse of the river. Not one human being would be fated to die in order that the dolphins might be saved, if that were possible.
Translated, does a human being have more right to live than a dog? Perhaps so, but if we pursue Bricker’s position here, that means that any time someone wants to take up target practice using your family pet on the street in front of your house, they have every right to do so, and you have no recourse. Too bad, they had more right to live than your dog. The fact that your dog was not menacing their existence, and their misuse of the public corridor as a target range is what led to his demise, is irrelevant. Their right transcends his, or yours.
:mad:
Not at all. The family pet is property. Wild animals, belonging to no one, can be slaughtered with a clear conscience.
Except, of course the rights that the landowner might have in the game on his property.
Which brings us to today’s thread on first year law school finals.
How does a right to live translate to a right to use someone’s pet as target practice?
Since I have a right to live, does that give me a right to burn your house down for no reason whatsoever?
Do individuals have a right to life? Surely not, if the collective does not. Yes? Or put another way, if every member of a species has a right to life, how can it be that the group does not?
Come on… easy. Fallacy of equivocation.
When we speak of a human being’s right to life, we refer to a right that either is enshrined in law, or is being argued should be enshrined in law.
When we speak of the right of humans vs the right of dolphins to live, we are not discussing a right which has a remedy at law.
If a dolphin wants to push me out of the ecosystem, let 'im try!
Well… one might say that wild animals, along with everything else on this planet, belong to mankind. In which case hunting a few can be considered reasonable use of proper resources, but hunting them to extinction cannot.
You hit on my point, John, and I don’t see why you are arguing it against me.
The news story and related MPSIMS thread dealt with the “effective extinction” of the Yangtse river dolphin species owing to human abuse of their fluvial environment. Bricker picked up on a single bit of hyperbole by Zabali Clawbane to the effect that dolphins have as much right to live as humans, and spun it into the current thread.
My point was that, except as a hypothetical topic for debate on the abstraction level of whether balrog wings are physical or spiritual in nature, there is no choice to be made between human right to life and dolphin right to life. Rather, it’s between the dolphins’ putative right to survive as a species and the putative human right to willfully abuse the environment. (I cannot resist the temptation to point out that there’s a close parallel between what’s being posited here and its bait-and-switch nature, and the Bush administration policies regarding the environment when the environmental managment laws conflict with the wishes of Bush and Cheney’s big business supporters.)
If the last surviving dire wolf on the planet were to attack my “honorary grandson,” I would kill it by any means at my disposal – regretting destroying the species, but with absolute certainty that I’m doing right in saving the boy.
However, this is not so clearcut a choice as that. The superpowerful alien ship has not beamed you up and required that you choose between the lives of the last 20 beiji dolphins and those of an equivalent number of Chinese people. The real-life choice is between different hypotheticals: the dolphin right to life, and the human right to pollute and run powerboats without regulation.
If Bricker wants my answer to his OP – humans, every time. But that’s not the real-life problem to which he reacted, and it’s disingenuous of him to pose the argument in that way.
Which was exactly the point of my post, ignored farther up the thread. There is no equivalence here. It’s the existence of a species vs. the convenience of a small number of humans. And not just some tiny fish like the snail darter, a large mammalian species.
Stupid-ass Chinese.
The original MPSIMS thread had a number of different claims made by a number of different participants. It was my argument specifically with Zabali and the “rights” of species to survive that prompted my posting of this thread.
I agree that there are economies of scale at work here, and it’s not wise to adopt the position that any convenience for any humans anywhere should outweigh the survival of any other species. Like any other policy decision, the utilities of both sides should be weighed and policy decisions reached by balancing the overall benefit accured to humans against the expected loss to the ecosystem. I certainly don’t believe the human side should win every one of those battles, any more than I believe the ecosystem must be held supreme and unalterable.
It was the concept of “rights” as applied to the dolphins to live that irritated me into posting this thread, and framing the topic of discussion as I did.
Well, when you put it that way — when you clarify the limits of the proposed debate, and when you disavow any attempt at disingenously veiling a controversial point inside the cloak of a no-brainer, as described by Polycarp — then I for one don’t really see the debate here.
I’ll await the only person that was really offering a debate – Zabali_Clawbane – to take up the mantle, then. I believe Zabali has made two points that are vulnerable – the “rights” mentioned above, and the assertion that “…the more diversity, the healthier the ecosystem…”
Essentially what I was going to come in and say. The spirit of the two threads doesn’t translate over. It seems incredibly loaded.
Why aren’t the dolphins coming in here to defend themselves?
Helps if I finish reading the thread, huh?
If we’re talking about rights, then either every living thing has rights or no living thing has rights.
Of course, now we’re stuck defining “rights” and we fly further away from our point (hopefully not).