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‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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It's more that life itself almost evolves an entire planet to best benefit life itself. Or that when life on the planet as whole is threatened, life evolves to address the crisis. For example, in the caboniferous, trees evolved undigestable lignin, and this caused a misbalance in nature as forests grew and died with nothing to digest the dead trees. In time, organisms arose that could digest wood, and the balance was restored.
Here, the problem is greenhouse gas emissions. And meat consumption is one of the biggest drivers of meat consumption. So nature responds by making humans allergic to meat!
The Gaia hypothesis is quite out there because it ascribes a sort of collective will or intention to nature, rather than just the blind machinations of evolution.
The hypothesis kind of seems like selection bias to me. It seems more likely to me that in order for life to flourish as it has on earth, it has to (by pure chance) create a self regulating system, as otherwise it will eventually die off. What's interesting (and I hadnt thought about prior to reading the wikipedia article) to me is that it seems possible that the current rapid temperature rise will lead to some organism(s) we don't know or think about multiplying like crazy, and that has some form of cooling effect due to the organism's emissions or w/e. Industrialized humans appear to be the most extreme (in the sense of rapid, persistent change) climate event to happen to this planet since it has had life, but at the very least we're not the first time something fucked up the climate. Maybe we'll just get lucky after all.