A bit of caution with this line of thinking, because I was blindsided by it after more than decade of hand waving away "academics"

When you have the mind of "the models are wrong", you tend to be brought there by select counter examples, and in that space you only feed on counter examples. "The experts are wrong (and you can be right in 15 minutes if you consume this media!)" is abundant.

The actual reality is "the models work great until they don't". Not "the models don't work."

Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this.

> We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

Even if we do make that claim, from practice in systems theory we should know that some systems have multiple potential equilibrium. If a system is perturbed, it may come to rest at a different equilibrium that is much less desirable.

I've worked with mechanical and computer systems where the ordering and timing of applied loads makes a significant difference to observed behavior. Sometimes you have to stop and restart the whole system when it ends up at an undesired equilibrium.

In the natural environment, stopping and restarting in a controlled manner is not something entirely in our control.

I don't really know anyone serious who thinks that ecological systems have a single stable equilibrium state.

Indeed, even the trivial systems you learn about at school, like predator-prey relationships are dynamic equilibria rather than static ones. Experiments clearly demonstrate trophic cascades can shift ecological systems from one meta-stable state to another (e.g. remove crabs from a rockpool, and the herbivore population explodes until it runs out of seaweed, at which point it crashes).

Evolution is obviously a progression between many quasi-stable states.

I think a stronger claim is that _economics_ doesn't recognise this; local incentives and the price feedback structure aren't enough to avoid pushing natural systems out of their current quasi-equilibria state into degraded states that are long-term also poorer for humans (e.g. collapsing fish populations). This is also pretty broadly understood, and why market interventions like fishing quotas exist. But in the conflict between "extract more more now" and "long term health of the ecosystem", "extract more now" is the economic default and "long term health" requires special pleading, so unsurprisingly the former tends to win.

Curtis's stuff is all good fun but I'm skeptical that:

>The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature :

>The concept that nature maintains its condition is of ancient provenance. Herodotus asserted that predators never excessively consume prey populations and described this balance as "wonderful". Two of Plato's dialogues, the Timaeus and Protagoras myths, support the balance of nature concept...

Rather than the first two minutes, here's the whole thing: https://archive.org/download/BBC.All.Watched.Over.by.Machine...

This is the story of how one user spent too much time writing why he became disenchanted with Adam Curtis, how he had been a longtime fan. But eventually he saw through the same smoke and mirrors. He learned to see it all as uncharitable nonsense to convince others that technocracy is unassailable. He thought the parody was funny.

But this was a fantasy.

(Curtis's entire ouevre can be summarized in 18 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YSwCJIpSXQ )

This isn't me being pedantic, actual question:

Are we talking about whether nature is ever at equilibrium, or about how stable that equilibrium is?

A ball on the crest of a saddle is at equilibrium, but it isn't a very stable equilibrium.

Basically, are you saying the reality is that nature is always in flux, or that it doesn't take much to knock it toward a different stable state.

> if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

Even if that's true, quite a bit rides on how long "longer" is. If "longer" is a million years, that's not exactly good news.

I did some ecological modelling back in uni. A lot of it seems to be supported by experiments too. But we're talking nonlinear dynamical systems, right? Not all equilibria are stable equilibria (you can have all sorts of shapes) , and a stable equilibrium might not be what you want at all! (eg zero crossings where 'everyone dies' are absolutely the most stable equilibria you can hit) .

The “natural equilibrium” model originated in physics. It’s well applied and tractable in chemistry. It was then brought into economics and ecology (much more stochastic domains) as familiar metaphor from more deterministic systems.

I agree. Nature doesn’t care about humans, this is a romanticized fantasy by ideologists.

There is a reason why after WW2 so many theories of nature came to light. It was a cultural shift from day to day survival to being taken care of by a system that more than allowed to handle humans’ most basic needs.

After all we are the result of many 100.000 years of evolution. The modern time is roughly 100 old - compare these spans: from the perspective of an anthropologist 100 years is not worth to be stacked against x times 100.000 years.

The word for that used to be psychobabble. Most of this phrases don't have any sense.

> "The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning".

Nice word salad. Zero substance. Served with extra of BS sauce.

Has been this written by AI? Because for sure it looks like that

Doesn't the premise of bouncing back imply an ideal state to bounce back to?

And there we have it: ideal state for one species? the most possible species? longevity for individuals or the species?

The myth of some "natural" (the word literally means without human influence) state that is desired/better is somewhat ironic, right?

Any ideal state brings with it subjective criteria.

