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Worlds wildlife 'falls by 58% in 40 years


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1 hour ago, Servator said:

NZO, Did I state actions weren't being taken? Haven't the increase of Genetic deficiencies in the last couple generations worldwide been noticed. The decline of a species dependent upon preconditioned medications to continue its existence has just about been established globally hasn't it. Now withdraw said dependence you will have a major species die off.

Genetic mutations accumulate in the gene pool when populations are increasing.  Should anything happen to cause population decline, those mutations are rapidly selected out of the population.  I don't think you need to worry.

Doug

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Doug! I have no Need to Worry. The species that was referred to was Homo Sapiens. Your continued dependence upon medications to continue your survival has become so prevalent. Natural Selection no longer encompasses your kind. The outcome of a viable strong species is in decline. Your weak who would normally not be capable of producing offspring, but now with the help of science have established generations who would perish without their life sustaining drugs

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4 minutes ago, Servator said:

Doug! I have no Need to Worry. The species that was referred to was Homo Sapiens. Your continued dependence upon medications to continue your survival has become so prevalent. Natural Selection no longer encompasses your kind. The outcome of a viable strong species is in decline. Your weak who would normally not be capable of producing offspring, but now with the help of science have established generations who would perish without their life sustain drugs

Read a lot of epidemiological studies do you? 

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Mainly from Decades of Observation. One might say epidemiological studies would be a hobby. It is a necessary observation to use when studying the future viability of a species.

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5 minutes ago, Servator said:

Mainly from Decades of Observation. One might say epidemiological studies would be a hobby. It is a necessary observation to use when studying the future viability of a species.

That's a no then. 

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So you've nothing to back any of this then

 

1 hour ago, Servator said:

Your continued dependence upon medications to continue your survival has become so prevalent. Natural Selection no longer encompasses your kind. The outcome of a viable strong species is in decline. Your weak who would normally not be capable of producing offspring, but now with the help of science have established generations who would perish without their life sustaining drugs

I thought not. 

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1 hour ago, Servator said:

Doug! I have no Need to Worry. The species that was referred to was Homo Sapiens. Your continued dependence upon medications to continue your survival has become so prevalent. Natural Selection no longer encompasses your kind. The outcome of a viable strong species is in decline. Your weak who would normally not be capable of producing offspring, but now with the help of science have established generations who would perish without their life sustaining drugs

Cone on, someone has to fall for it, so this time it will be me! 

 

Servator, when you say you are not human, you mean biologycally, mentally, energetically, spiritually? 

And have you been a homo sapiens sapiens before or you have always been like that? 

In which case, were you born on Earth or you came here somehow? 

From where? 

How do you call your species? 

 

Besides, where did you practice your decades of observations? 

Across the world? 

Only in US? 

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It would be very cool if Servator was an alien from some distant star.  Or perhaps, an alien from another dimension. Unfortunately, the likelihood is extremely extremely small. And I doubt an alien would come to earth and chat about human destruction of species etc. on a forum. But then wth do I know? Maybe that's what aliens do.

And the extremely slow moving genetic mutations are not going to solve the incredibly large population problem and the problems that creates.

Just in case you are an advanced alien from a benevolent species from another planet or series of planets etc. Take me with you when you go please but not as food, a pet or research lol. Maybe an extremely well kept pet with stud privileges lol.

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Interesting Comments have arisen. I haven't stated that I am not of this world or even remotely an alien species. Perhaps another tangent might be plausible. Let's say a close relative of Homo Sapiens but much like my example I commented on earlier (31 Oct, 12:39 PM) in this discussion (Llama and Alpaca) or just an upgraded mutation with a limited number which are very long lived. And OLDROVER, I must point out Decades of true observation in the long term can be far more reliable than of reading about epidemiology. As You've certainly heard the phrase, Hands on Approach.

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18 hours ago, Servator said:

Doug! I have no Need to Worry. The species that was referred to was Homo Sapiens. Your continued dependence upon medications to continue your survival has become so prevalent. Natural Selection no longer encompasses your kind. The outcome of a viable strong species is in decline. Your weak who would normally not be capable of producing offspring, but now with the help of science have established generations who would perish without their life sustaining drugs

As I noted above, once something causes a decrease in population, it will be the least fit that die first - until the carrying capacity of the planet under the new regime is reached.

Katrina was such an event.  The dead tended to be older, weaker individuals.  For a brief time, natural selection operated.  Every time some serious natural disaster occurs, natural selection again operates.  The effects are cumulative.  The classic example was the deer population on Isle Royale back in the 60s.  A snow condition developed in which deer with smaller feet could not walk on the snow without breaking through the crust, but wolves could.  The deer kill that night was tremendous.  Afterwards, surviving deer had measurably bigger feet.  This condition occurs about one night in twenty years.  It doesn't operate often, but when it does, it is vicious.  Such would be the case with us.

A disease is more-likely to be what finally controls our population.  The Black Death was the last epidemic that actually reduced our numbers worldwide.  So that's the type of disaster we're afraid of.  Ebola turned out to be a fizzle.  Maybe bird flu will get it together, yet.  Or maybe, we'll make some super-disease to use as a weapon and accidently unleash it.  Then, there's a revolt by our own intelligent machines...

Doug

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On 2/11/2016 at 0:51 PM, Doug1o29 said:

As I noted above, once something causes a decrease in population, it will be the least fit that die first - until the carrying capacity of the planet under the new regime is reached.

Katrina was such an event.  The dead tended to be older, weaker individuals.  For a brief time, natural selection operated.  Every time some serious natural disaster occurs, natural selection again operates.  The effects are cumulative.  The classic example was the deer population on Isle Royale back in the 60s.  A snow condition developed in which deer with smaller feet could not walk on the snow without breaking through the crust, but wolves could.  The deer kill that night was tremendous.  Afterwards, surviving deer had measurably bigger feet.  This condition occurs about one night in twenty years.  It doesn't operate often, but when it does, it is vicious.  Such would be the case with us.

A disease is more-likely to be what finally controls our population.  The Black Death was the last epidemic that actually reduced our numbers worldwide.  So that's the type of disaster we're afraid of.  Ebola turned out to be a fizzle.  Maybe bird flu will get it together, yet.  Or maybe, we'll make some super-disease to use as a weapon and accidently unleash it.  Then, there's a revolt by our own intelligent machines...

Doug

Actually the last (and deadliest from numbers perspective) one was the Spanish flu in 1918 that killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world. 

Not a good decade to live in. 

 

Apart from that, I agree with you. 

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17 hours ago, Parsec said:

Actually the last (and deadliest from numbers perspective) one was the Spanish flu in 1918 that killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world.

According to the CDC it was 20 to 50 million (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm).

But even so, over the course of the epidemic, world populations did not decline.  That's mostly because the pandemic was spread over several years so that deaths did not add up to births in any given year.

Doug

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7 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

According to the CDC it was 20 to 50 million (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm).

But even so, over the course of the epidemic, world populations did not decline.  That's mostly because the pandemic was spread over several years so that deaths did not add up to births in any given year.

Doug

We are talking semantics here, since we basically both agree. 

 

According to the sources cited by Wikipedia (yeah, I know, but the wiki looks well written) 

Quote

The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means 3% to 6% of the entire global population died. Influenza may have killed as many as 25 million people in its first 25 weeks. Older estimates say it killed 40–50 million people, while current estimates say 50-100 million people worldwide were killed.

This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed more people than the Black Death

It is said that this flu killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century.

Wiki

 

So actually it's the other way around, the Spanish flu was way more time limited than the Black Plague. 

 

We can argue on the numbers, but humankind has been impacted. 

Then of course it depends if you see it from a relative or absolute point of view. For sure the Black Death impacted way more harshly, killing around 50% of European population, while the SF "only" 3-6% (of world population), but if you look at the actual numbers, they are apparently more or less the same. 

 

Anyway, whichever was the most devastating, chronologically the SF was the last one. 

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19 hours ago, Parsec said:

We can argue on the numbers, but humankind has been impacted.

Are we talking about the same thing?  Both epidemics had serious impacts on human populations.  BUT:  during the black death, there were fewer births (because there were fewer people to begin with), so it didn't require as many deaths to reduce human population.  The Spanish flu produced perhaps as many deaths, but there were more births (due to a larger base population), so the Spanish flu did not decrease human population.

