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War is not needed for population control.
The population level of a species is self regulating, and will evolve in such a way so as to maintain itself.
A shortage of food/resources, will increase the selection pressure, and thus lower the population.
A population will never grow so large that the environment can't sustain it, and thus cause it to become extinct (except in rare circumstances, and in those cases war isn't going to help anyway).
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You are confusing cause and effect.
There is nothing a shortage of food/resources will increase selection pressure, but that selection pressure is otherwise known as "starvation", and sometimes "war" in the human species.
War could be viewed as a form of selection pressure. Not the only one, but John never said "war was the only" only that "war was a good way".
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A population will never grow so large that the environment can't sustain it, and thus cause it to become extinct (except in rare circumstances, and in those cases war isn't going to help anyway).
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Why won't this happen? If it does happen, the species becomes extinct, but evolution isn't psychic.
We are doing things that haven't happened before to our strain of life. There is no genetically-distilled experience availiable. We could be walking towards a cliff, and because life hasn't walked over that cliff before, evolution cannot not guild us away from it.
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It's probably the whole "point" of evolution, since the development of nervous system complexification is the most recent and rapid expansion of the life process.
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The point of evolution is self-replicating patterns of information. There is no goal, evolution does not go upwards.
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what animal is there to keep us in check?
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We are not the only animal with 'no preditors'.
And hell, we have preditors. They are called viruses.
Dispite all this, I'm going to put forward a radical statement.
Consciousness is a good evolutionary development.
While it has high risk (self annihilation), it has a large payback (intersteller travel).
Intersteller travel of entire ecosystems would be a completely different phase of evolution, with payoffs orders of magnatude larger than any other evolutionary gambit.