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this should be read by every Malthusian environmentalist.

• grammaton 15y ago
  Why? Does it contain some sort of resounding rebuttal? Because I read it, and I didn't see one....
• btilly 15y ago
  His underlying assumption is that if we raise everyone's standard of living, population will stabilize permanently. It is true that raising people's standard of living drops population growth - typically to below the replacement level. But anyone who thinks that this effect will last for billions, millions, or even thousands of years has failed to understand evolution.
  • anamax 15y ago
    > But anyone who thinks that this effect will last for billions, millions, or even thousands of years has failed to understand evolution. Oh really? Evolution selects for survival, period. (Actually, survival selects for certain kinds of evolution.) Where is it written that survival implies over-population.
    • btilly 15y ago
      Evolution selects for survival, period. No. Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants. This is a local optimization that is not the same as long-term survival. In fact there are lots of examples of species going down evolutionary dead ends where eventually they get wiped out. Thanks to the miracle of exponential growth, a successful trait that is possessed by a small fraction of the population will spread like a cancer until it dominates the population. In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful. And it will be successful in a surprisingly short time. To take a simple model, suppose that we have a recessive allele that is 1% of the gene pool. (So 1.99% of the population carries the recessive, but only 0.01% of the population expresses it.) Suppose that people without it just replace themselves, while people with it expressed have twice as many kids. At first the trait will be utterly invisible. But in under 100 generations it will completely dominate the population. That is only a few thousand years.
      • anamax 15y ago
        > Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants. Nope. Survival selects for genes that have enough descendants. One way to have "enough" is "lots", but it doesn't necessarily work and isn't necessary. > In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful. Nope - lots of kids is neither necessary nor sufficient. The key metric is "do your kids have kids, rinse and repeat." Too many kids can break that, as can too few.
        • btilly 15y ago
          All else being equal, in an environment like our own where survival is easy, generally the more kids the merrier. Modern economics and birth control have created pressures against reproducing that we have never faced in our evolutionary history. Our species has not yet evolved a response to it. Once we have evolved a response to it, I would predict exponential growth rate until we exhaust available resources. This may not happen in 10 generations or 20. But in 1000 generations, our species will have adapted and reached a crisis.
          • sedachv 15y ago
            The only way I see of "evolving a response to it" is selecting for baby-crazed women who are basically addicted to the hormonal changes of childbirth and rearing. Men would already be happy to impregnate women as much as possible, if they didn't have to stick around or pay child support. It's hard not to think of Idiocracy.
            • btilly 15y ago
              And you think that selection process is not going on? Anyways there are other possible responses. There is a strong correlation between being religious and having lots of kids. Therefore genes that incline one towards being religious are positively correlated with kids. Another is a trait of failing to worry about future consequences. (Now you'll really be thinking about Idiocracy.) Complex traits like these are part nurture and part nature. But to the extent that they are nature, there is evolutionary pressure for them to spread.
• wazoox 15y ago
  For a good laugh? Certainly. On the other hand, such delusion coming from this guy (probably a genius otherwise) is painful to see. He still completely lives in the illusion that energy is free and will remain so.