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Comment by pavanred | Hacker News Reader

I think the term natural selection is sort of a misnomer, makes it easy to misinterpret it as if many are let to die while few are selected. It just happens creatures that with certain traits are more adapted to survive and reproduce (not having tusks in this case), where as some other creatures are not and die. Hence those specific traits tend to be preserved in subsequent generations while the others just didn't survive to reproduce.

And, the extinction events, its not like nature is cruel and killed off most species. As you see in the list of extinctions, the reasons mostly are that the environment (or nature if you will), changed too drastically and quickly that most species couldn't adapt fast enough to survive.

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We could argue for a while whether it's "few" or not depending on which scale or species you're looking at, but that wasn't really the point. I'm not really even concerned with the death of a given species or organism in and of itself, but other people are.

It's a selection process that results in countless creatures suffering and dying over and over. Sometimes even the selected creatures are suffering immensely and dying shortly after reproducing.

The environment changed too drastically and killed off most species. Humans changed the environment too drastically and it killed off some species. I fail to see what is it that humans are introducing that is so novel. If anything, it just seems like we're tapping into an existing process. Or, I would say, we always were part of the existing process.

Should we promote the process? I do not think so. But talking about opposing or stopping nature is the direct opposite of the usual rhetoric one hears, which is often in the form of: "Humans are terrible and are driving these poor creatures extinct and messing up the environment, we are not paying respects to Mother Nature!"

Meanwhile "Mother Nature" is OK with flooding the entire atmosphere with a completely different gas and making it unlivable for anything that used to be there before.

>its not like nature is cruel and killed off most species

>the environment (or nature if you will), changed too drastically and quickly that most species couldn't adapt fast enough to survive.

These are not mutually exclusive. Mass starvation caused by environmental changes is a cruel kill off. I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is.

I would say you are a little too excited about the drama and morality of a statistical process, and it's occluding your understanding of what's actually going on.

That's a lot of emotional content to infer from a post with such a neutral tone. I'm also struggling to see evidence of occluded understanding.

I think the idea is that these events aren't catastrophic on an individual lifespan level. They're catastrophic in geological time.

Look at the holocene extinction event. It's been going on for over 10,000 years. It's only noticeable statistically, doesn't affect day-to-day life much if at all. Therefore it's not really cruel because for most species it's as benign as having a little too few babies to maintain the population.

It appears that, as expected, a young millennial is trying to blame this on human accelerated climate change. (not necessarily you, but someone in the above comment chain).

And yes, I agree that human accelerated climate change is causing faster extensions. However, I could care less. When does the new MacBook Pro refresh come out?

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