What is The Law of Limited Competition?

What is the Law of Limited Competition? Dr. Alan Thornhill answered it over at the Ishmael Community:

"You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. Lions and hyenas will kill competitors opportunistically (as will other creatures, like baboons), but the law as stated holds true: they do not HUNT their competitors the way they hunt their prey. That is, they'll kill a competitor if they come across one (especially in conflict over food when food is scarce), but in the absence of a competitor, they won't go looking for one to kill. Such behavior would be evolutionarily unstable. (See THE SELFISH GENE by R. Dawkins.) As a strategy, it just doesn't pay off to use your time and energy hunting competitors that you DON'T eat (and that will fight back to the death) instead of using your time and energy to hunt prey that you DO eat. It's not a matter of ethics, it's a matter of calories.*"

After Dachau and Eliminating Competition

More on the theme of elimination competition. This is an excerpt from "After Dachau." In that book the Nazis had successfully purged the human race of the mongrel races and the only race left was the Aryan race. Here is one of characters describing the inevitability of the Aryan's success:

"The story of human evolution doesn't follow the same pattern as the evolution of other creatures. When reptiles emerged from the amphibians, they didn't destroy the amphibians. When mammals emerged from the reptiles, they didn't destory the reptiles. But the same is not true for humans. Among humans, each emerging species apparently destroyed the species from which it emerged. This explains why none of those earlier species survived to the present time. In fact, most biologists feel this accounts for the tremendous speed with which humans evolved from lower forms. So we Aryans were only doing what humans have done from the beginning. [Daniel Quinn, Pg.125, After Dachau]

Wisconsin Deer Hunting and Competition

This morning I listened to Joy Cardin's call-in radio show about deer hunting in the state of Wisconsin. One of the issues that was brought up during the show was that there are to many deer in the state, so hunters need to shoot more deer to bring the numbers down. The part of the show that caught my attention was Frank's (He was from Portage, WI) call at about 45 or so minutes into the hour long program. What I heard Frank saying in his comment is that part of the problem is that we're not letting the natural predators like wolves, bear, and cougars do their job of consuming deer because we have taken over their territories, therefore bringing their numbers down so they can't make an impact on the deer herd. He also mentioned that we keep taking from the land and its inhabitants, and we have been doing this since we decided to take the land from the Native Americans that lived here.

I was disappointed with Keith Warnke's response to Frank. Keith is a Big Game Specialist who works for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The main reason why is that he didn't mention our total dependence on agriculture to produce our food. And most importantly, because of this dependence on agriculture we are breaking The Biological Law of Limited Competition. The law simply states:

You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. Lions and hyenas will kill competitors opportunistically (as will other creatures, like baboons), but the law as stated holds true: they do not HUNT their competitors the way they hunt their prey. That is, they'll kill a competitor if they come across one (especially in conflict over food when food is scarce), but in the absence of a competitor, they won't go looking for one to kill. Such behavior would be evolutionarily unstable. (See THE SELFISH GENE by R. Dawkins.) As a strategy, it just doesn't pay off to use your time and energy hunting competitors that you DON'T eat (and that will fight back to the death) instead of using your time and energy to hunt prey that you DO eat. It's not a matter of ethics, it's a matter of calories.*

Spraying pesticides on fields, killing wolves because they kill whitetail deer, shooting deer because they eat our corn, are all examples of killing our competitors because we don't want them to have our food. That's breaking the Law of Limited Competition. The problem is that over time a species will go extinct from breaking this law. Experts and citizens alike, I think, really need to start talking about this more.

I would like to be a guest on Wisconsin Public Radio talking about this and other ideas brought up in Daniel Quinn's work. Perhaps there needs to be an organization started in the state that focuses on those ideas. Anybody out there with any ideas? In the ten years I have been listening to WPR I have not heard a guest voice the B Attitudes, but I have heard callers like Frank touch on them.

*Source

Website Discovery

I just ran across this website. It sums up a lot of the way I think in new and creative ways.

I especially like this essay and excerpt:

Rule No. 7 - You are allowed to compete with other species for food, but not to wage war on them.

As Daniel Quinn points out in his book, Ishmael, lions may not like the hyenas that compete with them for food and territory and will sometimes pick fights with them, but lions don't organize all-out, genocidal war against hyenas as you humans do against any species that dares to eat "your" food, with your pesticides that indiscriminately poison everything that comes near "your" crops, or your "predator control" programs that seek to exterminate the bears, wolves, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks and eagles, etc., that occasionally prey on "your" sheep, cattle, chickens, etc.

What you humans fail to realize is that trying to deny competing species access to the food that you claim as yours alone can only lead to eventual ecological devastation. The other species that compete with you for food exist for very good reasons: Because biodiversity helps preserve ecosystem stability and health (see Rule 5, above) and because they form an important part of the food chain. Just one of many examples: Wolves do not just eat "your" sheep or cattle, they also eat deer, and the extermination of wolves in much of North America has therefore led to widespread ecosystem damage due to the severe overpopulation of deer in such areas as the northeastern U.S.

This is one of the reasons why Timberwolves were wiped out in the State of Wisconsin during the early 1900's. It would be nice if atleast the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources would acknowledge this.

I don't think there is any argument that can stand against the rule quoted above (In other words The Biological Law of Limited Competition as talked about in the Ishmael Trilogy).