Do you ever stop to appreciate what an overwhelmingly successful life form humans are?

lol what's funny?

@UnparalleledMonster:
Ok how do you define successful?

@ajoite:

Well at the risk of copy and pasting....

Our population has been skyrocketing. We live on almost every continent on the planet. We control territory and resources in a way nothing else ever has.
We are THE apex predator.

@UnparalleledMonster: Yes yes sarcastic some of us live in a crap reception area so didn't see your other post until after I posted. Anyhoooo
Simple answer
An intelligent and successful animal doesn't kill it's host

@UnparalleledMonster: "Our population has been skyrocketing."
I don't understand why you view this as a positive.

@enevoe: In terms of success the goal of EVERY species is to propagate itself.
We're doing that VERY well

@UnparalleledMonster: No it isn't, every wild animal on the planet unless it's placed in an environment it shouldn't be in, limits how it breeds

@ajoite:

[quote]An intelligent and successful animal doesn't kill it's host[/quote]

Well i think you're being a bit hasty in combining intelligent and successful. Intelligence doesn't really have anything to do with how successful we currently are.
Like any other successful organism we thrive in an environment until it is no longer viable. In our case that will probably be through our own actions rather than natural events but there is no practical difference.

Successful viruses don't kill the host before they can pass their genetic material on to a new host. And that could still happen with humans, who knows.
But the only argument you're really making is that we might not be successful forever.

@ajoite:

No they don't limit how they breed. They are limited by their environment. And as you say when they enter an environment that no longer limits them, their population explodes....because the goal of every living organism is to propagate the species

@UnparalleledMonster: I didn't say that I said " shouldn't be in" I'll be back in a bit have to sort out my animals..but this is getting good!

@ajoite: Yeah no worries.

But the idea that there are environments that an organism "shouldn't be in" is really a human construct.
There are ecosystems that have a balance within them among the organisms. When a foreign organism enters that ecosystem and is able exploit the resources then it can become highly successful even if that means destroying that ecosystem as it existed.
Their goal is to spread the species and that is to a very large extent only limited by available resources and predation.
Humans have no predators and we have learned to exploit our resources to the point where we've spread across the globe