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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

There's got to be clear advantage, or at least no strong disadvantage across the morphological choices they are constrained to, in the forms. Isabella Rossolini aside, there's no dance here which is pure beauty, its form-follows-function all the way.

Ducks are savage. York University where I studied, in the 70s had a huge shallow lake and it had a regrettable sexual population imbalance which caused fatalities. Randy drakes drowned the decreasing number of ducks. I think they had to do culling to fix it. You think nature would right itself, but in human time for small local populations sometimes it doesn't do a good job.

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Letting a part of the population die, perhaps entire species or groups of species, is one of the way nature "rights itself".

Describing a species wiping itself out as “nature righting itself” seems to me a bit like saying a shotgun is a cure for cancer.

Why is that not accurate? Nature is just physical processes. Those physical processes taking their course is really all nature does. You could call it “righting itself” or “destroying itself” and I’d say you’re equally right, because the same physical process occurs without moral judgement, and your connotation is just you applying your human morality to the situation

In a mechanical system, say a bicycle, “righting itself” implies returning to an upright position rather than any transition to a stable state — a bike lying horizontal on the ground is in a stable state, but falling over isn’t physics righting itself.

Well, the fatalities were exactly how nature 'righted itself'. Nature ain't squeamish.

The fatalities were a vicious spiral. The males were killing more females, deepening the imbalance.

Which means the next generation would be even smaller and so on and so forth until at one point the thing is reduced to a point where it is no longer sustaining the spiral.

Or at least that's how I imagine it would go.

For better or worse, that point might be a population of zero.

Well, let's just say extinction is not the first definition of "nature righting itself" that comes to mind for this scenario.

> You think nature would right itself

Why think this? Populations and their environments constitute complex systems, not magical ones. They can self-correct, or not, just like how humans don't always manage to not develop cancer.

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