Claim here.
Through the 18th century, the balance of nature was probably primarily a comforting construct–it would protect us; it represented some sort of benign governance in the face of occasional awful events. When Darwin replaced God as the determinant of the balance with natural selection, the comfort of a balance of nature was not so overarching, if there was any comfort at all. – Simberloff D (2014) The “Balance of Nature”–Evolution of a Panchreston. PLoS Biology 12(10): e1001963. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001963
Here’s the abstract:
The earliest concept of a balance of nature in Western thought saw it as being provided by gods but requiring human aid or encouragement for its maintenance. With the rise of Greek natural philosophy, emphasis shifted to traits gods endowed species with at the outset, rather than human actions, as key to maintaining the balance. The dominance of a constantly intervening God in the Middle Ages lessened interest in the inherent features of nature that would contribute to balance, but the Reformation led to renewed focus on such features, particularly traits of species that would maintain all of them but permit none to dominate nature. Darwin conceived of nature in balance, and his emphasis on competition and frequent tales of felicitous species interactions supported the idea of a balance of nature. But Darwin radically changed its underlying basis, from God to natural selection. Wallace was perhaps the first to challenge the very notion of a balance of nature as an undefined entity whose accuracy could not be tested. His skepticism was taken up again in the 20th century, culminating in a widespread rejection of the idea of a balance of nature by academic ecologists, who focus rather on a dynamic, often chaotic nature buffeted by constant disturbances. The balance-of-nature metaphor, however, lives on in large segments of the public, representing a fragile aspect of nature and biodiversity that it is our duty to protect.
Like we said earlier: The human race is the only species that environmentalists do not have any duty to protect. And we actually only have about seven billion members. that’s nothing in many life form groups.
Something to think about, before you write at cheque to them.
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (human evolution)
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Actually, as was pointed out the other day, the Copernican principle which held that the Earth nor man was of any special significance in the universe, was overturned,,,
Of special note, the documentary ‘Privileged Species – How the cosmos is designed for human life’ is soon to be released:
As to the abstract in the OP, I would like to draw attention to a non sequitur,,,
In what should be needless to say, competition is anatagonistic towards the notion of balance. And indeed, as these following studies highlight, Darwinists are many times completely mystified that there should be so much cooperation and ‘balance’ of life on earth and so little direct competition between it,,
As well, this unresolved tension between cooperation and competition is also reflected in this following comment to Richard Dawkins,,,
In other words, if evolution were actually the truth about how all life came to be on Earth then the only ‘life’ that would be around would be extremely small organisms with the highest replication rate, and with the most mutational firepower, since only they would be the fittest to survive in the dog eat dog world of ‘competition’ where blind pitiless evolution rules and only the ‘fittest’ are allowed to survive.
i.e. Since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful reproduction be realistically ‘selected’ for? Any other function besides reproduction, such as sight, hearing, thinking, etc.., would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successfully reproducing, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded as so much excess baggage since it would, sooner or later, slow down successful reproduction.
But , instead of eating us, time after time we find these different types of microbial life are found to be helping us in essential ways that have nothing to do with their ability to successfully reproduce,,,
Moreover, the earth is far more tolerant of us Humans, and of our environmental mishaps, than many radical environmentalists would believe,,,
In fact, humans ‘getting in the way’ to try to help clean up the oil spill only made the situation worse:
Apparently, other than man cleaning up animals covered with oil, and making minor clean up efforts on shore lines, that man only gets in God’s way as to helping ‘nature’ restore the ecosystem to its pristine state following a major oil spill by dumping man-made dispersants into the ocean to try to break up the oil.
Moral of the story? God has made provisions for man to inhabit this earth, including our mistakes. ,,, Which reminds me of God’s number one provision for our mistakes,,,