How the planet takes care of itself

I have been thinking about evolution and how natural systems tend to be self-balancing. Before homo sapiens ruled the planet, a number of predator species kept the population of herd animals in check. The populations of the predator species were in turn kept in check by the availability of prey which might be affected by the shortage or abundance of fodder which in turn was affected by climate cycles. Homo-sapiens has been one of those evolutionary outliers that possibly threw the self-balancing mechanism off balance. Our ability to not only adapt to changing environs but also our tendency to bend the environment to our needs has perhaps been more than evolution bargained for.

Of course, nature did not give up easily. As recently as the first half of the last century, every so often an outbreak of cholera or the plague would reduce the human poluation by a not-insignificant percentage of the total. As we developed vaccines and cures for a number of diseases, the human population started to grow rapidly.

It would be interesting conjecture that all sexually transmitted diseases including Syphilis and HIV were nature's attempts to control the population of a species by making the very process of pro-creation a transmission vector.