> We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium.

umm, that is not what the word equilibrium means. Obviously no system is stable to every and all disruption.

There are often other factors too, than just the direct fishing, that keep a population low.

In the west of North America, like most places, almost all of the old growth forest was logged.

Some places where the soil and subsoil was particularly vulnerable to erosion and landsliding or just didn't have a lot of water capacity in the first place like on dry mountains, after these trees were removed and most of the soil washed away from rain, the forest simply has not come back a hundred years later. There are little trees gradaually getting started, and lots of mostly bare soil or rock still where erosion from rain is able to outpace the vegetation growth. It will likely take many thousand years for trees to get to the size they were before, and to build up the capacity for holding water like it had been.

In more abundant forests, trees regrow faster. But even there, a hundred years later, the total biomass per acre is often 10% of what it was as old growth forest, and the capacity for holding water on the land similarly much reduced. The old growth forests were the result of nature doing its thing often with help from humans for thousands of years and continually becoming richer. Eventually a major disturbance sets it back, but this might only happen ever 5 or 10 thousand years. This time humans did it.

Example regarding clams: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pearl-buttons-muscatin...

They never actually stopped fishing it though. It's regulated at a level to prevent 100% collapse, there was never political support to let it truly recover by banning fishing for a decade or two.

That is a story about nature bouncing back. Just not the way the people doing it thought it would as it turned out other 'stuff' was a lot bouncier than the Cod were.

There are differing views on evolution, between slow and gradual and punctual equilibrium( a sudden breakthrough that triggers a biological arms race), this article is looking more at the very short term and saying if a species goes extinct another species does not immediately or fully occupy the space...which I guess needs to be stated but I would think that it was already understood...

The article is more focused on oceanic and coastal diversity but I agree about the mosquitoes.

Yeah the news for me here is that people thought nature could "bounce back" on a human timescale. Any human lifespan is just the blink of an eye to nature

I always find the silver fox domestication experiment[0] an interesting point about how much smaller evolutionary timescales can be than expected.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

> All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

The modern version of Carthage should be destroyed.

Nature is not harmonious, it is in constant flux. Saying it can bounce back implies there some state of equilibrium for it to bounce back to. I guess there's no reason why it can't bounce forward.

"Saving the Planet" (George Carlin)

https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?si=HqyW8mys0uNBuFdW&t=147

Humorous, but not inaccurate about what climate change means to primates. =3

> All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

I'm doing my part

Yes, we often see the history of earth's ecosystem through a geological timescale... human scale is almost light speed by comparison.

What about the animals that feed on those mosquitoes

Sure we should get rid of the diseases, but what about the niche mosquitos serve as food for birds, bats, etc?

if we're doing analogies to other complex systems, forests which have been patched and patched by different maintainers over the year are likely to have a lot of built up cruft, overlapping APIs, bloat, and of course a rewrite results in cleaned up code.

Nature itself ain't in no long term stasis, its just us humans projecting our wishful thinking on our environment. Planet is warming since last ice age (ie all glaciers in the Alps are provably receding since 1850 when measurements started, and ie vineyard region where I live was provably under huge glacier some 25k years ago).

Often cited mosquito eradication (at least those transmitting malaria, dengue, yellow fever, zika and so on) would change few things even though most folks would not even notice... and I couldn't welcome it more intensively. These academic discussions in the west would quickly die off when people around you start dying frequently from these (especially small children, but also grandparents or just weaker / more unlucky folks).

Massive droughts this summer still continuing here where I live wreaked way more havoc not only in insect world than any such engineering would do, yet I see no violent mass protests all around the world about banning cars, huge transport ships or commercial & private jet flying for example, or some other big pollutants. Literal frog in boiling water situation.

> Down the line there is a state nature will be in

Nature is in a state at every point of time. This not-especially-useful perspective means there’s nothing to bounce back from.

It reminds me of clever people tut-tutting when talking about an apocalypse. “Ah, but the planet will still be here!”

TARGET 2: Ensure that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of areas of degraded terrestrial, inland water, and marine and coastal ecosystems are under effective restoration, in order to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, ecological integrity and connectivity.

Uhh, yeah, I think that one was certainly known to be a non-starter when drafted in 2022. Most of the targets are vague and subject to interpretation. Some of them are loaded with overly effusive language. Not an agreement, it seems, that will garner much in the way of political support. It was clearly designed as idealism rather than policy.

Are you arguing that Grey Goo is only a local and not global optimum?

