Population Control

[Tiberius]

Careful, that's frowned upon by some

What is? It was only the last bit I adapted from something I said in a debate, and it's an accurate description of my beliefs. I honestly do find the tree of life awe-inspiring and beautiful.

Adrian Hi
You are one of the moderators of this forum,aren't you? Or am I wrong.

I'm one of the administrators. I thought you knew this...haven't you been here since the beginning?

I thought that one of the roles of the moderator is to maintain a discussion in the limits of the issue being discussed. True, the limits might be very large but nevertheless a certain direction should be maintained. When a discussions is diverted to irrelevant issues ,as interesting as they may be,it looses it's substance and tends to be diluted,

No, my job is to make sure people obey the rules. Discussions always waiver but most of them eventually get back to the topic at hand. Anyway, it was you who started the fork off to a discussion of whether humans are animals by replying to padriac's post[1] (which was about population control) with a post that stated (and I quote) "humans are not animals".

Now in the rational community (of which most members here belong) we don't stand for this sort of piece of misinformation, and therefore we sought to correct it. Your personal view does not change the truth of the matter, which is that humans, by all definitions, are animals.

I was convinced ,seemingly quite naive ,that members of the forum will comment on this issue ,some pro or some against or otherwise.

Instead Paradaic jumped in with his "animals" .

No, you did that. Padriac mentioned once that if we had global atheism, humans would still be animals with a powerful survival instinct. This is true. Global atheism wouldn't change our genetic predisposition and natural instincts any more than global theism would. It was you who decided to make an issue out of it by attempting to refute his point with an unscientific claim.

Of course that we are all biologically speaking animals but using the term of "animal" may be in personal discussions offending and that's why I thought of being displaced in the discussion on population control.

Yet because humans are animals, and we have certain instincts regarding sex and family, it seems that it would be a perfect issue for a population control topic. Animals in the wild have different ways of controlling population, most of them through fierce competition of natural predators. Humans, as one of the more dominant species on the planet do not have this, and in fact we care for our sick and young. Thus the differences between a natural population control and a human population control should be addressed.

Now ,you cornered me with the "most evolved species".
Do we have a scale to the measure the evolutionary stage of species? I'm not a biologist and I wouldn't know the scientific answer to that .But so are you and so are seemingly many members of the forum.
Nevertheless from a general point of view it seems to me that self consciousness is a unique trait of humans qualitatively incomparable to any other species and that's what makes us the most evolved species on earth.

Self consciousness is not a unique trait of humans, and even if it were, it is a bad argument to say that this makes us "more evolved". Sonar is a trait in a lot of marine animals, as well as bats. Humans do not have this ability, so therefore by your own argument any animal with sonar is "more evolved" than humans, creating a contradiction.

What it really boils down to is whether self awareness (which I think is most prevalent in humans) is a good or a bad thing evolutionarily speaking. I think you can argue it from both sides. For one, we have technology to support us, we can live longer, etc. On the other side, one could argue that it has caused overpopulation because we take care of our sick and old, and that also means that genetic "defects" are more prevalent in society.

Anyway "animals"or "species " are far away from the issue of the discussion which is population control
and that's why I expected your moderation.
I may be also wrong.

As you can see from my response above (concerning self-awareness being a bad mutation), I think there is certainly a connection to be made between population control and evolutionary biology.