Once they're born, it is not hard to predict when they are going to die.  Predicting birth is the hard part.

Which was the worse, depends on your POV.

Doug

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3 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

Are we talking about the same thing?  Both epidemics had serious impacts on human populations.  BUT:  during the black death, there were fewer births (because there were fewer people to begin with), so it didn't require as many deaths to reduce human population.  The Spanish flu produced perhaps as many deaths, but there were more births (due to a larger base population), so the Spanish flu did not decrease human population.

Once they're born, it is not hard to predict when they are going to die.  Predicting birth is the hard part.

Which was the worse, depends on your POV.

Doug

Apparently not! 

I didn't want to start a contest between which was worse, but only to point out that the Black Death is not chronologically the last, there's the Spanish flu after it. 

 

See it as you prefer, but a flu that kills at least 25 million people and makes more casualties than the just finished WWI to me is something. 

 

Then, as I said, I won't argue on which was worst, that wasn't and still is not my point. 

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2 hours ago, Parsec said:

Then, as I said, I won't argue on which was worst, that wasn't and still is not my point. 

All I'm saying is that the Black Death caused human populations to decline, while the Spanish flu did not.  That doesn't say anything about which caused more deaths.

BTW:  About 10% of Europeans have resistance to hemorrhagic fevers - virus diseases.  That gene appears to have originated about 700 years ago - the Black Death.  But the Black Death is a bacterial disease.  So how did a bacterium produce a gene that gives immunity to a virus?

Doug

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16 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

All I'm saying is that the Black Death caused human populations to decline, while the Spanish flu did not.  That doesn't say anything about which caused more deaths.

BTW:  About 10% of Europeans have resistance to hemorrhagic fevers - virus diseases.  That gene appears to have originated about 700 years ago - the Black Death.  But the Black Death is a bacterial disease.  So how did a bacterium produce a gene that gives immunity to a virus?

Doug

Considering that the first wiped out 50% of European polulation (so for that time let's say it equals to around 35-40% of world polulation) while the second between 3 and 6% of world population, I'd say that's an understatement. 

 

I have no idea, spontaneous generation?

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5 hours ago, Parsec said:

Considering that the first wiped out 50% of European polulation (so for that time let's say it equals to around 35-40% of world polulation) while the second between 3 and 6% of world population, I'd say that's an understatement. 

 

I have no idea, spontaneous generation?

We seem to be on the same wavelength here.  No need to split more hairs.

Another Black Death mystery:  at the time of the Black Death, leprosy disappeared from Europe.  Suspicion that it wiped out all the lepers.

Doug

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Hundreds more species than we thought may be endangered because a database misclassified the animals

    Research used remote-sensing technology to map out bird habitats
    Scientists found 210 species facing extinction due to loss of habitat
    But none of the birds feature on the globally-recognised 'Red List'
    The researchers hope their work will help to save species that may have otherwise been neglected


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3924184/Hundreds-species-thought-endangered-database-misclassified-animals.html#ixzz4PjAFrVQC


 

 

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I decided to look at the actual original report (I know, I know...why would I do that?) and found some interesting things.

(Yeah and here's the link to the actual report - http://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2016-10/LPR_2016_full report_spread low res.pdf?_ga=1.165145021.322127206.1478890768).

First of all, the majority of LPI calculations are shown to be little more than blindfolded darts based on their confidence limits. And that's simply taking the data at face value - not critically assessing the methods used there.

Second, it's just as darts-y looking at the data out of an example survey (dolphins in SE Asia). At the end of the day, it's 3 people scanning the water in a fishing boat. And interestingly enough, this method actually yielded a LARGER estimate than previously thought based on pressures put on the population. Huh, ground-truthing, such an odd idea.

 

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Puffins are starving to death in incredible numbers

Dead puffins are washing up on the shores of an island in the Bering Sea at an alarming rate, National Geographic reports. "In 10 years of monitoring, we've only seen six puffins wash in—total," a professor who coordinates a West Coast volunteer bird-monitoring network says.

In just shy of three weeks, they've seen 250. Scientists believe the actual number of dead puffins is much higher, to the point that half the puffin population in the North Pacific may be dead.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/11/10/puffins-are-starving-to-death-in-incredible-numbers.html


 

 

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