[schiffern]

  >  we are the only species that will become extinct because survival wasn't profitable enough

This a very good quip, but I have to ponder: how could we know that for sure?

If some other species had a comparable concept used to organize themselves, I doubt humans would even be aware of that nuance.

[saintfire]

Single celled organisms do it all the time, on a local scale.

If you fill a jar with some yeast and sugar water, they'll feast and multiply at an accelerating pace until they've turned their environment toxic.

Painfully analagous to humans.

[palata]

Well because other species don't manage to break the barriers as efficiently as we do.

The way regulation works is that species are limited by their environment. If there are many antelopes, there can be many lions. But if there are two many lions, the population of antelopes goes down to the point where not all the lions can survive, right? This is simplistic, but that's the idea (the higher the population, the bigger the impact of a disease, etc).

Because we are really good at changing our environment in order to be more individuals who consume more resources, we escape those regulation mechanisms. By doing this, we destroy most species, including ours.

Now let's not pretend that ants would be better: if they somehow escaped those mechanisms, they wouldn't suddenly vote and stop growing (presumably). The fact is that they haven't escaped them, and we have. Well for a while. Now it's very likely that some kind of mechanism will end up regulating us. Maybe it will finish destroying most species, and it will take thousands of years to "recover" (with some definition of "recover").

What's interesting with us is that we do know we are destroying ourselves and the biodiversity (which is arguably one of the enjoyable things in life), but we can't seem to find a way to fix it.

[baanist]

Most of what you've said is true but what exactly does it mean to "break barriers"? We can not escape the laws of chemistry, physics, and thermodynamics because we live on a compact manifold with finite resources which must be recycled eventually by the surrounding ecology. This is why plastics are now found in all newborns, the chemicals produced by our factories are recycled back into the ecology and our internal biomes.

[palata]

Totally. I just meant that those are less direct. Species usually don't reach a point where they change the climate because they are stopped by other mechanisms long before. Our cycle is slower, which gives us time to destroy more stuff before we "get regulated", I suppose.

[__MatrixMan__]

Sometimes it's pretty visible. Some slime molds (dictyostelids) form multicellular bodies when food is scarce and they have to hunt, and then go back to single-celled life when conditions are more favorable.