Well said, David G

runner,

"And the idiotic belief in evolution reduces us to behaving like animals..."

Animals don't run around the landscape massacring their own kind indiscriminately - that's a human specialty (save for a few varieties of ants - maybe rats)

In his book "Hegemony or Survival" Noam Chomsky cites the opinion of biologist Ernst Mayr. Chomsky says that Mayr speculated that the human form of intellectual organization may not be favoured by selection.Mayr wrote,:

"The history of life on earth refutes the claim that it is better to be smart than stupid, at least judging from the success of beetles and bacteria." Mayr also pointed out that the average life expectancy of a species was 100,000 years.
Chomsky continues on the theme: "We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if It receives a definite answer, the answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else...Humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well."

You're right - Humans are in a class of their own.

Divergence
"It may surprise you, Jardine, but there is a big difference between killing people who are already here (or allowing them to die) and not having that 5th or 6th child, especially since a great many of the world's pregnancies aren't wanted in the first place (see the Guttmacher Institute website). Why do you assume that anyone pointing out the problem favours the first alternative?"

Why do you assume that the author was directing his remarks only at people who are having a 5th or 6th child, more like it?

As you can see from the remarks, the human-haters are legion. Not willing to practise what they preach - too much of everyone else, but just enough of them - but certainly willing to use their anti-human liturgy as a pretext for a bit (a lot) of *non-altruistic* action of their own.

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
Mencken

These people are fakes. The author's pretended concern for altruism is fake, as is that of the environmental movement in general. They are every bit as selfish, greedy and grasping as their fellow man. Here they are, tapping away on their computers made of rare earths and depletable resources and fossil fuels, and moaning about how dreadful human life is. Only they are more selfish, greedy and grasping than the plebs they complain about, who only want to be able to get on with their life, because these nauseating fakes want to use the State to benefit their own values at others' expense, backed up by force, else no question of policy arises.

Poirot

reread your post. You could not possibly believe such fantasy.

Jardine,

I am saddened when someone expresses a real hatred of people, but that doesn't mean that we should chuckle indulgently when people do really stupid things and maybe drag us down with them. People have always been able to damage their local environment, but until now we haven't had the numbers or the technology to seriously destabilise our global life support systems. Warnings about losses of biodiversity along with a host of other environmental problems are coming thick and fast from the scientists in the relevant fields. These are mainstream scientists who publish in top peer-reviewed journals such as "Science" and "Nature", not fringe greenies.

You are a lawyer. If a biologist started to make pronouncements on how the law should be interpreted, you would most likely proclaim him to be an idiot. Why then do you people believe that you understand the biologist's field better than he does? What we are doing to the planet is becoming very obvious from satellite images, and it is hard to believe that there won't be some very negative consequences, including massive losses of populations of other species. See, for example, this time-lapse video of Amazon deforestation from Landsat images since the 1970s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBIA0lqfcN4

Here is the destruction of the Aral Sea by the Soviet Union

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSkRS8Ih7o

I don't feel at all guilty about using a computer, although I will take it for recycling at the end of its life. If you read economic historian Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms", he has a lot to say about the Malthusian trap societies of early modern Europe. He makes the point that the palace at Versailles and other extravagances of the French aristocracy actually cost the peasants nothing. The peasants were breeding up to the carrying capacity allowed by their environment and technology, so without the aristocrats, there would have just been more peasants, every bit as hungry and every bit as miserable. Unfortunately, the only dysfunctional culture that you have any hope of changing is your own.

David G as you feel that way, do feel free to top yourself to start the trend.

Such an action would definitely do some good for the gene pool of the human species, although I doubt it would do much for the rest of the fauna. Only those who understand English are actually likely to be depressed by your constant stream of misery, & even then, only those as foolish as you.