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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dogbrain" data-source="post: 1633954" data-attributes="member: 14980">Weeds.Humans are excellent weeds.  We can live in a wide variety of environments, are very good at glomming up anything that is useful, reproduce with relative ease (compared to many other large mammals), and are rather good at countering obstacles.  Weeds aren't evil, they're just weedy.  Weediness is a survival strategy.  We're just unusual in that we're more of a K-selected (a relative few high-quality offspring) weed than an r-selected weed (toss out as many offspring as possible).Ecologically, we are closest to the Orcs than to the other species.  We're just better at working together than they are.It is probably impossible to "educate" humans into being "responsible" in the hippie-eco-freak sense.  Only one thing has ever consistently slowed down human population growth--female education.  As women gain in status in a society, reproductive rates fall off.  I'm not talking about so-called "matriarchical" societies.  I refer to education and status of the "common" woman.  This has been demonstrated over and over.  Countries that concentrated on providing solid primary education to girls, regardless of social status, have ended up with low or even negative growth rates (not counting immigration).  Countries that concentrated primarily or exclusively on higher education (which is almost always limited to high-status men and women) do not see a corresponding reduction in population growth rates.Oppression does not result in long-term reduction in human population unless that oppression results in a lot of deaths by engineered famine, disease from bad infrastructure, or flat-out killing lots of people (by execution or wars).  Thus, many attempts at "reforming" humans will fail.  Conquer and enslave them?  They breed even more, and now you have an enormous population of very bright and uppity slaves.  Replace the "bad" leaders with "good" leaders and you'll have to keep repeating the job--and end up with very ill-tempered mobs that keep getting larger and larger.  It is our nature to expand to fill all available space and then make other space "available".Any "good" leaders installed who are the least bit benevolent will just end up giving you more humans.  You've got to install monsters like Kim Il Sung or Pol Pot to really cut down on human population.</blockquote>

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