Can self destruction be anticipated?

[TimeTraveler]

Just a little factoid. Humans evolved to be social in small groups.
The small group's solidarity is often defined by aggression towards outsiders.
The tribe is defined by a hatred of all that is not the tribe.

This large-scale society in which we find ourselves floundering in these modern times is a very recent trend and we are not well adapted for it. You can see how difficult maintaining group solidarity without an enemy to galvanize the group can be.
You can also see how leaders utilize this mechanism to lead us around by the nose.

That maybe true, but this was during a time when we didnt all speak the same language. Of course you'd fear some other group of weird looking people saying weird shit and doing weird things. Theres no excuse for it now in 2006 when we know that other groups of people arent aliens, or at least some of us know.

As far as modern society, some of us are adapted for it, the people who actually do all the building seem to be well adapted. It's not that we arent designed for civilization, it's that only a moderate percentage of us has adapted and because not all of us have adapted, we are unable to maintain a civilization beyond several thousand years.

 

[TimeTraveler]

Just a little factoid. Humans evolved to be social in small groups.
The small group's solidarity is often defined by aggression towards outsiders.
The tribe is defined by a hatred of all that is not the tribe.

This large-scale society in which we find ourselves floundering in these modern times is a very recent trend and we are not well adapted for it. You can see how difficult maintaining group solidarity without an enemy to galvanize the group can be.
You can also see how leaders utilize this mechanism to lead us around by the nose.

IF you need an enemy, can't we find any enemy other than ourselves?

 

[Kumar]

Competitive exclusion principle
just Gause's Law, states that two species that compete for the exact same resources cannot stably coexist. One of the two competitors will always have an ever so slight advantage over the other that leads to extinction of the second competitor in the long run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle
Ecological niche
In ecology, a niche is a term describing the relational position of a species or population in an ecosystem. More formally, the niche includes how a population responds to the abundance of its resources and enemies (e. g., by growing when resources are abundant, and predators, parasites and pathogens are scarce) and how it affects those same factors (e. g., by reducing the abundance of resources through consumption and contributing to the population growth of enemies by falling prey to them). The abiotic or physical environment is also part of the niche because it influences how populations affect, and are affected by, resources and enemies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_niche

Niche differentiation
The term niche differentiation (synonymous with niche segregation and niche separation), as it applies to the field of ecology, refers to the process by which natural selection drives competing species into different patterns of resource use or different niches. This process allows two species to partition certain resources so that one species does not out-compete the other as dictated by the competitive exclusion principle; thus, coexistence is obtained through the differentiation of their realized ecological niches

The above theories may indicate, how pathogenic population can be kept under check.

 

[valich]

Natural means inherent sense of right and wrong. But I doubt that nature can give sense for self destruction & suicide in normal circumstances to any living being. How then, we, natural happenings in our body, pathogens, cancer cells etc. can think of killing us resulting their death or "self destruction?

Again, this is your assumption: it is not something "IN" Nature. Nature, or what is natural, has no "inherent sense of right or wrong." Where did you get this view? It is not scientific. It is a view that you acquired in your upbringing: parents, church, peers, or school. Right, wrong, sense of destruction or "self destruction & suicide in NORMAL circumstances" are all human moral values. I capitalize the word "normal" because this leads to another human acquired assumption. There is nothing "normal" inherent in Nature. I believe it was heisenberg who coined the term that "the only constant is change." In Nature, would you consider change as "normal."

Your views are really deeply imbedded with a lot of preconceived beliefs that you grew up with. And I'm not criticizing you or putting you down for this. But I often consider my own education, and even my first four years of college, as a road to unlearning all the fallacies that I had learned in the past. Ones' primary years of learning, from elementary school to high school, should be a stepping stone to the road of lifelong learning. As is often stated, the more you learn, the more you know how much you do not know: the more I learn, the more I learn how much I do not know.

 

[Kumar]

Cellular senescence is the phenomenon where cells lose the ability to divide. In response to DNA damage (including shortened telomeres) cells either senesce or self-destruct (apoptosis) if the damage cannot be repaired. Organismal senescence is the aging of whole organisms. The term aging has become so commonly equated with senescence that the terms will be used interchangeably in this article...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence

Many organisms can reproduce sexually as well as asexually. Aphids, slime molds, sea anemones and many plants are examples. When environmental factors are favorable, asexual reproduction is employed to exploit suitable conditions for survival such as an abundant food supply, adequate shelter, favorable climate, disease, optimum pH or a proper mix of other lifestyle requirements. Populations of these organisms increase exponentially via asexual reproductive strategies to take full advantage of the rich supply resources.

When food sources have been depleted, the climate becomes hostile, or individual survival is jeopardized by some other adverse change in living conditions, these organisms switch to sexual forms of reproduction. Sexual reproduction ensures a mixing of the gene pool of the species. The variations found in offspring of sexual reproduction allow some individuals to be better suited for survival and provide a mechanism for selective adaptation to occur. In addition, sexual reproduction usually results in the formation of a life stage that is able to endure the conditions that threaten the offspring of an asexual parent. Thus, seeds, spores, eggs, pupae, cysts or other "over-wintering" stages of sexual reproduction ensure the survival during unfavorable times and the organism can "wait out" adverse situations until a swing back to suitability occurs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproduction

In view of above articles, it is to be evalued, how pathogens, cancer cells, how those can exist and how those can be destructed--naturally by aging?

 

[Kumar]

Again, this is your assumption: it is not something "IN" Nature. Nature, or what is natural, has no "inherent sense of right or wrong." Where did you get this view? It is not scientific. It is a view that you acquired in your upbringing: parents, church, peers, or school.

One Dict. definition of natural is given as under

Natural: 1 : based on an inherent sense of right and wrong <natural justice>
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/natural

As such, all things and beings can be considered natural or having some natural source, but I am considering here "natural to us or to other living beings".

Right, wrong, sense of destruction or "self destruction & suicide in NORMAL circumstances" are all human moral values. I capitalize the word "normal" because this leads to another human acquired assumption. There is nothing "normal" inherent in Nature. I believe it was heisenberg who coined the term that "the only constant is change." In Nature, would you consider change as "normal."

I feel, anything which opposes "self survival" or encourage "self destruction/suicide" may neither be natural nor normal--normally practiced in senses. We may be doing many things many abnormal things knowingly, but how pathogens, our cells, cancer cells can do that?

Changes in nature can be one type of re-balance which is disturbed due to new environment, which lately, we can inherit as a "sense of right and wrong".

As is often stated, the more you learn, the more you know how much you do not know: the more I learn, the more I learn how much I do not know.

Many times learning can just be RE-membering/RE-searching or discovering but not creating absolutely new esp. when we are in destructive phase of "big-bang" theory. on stimulation by logical poweri.e. inherent sense. Spritually, it is indicated that "God is omni-present, omni-scient and omni-potent". In such view, why/how all can't be alike "HIM". However "He awakened or slept in anyone can just be a differance. Probably, we have memory of all our interactions dormant in us since our evolution from HIM till date, but those are yet awakened or not(slept) probably can only be the difference. We may evaluate many things ans says look right or wrong, inspite of fact we had never seen or interected with those during current lifetime. How?

 

[Kumar]

It is somewhat indicative that bacterias may switch-over to somewhat sexual type reproduction i.e. Horizontal gene transfer or Bacterial conjugation etc., when environment to them is unfavourable whereas may multiply by replication or by asexual reproduction when environment is favourable..availabilty of nutrients, optimal pH etc. Although Asexual reproduction would seem a more efficient way to reproduce and avoids all sorts of problems. Perhaps sexual reproduction has kept in style because it provides a mechanism to weed out harmful mutations that arise in the population (through the recombination process of meiosis). Bacterial resistance to antibiotic can be an example of Horizontal gene transfer or Bacterial conjugation.

Perhaps it is the ability to adapt to a changing environment that has caused sex to remain the method of choice for most living things.

An asexual population tends to be genetically static.

In view of above, how our interventions can be self destructive?