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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

That lovely harmonious structure where lions kill cubs because they want to impregnate the mother, where bugs literally stab-rape others to procreate and where animals regularly die of hunger because the predator-prey cycle is at a predator low?

It seems great if you're only looking at the nice parts.

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That's part of the ecosystem. The lion kills the cubs because he wants his DNA to survive. The lion kills and hunts to eat, but the lion doesn't kill the entire living creatures in Serengeti or elsewhere to later die himself from hunger.

Our ultimate differentiating evolutionary trait is our intelligence. Which has enabled us to adopt, but this trait has become an unchecked strength. We do not have the ability to control ourselves nor the nature is able to contain us. We're an out of control virus about to destroy its host.

> The lion kills and hunts to eat, but the lion doesn't kill the entire living creatures in Serengeti or elsewhere to later die himself from hunger.

I don't know about lions, but their cousins the lynx absolutely do kill off so many hares that they die of hunger. The hare population then rebounds, followed by a rebound in the lynx population. It's one of the most famous cycles in ecology.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that a similar predator/prey population cycle holds true for lions.

https://www.enr.gov.nt.ca/en/services/lynx/lynx-snowshoe-har...

If you're interested in the math:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

This is the argument put forward by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael. Either way, it depends on your reality tunnel. None of this has any inherent meaning other than the meaning we attach to it. Life and the lack of life is equally "harmonious".

You can't have it both ways -- if we're a virus, then the universe is meaningless and frankly who cares about harmony, balance and esthetics.

But if you want to make value judgements -- which you seem to want to -- I'm curious from whence your values come? Is your love of harmony, beauty and balance objectively different than a fly's love of a turd?

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