Dear Ronald,
I' very glad that you take it up for the Indian people and so will I any day
of the week.
However You would probably find it interesting if you had a look at
http://www.well.com/user/elin/edentxt.htm
Elin Whitney-Smith, Ph.D is offering a "New Theory of Extinctions at the End
of the Ice Age" there.
Whitney-Smith's theory is that "Second Order Overkill" was the cause of the
extinctions. In short : by reducing the populations of the big predators
cave lion and sabertooth tigers) by just a few percentage points an
ecosystem collapse became inevitable.
I did my own calculations, admittedly based for the most part on data
supplied in this web page, and I came away convinced.
If you do the same thing and you reach a different conclusion I would be
very interested to learn about it.
In the mean time and given that this new theory is correct we can draw some
other conclusions : never could even the greatest sage have foreseen that
such a relatively small number of people by doing so little could have had
such a dramatic effect. Makes one think about what is happening to our
ecosystem today in a different light.
Our lives are so short in comparison to evolutions in the global ecosystem
that it is virtually impossible to predict effects. But it is possible to
imagine that a hundred years in the future our species may suffer severe
damage through the action of some pesticide the use of which was
discontinued 50 years ago.
It might in fact be safer for the world to give America back to the Indians
altogether.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: Ronald Nigh <danamex@mail.internet.com.mx>
To: <sanet-mg@ces.ncsu.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2000 3:39 PM
Subject: Asinine claims
John wrote:
>it will never stop to amaze me
>that the most assinine claims often make the most succesfull memes in the
>face of plentifull good scientific evidense to the contrary.
And then, to prove his own point, he repeats one of the great media myths
of our time:
>Humans caused the ecosystem
>collapse at the end of the pleistocene that caused mass extinctions on the
N
>American continent.
>
The evidence for this nonesense was not very good when the "Pleistocene
overkill" argument was made by Paul Martin in 1967. The evidence has not
improved since then. Nonetheless the idea has gained "scientific"
legitimacy by endless uncritical repetition in the scientific and lay
press. The popularity of this idea has more to do with a political agenda
to descredit Indian people's right to control their own natural resources,
than it does with real evidence (see the latest diatribe in Newsweek, March
27).
Ronald Nigh
Dana, A.C.
Mexico, D.F. & San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas
Tel. y FAX 525-666-73-66 (DF)
529-678-72-15 (Chiapas)
danamex@mail.internet.com.mx
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