How can nature balance itself?

Answer 1

Assume nature is now balanced for example. The plant world can support so many people and animals who consume these plants. Plants reproduce at a certain rate and so do people and animals. Lower forms of life reproduce faster. If there are not enough plants, then people and animals start dying off thus reducing the consuming population which allows the plants to catch up and again balance nature. However if a species dies off totally then nature is in a different balance. If all higher life forms die off then the lower forms take over and perhaps in a billion years they evolve to the life forms that died out thus again balancing nature. So the balance of nature may not be an instantaneous balance of all things. A balance is that all things don't just die out. Even if this happens, in 10 billion years everything may evolve again to the current state. Perhaps everything works in cycles like this. If nature was one giant model then there would be millions of parameters to balance. Maybe over billions of years and through a random trial and error process, everything eventually reaches some kind of stable state that we call a balance but that balance in never stable in the long run but balanced enough so that we can live well enough for a lifetime? Even if you have a very simple model with three things interacting, the dynamics can be extremely complex and also extremely sensitive to the most minute changes to the model. The three body problem is a case in point. Thus also climate models should be taken with a grain of salt for long range predictions since they may suffer from this idea of chaos as well. Just my simplistic opinion. Ray