I recommend listening to Gerry Wilhelm (co-author of Flora of the Chicago Region) in this video by Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0

> (11:55) ...of our 500 native bees... the most... found... in a restoration... is under a hundred. So, more than 80% of our bees are confined to remnants. And... a garden... [only] 16 different species of bees... in the best prairie garden... If you look in our book under [a specific plant species], we have... well over a hundred insects listed for that plant... but only in remnants... You could plant [species] in your garden, you get the same old 15 bees... they're not as agile as we think.

> (21:00) (Comparing his 'restored' prairie to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) This isn't a remnant, never will be. Once a prairie is gone, it's gone.

> (34:15) (Again comparing his 'restored' prairie compared to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) It'll never have the insects that a remnant does, not even close. The insects require a whole lot more things, so if we don't save the remnants, the home of all of our remnant biodiversity... what was it, the guy going on telling everybody 'if you plant nature in your yard, it'll come back'... it's assuming that the insects are just going to come there. It doesn't happen. You have to save the remnants... Our generation needs to deploy great armies to identifying and preserving what little remnants we have left. Otherwise, there'll be no germ material out of which to build a tomorrow. It'll all be gone.

> (49:40) Our culture is so out of phase with reality... we just don't have any sense of the cascade of consequences that flow from... things that we think are just fine.

> (52:55) The average person today in Illinois can get born, can live, and die, and not see anything that was not made by man.

I think that's be best argument one can make for environmental protections. Forget the warm-and-fuzzy-koombaya altruistic argument and appeals on mother nature or whatever.

In the end this is about protecting and preserving our own ecosystem without which we will perish.

That's conjecture.

For all we know the universe could be teeming with life, in whatever shape or form. And since we see the first signs of life about 500 million years after the plant was formed, there's a good argument to be made that life doesn't need much more than a stable energy gradient and some basic building blocks to get started.

The article clearly spells out why this wouldn’t be in our favour: functional ecosystems provide services to humanity that we need, and those ecosystems need biodiversity to effectively provide those services. The idea that destroying these systems is “more convenient to us” is very flawed

There must be myriad unintended consequences that would come with dumping a whole bunch of water into a desert though? It feels like there's an awful lot of hubris in thinking we could accurately predict all the changes that would cause and know it would have a net positive outcome.

The behavior you're describing has already brought us close to the planetary boundaries of our own existence in the last century or two. Plenty of second order effects to our actions.

It would be highly convenient for us to stop pumping so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to keep climate stable for food production. But we're incapable of even that, even though technology to get rid of most fossil fuel use exists.

When this is the status quo, I'm not very hopeful of humankind's general capability to control the nature in ways that ultimately benefit us.

i think this is a dumb take that does not withstand any scrutiny whatsoever.

The political will to save a species only spikes after or during its extinction. If you could keep a small population alive in a greenhouse it could be used to revive them when they suffer an event and people start to care.

> serious science

It could be argued that some serious science starts with "just looking at correlations", guided by intangible drives like imagination and moral intuition. I wouldn't dismiss it as "not really science", and may even lean toward saying that it's important for the scientific process, or even the development of mathematics, to listen to your moral intuition and follow your nose. It's often driven by asking questions and posing theories.

"Of course, for many reasons, we should try not to drive species to extinction."

I disagree with your statement that "it's just basic moral intuition." You really think that we shouldn't be trying to extinct the Guinea worm? You might want to do some protesting as humanity is actively on a mission to drive the population of that species to 0.

The more interesting question is why are some species OK for humans to extinct and others are not? What makes humans such great arbiters of these things and why does "morality" only seem to apply when convenient? Who says a Guinea worm has less right to exist then your pet dog? Who decides what is good biodiversity and what is bad biodiversity?

Maybe you could ask an ecologist this question.

I dont think its a big loss to the universe if humans go extinct. Humans didnt engineer the biochemistry of life or produce the atmosphere or the over rated buggy brain.

I don't know of anyone who's suggesting we kill all the mosquitos. Even if we killed all the human-sucking species, that'd still only be 3% of the ~3500 different species.

"killing all", can't imagine anything going wrong here at all, nope.

I guarantee trying to save dying species is just an emotional reaction with very little logic behind it. I know it feels sad to see them go, but that's life. We like nothing to suffer, but somebody's gotta be eaten alive from head to toe, right? THATS LIFE

[dead]

Yes, but not with the same species…

Yeah, at some point, natural restoration can only do so much. If humans cause nature to go out of balance, it gets to a point where it'll take human intervention to come close to getting it back. That might mean manually reintroducing livestock predator and prey.