1) First, a post from the past: Adaptation might not be a spherical cow. 2) Weird search query of the week: "shemale escort bald." I'm not making this up. The user who searched for this is a Wiener. 3) Comment of the week, in response to The neo-Malthusian petro-kings:
From what I remember, Ehrlich put far too much emphasis on shortages of metals and minerals. Mineral shortages can be dealt with by substitution, by more efficient use, by tech progress, or by exploration. The questions with air, water, topsoil, and energy are still with us. A second problem is time scale. For whatever reason Ehrlich chose a one-decade time frame. That’s an economist’s timeframe. Geophysical and ecological events occur over centuries and millenia, so that there can be long lags between cause and effect. There was a conference once where economists and ecologists tried to work together on environmental questions which dead-ended when it was found that for the economists the long run was ten to twenty years, whereas for ecologists the short run was a century. Simon was a magical thinker. He argued once that since there are an infinite number of points in a line, we can never run out of resources. I had an argument once with a free-marketer who was unwilling to concede that when the Atlantic cod fishery was destroyed, that meant that that much less food was available. He argued that the price system would take care of it somehow and that people would substitute other products. For him no physical world existed, only economies. (The cod fishery was a relatively minor source of food quantitatively speaking, but I was building to the point that if, for example, the Ukraine’s agricultural production diminished significantly, there would be real effects on the world’s food supply.)
4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:
