Sometimes I would hear people hoping that population numbers would decrease by natural catastrophies or diseases. Or they caution the expansion of health services in Africa "because it would make the problems worse".

That's your argument? That you don'e like it? I don't like it either, but mass death is how nature deals with species who exceed the carrying capacity of their environments.

> Sometimes I would hear people hoping that population numbers would decrease by natural catastrophies or diseases.

People don't hope for that, but they expect it as a natural consequence of biological growth. And they're right. The evidence is clear -- eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death. We're already seeing the first stages.

> Good to hear that I'm not the only one with this opinion.

Oh, you aren't the only one, not by any means. Most people think there's no reason to think about this. Natural selection efficiently chooses those who don't believe it's worth thinking about, and over time they become the entire surviving population -- people who accept mass death as a practical regulatory mechanism.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution

Can you support this?

We're not seeing any mass deaths which are sufficient to even slow the population growth rate, and instead, seem to simply be seeing more statistically unlikely events as the population grows larger - which is what we would expect.

Of course, there's the whole global warming debate (which I won't get into) as well ... what effect will that have on plant-life and agriculture?

P.S. I like seafood, so I'd also prefer we manage to keep the oceans habitable.

It's not a debate, it's science.

I'm also a steam-locomotive buff (install sl on all your Linux machines), and it's interesting to follow their decline in the US and other first world countries. China used steam power longer than most (http://www.david-longman.com/China.html), since they had vast reserves of coal and other more important infrastructure to build. But it appears China is just now recognizing the types of pollution that led to the 1970s/1980s "super-fund" sites in the US. I suspect that countries that want to join the ranks of the financial superpower will progress through similar stages where they won't be inclined to agree to pollution limits.

Instead the article argues we should use the tactics that humans have always used for survival to compensate global warming: * introduce a species that solves the problem for us. Right now the most efficient co2->o2 species are ~3% efficient. The difference need not be big, by the way. If we introduce a form of algae that's 3.2% efficient into the oceans, global warming will reverse in about a year. Note that some theories say that earlier in the planet's history, there were such more efficient species, which should mean they can easily come back without intervention and may suddenly solve out problem for us. The same goes for trees. It would not be a huge adaptation for trees to become more green, although it would take more time. * find another fuel to burn (e.g. a more complete switch to uranium, or solar panels. Although solar panels still necessitate competing with nature, which is bound to have ecological consequences if the usage goes up. Both pose the problem of moving the fuel around)

I would like to add that somehow the UN's policies and all the "green" policy efforts have moved the world away from nuclear power, and into coal power. Whatever the green movement is doing, it needs to learn that there are consequences to decisions. Moving away from nuclear means coal power plants. Why ? Look at the energy prices. Moving away from coal means nuclear power plants. Until this is understood widely, the green movement will continue to make things much worse by insane unconditional opposition to anything that doesn't completely satisfy their demands, including the demand that there can't be any impact on their lifestyle. I find it very weird that given such horrible results, the movement has any standing in society at all.

Btw: I hate sl. Too many type errors and I didn't know how it can be interrupted until a few months ago. It takes quite a while to pass on the screen on a 30" monitor.

Of course. Just look at the number of people who are on the brink of starvation:

http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20f...

Quote: "The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Almost all the hungry people, 852 million, live in developing countries, representing 15 percent of the population of developing counties. There are 16 million people undernourished in developed countries."

> We're not seeing any mass deaths which are sufficient to even slow the population growth rate ...

Not true, and in any case, that's not how an uncontrolled population expansion works -- such a process involves more mass death accompanied by more and more people surviving at the same time. The model is the Logistic function:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

The curve is nearly flat on the left because there are too few organisms available to produce a higher growth rate.

The curve is nearly flat on the right because mass death prevents enough surviving organisms able to produce a higher growth rate.

Notice about the Logistic curve that the trend is always positive -- more people, but more death, at the same time. I emphasize that the Logistic curve is matched by any number of laboratory experiments -- it's more than a hypothesis about biology, including human biology.

1) Many children will die young, so in order to have at least a few that survive they need to have a large number of them

2) They have no form of birth control available available to them, so even if they wanted to they could not control the population

To go along with this, in societies that lack a social safety net / old age pensions, your children are your retirement fund, so you tend to have many of them.

It's a multi-faceted problem, but there are humane, concrete solutions that don't involve acts of god.

There's a nice course on EdX about global poverty.

The population density of Hong Kong is much higher still, and it's also a pretty nice place to live. In short, the countries you name have a poverty problem, NOT a population problem. And the poverty problem is generally declining, last I checked.

WHAT point? Dude, you need to spend some time with gapminders.org . Follow the links below and press the "play" button beneath the charts.

India and Bangladesh have in the last few decades had a rapidly falling birthrate (down to around replacement level) along with rapidly improving child mortality rates. Watch this in the form of blue dots marching down and to the left.

http://www.bit.ly/1azLeVo

Meanwhile, per-capita income and life expectancy are improving - watch the blue dots march up and to the right:

http://www.bit.ly/16sSKR8

So where's the impending disaster? I don't see it in any of the relevant metrics.

The impending disaster is in its early stage and is slowed down a bit due to mass immigration of Bangladeshi citizen into neighboring countries and rapid urbanization of India (specially western and southern India) and please check the number of immigrants of bangladesh and hazardous urbanization of India.

Certainly we COULD continue developing innovations that harness and shape the natural world to support continued human population growth... but that line of thinking doesn't give room to consider whether we SHOULD do that.

Should population growth be a goal? What about raising the standard of living of all those who are already on the planet - helping them move from mere sustenance to abundance, and the opportunity to explore the true wonders life has to offer?

Should we live in a world void of natural beauty? I don't think it's a fair trade to have a few more billion people on the planet if everyone then has to read about how beautiful the Earth was before we poisoned the seas, melted the ice caps and drained the soil of its nutrients.

We are at a point now where we as a Human race can and should be thinking about our population growth responsibly. To suggest that we COULD adapt to a future world taxed by overpopulation doesn't imply that we SHOULD follow that path.

And your evidence for this is?

To continue supporting even our current population will force us to devastate our planet

And your evidence for this is?

What about raising the standard of living of all those who are already on the planet

As the article clearly states, the obstacles to doing this are social and political, not environmental or technological. People are starving or living at bare subsistence level, to put it bluntly, because our social systems suck at empowering people to make a better life. We allow predatory individuals, whether they are tinpot dictators or investment bankers, to siphon off resources they don't need and will squander anyway at the expense of others. That is what we need to fix.

Should we live in a world void of natural beauty?

No, and we don't.

before we poisoned the seas, melted the ice caps and drained the soil of its nutrients.

And your evidence that this is happening is? More precisely, your evidence that all these things are worse than they were, say, 1000 years ago, is?

Regarding the issue of 'natural beauty' in the world, I see it on a micro-level when I go to a lake in the summer that was once pristine but is now overrun with seaweed due to Nitrogen runoff from farmer fields. I see it on a macro level when I read about things my children's generation might never enjoy, like the beauty of a coral reef.

At the end of the day with so much 'pseudo science' thrown around from fringe scientists, all anyone has is an 'opinion'. You now have mine.

That was kind of my point, except that you and I would probably have different opinions on which particular arguments about these issues come under the heading of "pseudo science".

Also, you are basically saying that we don't know enough about these issues to make useful predictions about the future. At least, if that's what you were saying, I agree with you. But your post was full of predictions about the future; saying that they're "opinions" doesn't give them any more weight. If you don't know what's going to happen, the correct thing to say is that you don't know--and to base your actions on understanding your lack of knowledge, not opinions that have no useful value.

As for a high school environmental science book, surely you jest. A politically correct textbook produced for politically correct state-run schools?

More people means more science and better ways of sustaining population.

And we are not stuck on our planet forever, there are more planets nearby waiting to be 'devastated'.

Yeah right! We can have a movie on that planet with Cameroon directing,can't we?.

All snark aside, there is only one planet which is nearby and can be terra-formed, Mars. Our Solar system is huge as we go far from our sun, we loose precious energy we get from sun which is very important to sustain any kind of flora or fauna.And no the big moons of Jupiter are quite hostile and cold, one the moon has liquid methane raining from it's atmosphere. How can you terra-form that? Anything further than asteroid belt is just too damn cold.

Now coming to other solar systems, I learnt in my high-school that our near star Alpha Centauri (I know proxima centauri is the nearest, but alpha was mentioned in our textbook, but doesn't matter same system) is more than 4 light years away and no planet in the habitable zone.However if anyone builds a machine which enables us to travel to alpha in say a couple of months. I will immediately marry and procreate(May be in 10 years have 5-7 kids).

I hope Elon Musk(or someone else) succeeds and dies a natural death on Mars. It is important for humanity.

I mean, it's more-or-less the basis for all Sci-Fi: stories fall under either A) rich-get-richer and pending disaster as the Earth is overburdened, B) technology makes everything wonderful, C) Humans explicity inhibit their population, or D) humans find new land on other planets (usually also coupled with A,B, or C or Earth)). This isn't some debate that hasn't happened. This isn't some revelation that one comes to as an ecologist, this is an often-rehashed discussion. A worthy discussion, certainly, with points on both sides. But not one which the author has just now discovered a barely-known side of.

Now if the author had done some serious research and presented actual evidence for his side, I'd be all ears. Too bad there wasn't anything new in the article.

Social hunting strategies don't disprove the Earth having a "carrying capacity." You're not farming the animals that you hunt; they are part of the natural environment.

This entire argument is based on the idea that we should be able to continually expand carrying capacity by our inventiveness. Stating for example increased farming yield with technology.

Not only is there a likely limit to our ability to squeeze more and more out of finite resources, but the author completely ignores the subtle long term damage that our technology creates. Our current food production systems are highly toxic to the environment and are a major source of CO2 output. So while we increased food carrying capacity we did so by reducing long term habitability of the planet.

Personally, I'd like to see populatin growth reduced by a global increase in quality of live. But not western culture consumption obsessed quality of life. That would need to change. As would the growth based financial system. Those two go hand in hand so this could all gradually happen at the same time. In theory.

Actually the point of this article is: "Evidence suggests that despite what we think: Humans are smart".

Yes, and ironically enough, the article represents a glaring counterexample of its own thesis.

They seem to think current food supplies can via efficiencies be increased magically by a 100% or something.

They don't even seem to be looking at non food issues like oil use or the fact the 1st world (And it's mega resource use) is tripling.

Let alone technologies that might increase the life span by years which'll cause 9 billion to seem like a small figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

The Logistic function concisely describes the behavior of biological systems that don't have any control over their numbers, as humans most certainly do not.

At the left, the function's curve is nearly flat because there aren't enough living organisms to support a higher birth rate.

At the right, the functions's curve is nearly flat because mass starvation and death prevents a higher birth rate.

The Logistic function models a growing biological colony in a finite world, and it applies to any biological colony. For such a biological colony, eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death.

Does this model have any bearing on the human biological colony? Let me answer by saying as time passes, more and more accounts of mass death are met by less and less surprise or alarm among the world's population.

At Sandy Hook, a boy has a fight with his mother, so -- being a healthy young boy, possessed of normal instincts -- he kills her, then goes to a local school and kills as many people as he can possibly manage. The story makes national headlines for a few days, all those innocent children systematically killed by an amateur, acting on a whim. But that story evaporates, pushed out the public's consciousness by another story of mass death, and another.

By contrast, when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March 1932, it made national headlines for years -- years -- until the perpetrator was apprehended, tried, and executed in 1936. It's the story of one family, one child, one murder. Today that story wouldn't be able to compete with the latest mass murder account. "Oh, Bashar Assad has killed 1,500 people in a nerve gas attack. Oh, well, they're not anyone I know personally. What else is in the news?"

The author of the linked editorial concludes his article by saying, "The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it."

Both claims are likely, but with one important difference -- future populations will wonder what we were thinking, as we struggled to avoid considering the consequences of our own actions. As to "the environment will be what we make it", that is certainly true -- we will gradually tolerate more and more mass death, a process that has already begun.

At the next Sandy Hook mass killing, people will say, "Hey, what can you do? Boys will be boys. But this can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress."

"Within a year of his flight, a quarter of Americans (an estimated thirty million) personally saw Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis. Over the remainder of 1927 applications for pilot's licenses in the U.S. tripled, the number of licensed aircraft quadrupled, and U.S. Airline passengers grew between 1926 and 1929 by 3,000% from 5,782 to 173,405."

The Lindbergh kidnapping made headlines for years because of that celebrity status (and the sensationalism of the story and the trial), not because people back then were more sensitive to death.

As other people here have commented, the Lindburgh kidnapping happened 1932. What better argument can be made for that generation's forgetfulness about "mass death" (as you put it) than pointing out that WWII and its tens of millions of deaths happened after tens of millions died in WWI? If anything, we are much more vigilant now.

There was more "mass death" in 1932 +/- 20 than 1993 +/- 20, in fact more than the world has ever seen and hopefully more than the world will ever see.

Also, all that needs to happen for death to balance birth is that mortality rates need to go up and birth rates need to go down, it doesn't mean that there needs to be some Malthusian die-off localized in space and time, nor does it need to involve people going crazy.

I get that this is your claim, but I don't understand your argument that it's increasing when compared to WW1 and WW2.

That's not my argument, that's your argument, but it's perfectly valid as far as it goes.

Let me explain. When you perform a moving average, you can prove anything by choosing an unrealistically short averaging interval.

With respect to mass death, if the averaging interval is ten years, things seem to be getting better. If the interval is 100 years, things are much worse.

The same method is used by climate deniers -- a one-year averaging interval suggests that the climate is cooling. A ten-year interval shows that it's warming. They're both mathematically valid measures, but the future isn't a year long and it's not ten years long, so choosing short measurement intervals is intellectually dishonest.

I'm not saying that about you, only that the interval you chose isn't appropriate to the issue under discussion.

The modern equivalent would be the kidnapping of a celebrity's child, by a stranger, for money. Such things happen every day now, but they don't become the focus of the world's attention. The Lindbergh kidnapping tells us something about the nature of the world before modern times.

> And random violent acts do often lead to reform.

Are you serious? Here is a list of school shootings from colonial times to the present:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...

The trend is obvious -- there's nothing resembling reform, and as time passes, the body counts keep going up. Why? The population has become too dense to meaningfully prevent instances of mass death by wacko. This problem can only get worse as population density increases.

> At the same time, evidence shows better status and education yields fewer births.

That's very true, there's no dispute about that. But because of natural selection, the low-birth-rate educated are replaced by the high-birth-rate uneducated, which changes nothing. Those who think that's too gloomy need only read the history of efforts to control bacterial resistance to antibiotics -- we know why this happens, and we have teams of scientists addressing the issue, but we don't seem to be able to do anything about it:

http://mrsa-research-center.bsd.uchicago.edu/timeline.html

> You take your gloomy point too far.

Do you think I take this too far? Wait until you see what nature does with it.

Really? Give one example.

> Really? Give one example.

How about scores, even if we limit ourselves to a short interval of time (2000-2009):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kidnappings#2000-2009

And remember, even though the cases number in the scores on this list, these are only the high-profile cases that saw news coverage for more than a few hours. Many more didn't make the list because the circumstances were't remarkable enough.

EDIT: it also sounds to me like you're conflating our media with our ability to self-reflect and learn as a society. That might not be the case

My example was meant only to show the size of the public reaction to a single death. Today, that would be impossible.

Do you really contend that we wouldn't?

I routinely get stories about single families in China who have had their kids kidnapped for organ theft, even if it's not all of them. I find it HIGHLY unlikely that an international celebrities child would be kidnapped without it being major news.

You're going to have to do better than bald assertion for me to be convinced of that.

Wow! I wasn't going to bother replying, but this is egregiously wrong:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kidnappings#2000-2009

There are scores of kidnappings in this list, and it only covers ten years.

> Nobody would say "ho-hum, it's just another celebrity kidnapping story..."

But by wrongly thinking that "Kidnapping is essentially nonexistent in the US today", you did just that.

(In Mexico, on the other hand, it is a major business opportunity.)

The vast majority of "missing kid" events you hear about are related to custody battles - the noncustodial parent runs off without permission of the court. There are also a few (though it's quite rare) events of the sort in that list - usually teenagers or adults abducted for sexual purposes.

> There are scores of kidnappings in this list, and it only covers ten years.

There are 26 kidnappings in that list, but nearly half weren't in the US - it includes events in Baghdad, Columbia, Spain, England, and various other places. The 15 events in the US in ten years establish that it happens at least 1.5 times a year in this country of 313 million people.

Meanwhile about 1,000 americans per year are struck by lightning and 100 of those are killed by it. So kidnapping even of all varieties is an exceedingly rare event that we are in all likelihood WAY too afraid of. (In the US, anyway)

"In the coming days, Lindbergh became the most photographed, most filmed, and most famous living person on earth."

"On June 13, Lindbergh was greeted by over four million people at events honoring him in New York City."

"At the center stood the two most famous men in America: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who, as unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s isolationists, emerged as the president’s most formidable adversary"

http://www.aviation-history.com/airmen/Charles_Lindbergh.htm http://lynneolson.com/those-angry-days/

It seems to me that you actually agree with the article's claim that the primary problem is social. You just don't agree with the article's claim that the problem can be solved; basically you don't think humans will be able to come to grips with the social changes that would be required to manage ourselves as a species responsibly. Is that a fair statement of your position?

That's correct. The article relies on a common logical error, to wit: catastrophe hasn't overtaken us yet, and that stands as evidence that it cannot ever happen, i.e. the past predicts the future.

It's one thing to accept that we can't solve population problems by pointing fingers at other people. But it's quite another to try to claim the problem doesn't exist at all.

> basically you don't think humans will be able to come to grips with the social changes that would be required to manage ourselves as a species responsibly.

It's a bit more complicated than that. In a mixed population of people who can grasp the nature of biological limits, and others who cannot, those who cannot eventually become the entire future population -- people congenitally indisposed to act intelligently. It's the inevitable outcome of natural selection.

That's an easy problem to state, but impossible to do anything about without abandoning all civilized standards of behavior. If we do nothing, mass death becomes the problem. If we try to "solve" the problem, fascist and eugenic political measures become the problem. That's not any kind of choice.

My point? This isn't a movie in which everything gets resolved in the third act. All our choices are bad ones, but the worst is to imagine the problem doesn't exist, as the author of the linked article tries to do.

Yes, I see you make this argument on your page on evolution that you linked to. The only possible flaw that I can see is that you say it is

impossible to do anything about without abandoning all civilized standards of behavior

I'm not saying I have a solution that doesn't require that; but I'm not sure that our only option is giving up on trying to find one. I.e., instead of "impossible" in the quote above I would put "extremely difficult". But I admit that's purely a matter of opinion on my part.

No one is suggesting "giving up". In any case, it's not in the nature of science to give up on searching for solutions. But as things stand, there's no obvious solution.

> instead of "impossible" in the quote above I would put "extremely difficult".

My use of "impossible" was only with respect to measures that modify the behavior of individuals by force. That's impossible without abandoning civilized standards. I don't normally use the word "impossible" without good reason.

Ok, yes, I agree with this.

Agricultural technology is still progressing and we could probably feed any population growth beyond any current prediction of human population.

Massive death tolls from famines always come down to political stupidity. (Refusing food aid for example)

The issue is not whether we could feed the whole world, the issue is whether we do. If we don't, then the hypothesis that we could is small comfort to those who are starving.

> Massive death tolls from famines always come down to political stupidity.

Political stupidity is much harder to sustain with small populations, people who can vote with their feet.

lutusp: Do you care whether the statements you make are true? Or do you just want to not seem wrong, no matter what arguments are required to accomplish that?

When you give a link supporting your views, do you read the link first and check that it supports the argument you're making? Because it seems like you're not doing that.

In this case, the link you gave says that using the "new estimate method", there were 1 billion hungry people in 1990-92 (out of a world population of 5.370 billion) and there were 870 million hungry in 2013 (out of a population of 7.095 billion). So world hunger didn't just decrease as a percentage of population (from 18% to 12.3%), it decreased as an ABSOLUTE NUMBER. As the population went up, the total NUMBER of starving people DECLINED.

Your link also says this:

> "The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day"

So as you said, a bit snottily, "We already can't feed our present numbers, or haven't you been paying attention?", the link you provide in "support" actually said we CAN feed our present numbers and also says we're getting ever-better at actually doing so.

In short, your link does not in any way support your argument. So the "environmental deniers" you refer to are probably correct; you are wrong. As this is starting to seem like a trend, you might want to re-evaluate your information sources; they are not serving you well.

Here's a useful tip: most people are not complete idiots. If your sources give you the impression that everybody in some huge ideological grouping (say "environmental deniers", or even "climate deniers") IS a complete idiot, then they might not be showing you the whole picture. Try to seek out the MOST credible arguments against your position - and strengthen them if you can. Don't just harp on the relatively few stupid people making stupid, easily debunked arguments and assume that the opposite of what they believe must be true - "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". Give the other side some benefit of the doubt. Otherwise you can't learn anything.

Feynman said some of the necessary stuff better than I could:

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

Good luck to you!

The hungry aren't fed by unrealized possibilities. All the numbers do is fluctuate, they don't ever indicate that we're feeding the hungry. It's not at all surprising that the numbers fluctuate, we're talking about reality, not a computer model. But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time.

When it comes to hunger, there's no point in arguing that that we can feed the hungry, as you put it. There's only whether we did -- everything else is hand-waving.

> In short, your link does not in any way support your argument.

Of course it does. The number of people who are starving is very high. Some years it's higher, some years lower, but it's never "acceptable" and it always supports the claim I made about it -- we aren't feeding the hungry.

The presence of unused stockpiles of food means nothing -- there are any number of reasons why that situation exists, but the bottom line is that the hungry aren't fed. Do you really think some conscientious aid worker goes home after a hard day's work, satisfied that he had fed the hungry in principle?

> Here's a useful tip: most people are not complete idiots.

Think like a scientist. Use the null hypothesis as your guide. Let yourself be pleasantly surprised by what people know, but never assume that people know what they need to know to have any given conversation or deal with any given problem. The consequences of that mistake vary between foolish and dangerous.

> http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

Yes, very familiar with this article -- I use it in my anti-psychology campaign. For some reason, many psychologists think it identifies psychology as a science, when it clearly does the opposite.

But that one thing DOES change! It improves! In what sense is the vast improvement since the 1990s not change?

> we aren't feeding the hungry.

We ARE. Hunger is becoming less prevalent, worldwide. Again, here's a gapminder chart (are you looking at these?). This one shows calories consumed per person, all countries, plotted against GDP, over time. Notice how at the start most of the mass of the chart is BELOW 2000 calories/day; at the end of it all but a few countries are ABOVE that line. Progress is occurring, even in very populous countries. Even in countries with a high rate of population growth. How do you explain that fact?

http://www.bit.ly/15h0Wp4

> When it comes to hunger, there's no point in arguing that that we can feed the hungry

If you meant to claim we don't feed the hungry, you should have said that. But you said can't. While giving a link to support it that said we can, and what's more, that showed that we were.

> But that one thing DOES change! It improves!

Learn statistics -- learn how to avoid cherry-picking intervals to prove anything you care to. That is all.

If by some miracle human population was reduced to say 1bln it would make space colonies much less likely, and we'll slowly eat out our petri dish without a chance to enlarge it.

I don't really see your point, since it doesn't even remotely talk about the relative rates of the two populations or compare what would happen with humans to what would happen without for any of the species.

It seems to be contentless objection to what I said, despite the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species, many of which seem to be getting by just fine for many of their members.

Based on this definition the American colonies helped Africans 'thrive' on the American continent by bringing them over as slaves, and allowing them to reproduce.

I could agree with you in the case of wild animals that mooch off of humans (racoons, crows, rats, etc), but in the case of livestock, or animals raised for the sole purpose of being tested on in laboratory settings (and possibly killed immediately after), I don't think you can really spin that as a positive thing from the perspective of those species.

It would be like an alien species taking humans away to 'domesticate' them and raise them as livestock on another planet. And then hand-waving away concerns about all life on Earth going extinct because the "livestock humans" are 'thriving' because they are bred in large numbers in captivity (and even trying to make it sound like putting them in captivity for such a purpose was actually better for them then letting them live their own lives).

Not only is that not a fact, but the opposite is the truth. Humans are wiping out other species at an incredible rate.

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1525/abt.2011.73.2.5

Quote: "There have been five past great mass extinctions during the history of Earth. There is an ever-growing consensus within the scientific community that we have entered a sixth mass extinction. Human activities are associated directly or indirectly with nearly every aspect of this extinction."

> Not only is that not a fact, but the opposite is the truth. Humans are wiping out other species at an incredible rate.

Okay, now I'm definitely confused: Is English not your native language? Are you very young, perhaps in high school? You don't seem to be reading the claims that you are with such great confidence declaring to be wrong.

FWIW, the phrase "all of those species" in context pretty clearly referred to THIS list of species:

> raccoons, crows, cows, pigeons, rats, mice, dogs, house cats

Pro tip: a surefire way to end a conversation is to abandon the topic and/or make it personal.

> Are you very young, perhaps in high school?

Right. The statistical probability is high that I was designing spacecraft before you were born.

The point of the article is we wouldn't be here today at all if we hadn't been able to manage our resources. The science demonstrates this, over and over: land re-use is the key to it. The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth, and have done so for 200,000 years.

But what does your superstition have to do with this? Malthusian theories super-posit that we will perish, but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.

Science isn't a political movement. Science can produce very reliable results if conducted efficiently, but it cannot get people to listen. That's the divide between science and politics.

> The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth ...

Nonsense. It shows how biological colonies adopt increasingly clever ways to squeeze more sustenance out of the environment. All such efforts eventually collide with the real carrying capacity of the environment, a fact that we ignore at our peril.

> But what does your superstition have to do with this?

Biology is science, not superstition. The logistic function is science, not superstition. All these scientific results show the peril of ignoring the role of environment in survival.

> ... but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.

It does nothing of the kind. The archaeological record shows any number of examples of species being wiped out by changes in their environments. In one case, an environmental change wiped out 90% of all species on earth. Apparently those species weren't aware of your blithe dismissal of the role of environment in the equation of life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/science/meteorite-that-kil...

I bet you think there's no answer. But in fact, on at least one occasion in the past, human numbers dropped below 10,000 individuals, which means the fact that we still exist as a species can be attributed to chance, not destiny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans

Quote: "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans."

I emphasize this is an example that we can establish by studying the human genome from relatively recent times. Farther in the past, the genetic record is less easy to read, but it's very likely that the Toba near-extinction is only one of many similar events.

And its an invalid argument to make for the future prospects of any of them.

Also, this misses a big part of what's important to me. The standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?

You might want to consult the factual record of tens of thousands of years of farmers on that particular point of view. ;) You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.

>he standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?

For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over. So I'd say, if we can manage it, this trend will continue. I think thats the point of the article: there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.

(There are only psychological reasons. A fact proven, nearly, by a lot of the responses in this thread ..)

Wouldn't science suggest we model based on the systems as they are instead of past performance? Let me hypothesize for a moment here to create a situation where the past performance may fail for predicting the future: (1) Assume that plants have traditionally been nutrient limited. (2) We are no longer nutrient limited. (3) We are now insolation to stored energy limited. We don't have a good way to increase insolation, so we'd better come up with a way to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. (Not to say that there aren't plenty of ways around this. Maybe we'll use solar cells to power chemical sugar making plants.)

> For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over.

You quoted me, but I'm having a hard time interpreting your response in the context of you understanding me. I was stating that we might be better off with less population, not simply that the standard of living can increase with an increasing population. To state it again, we could have X% increase with double the population, but with our current population we might have Y%. Is Y > X?

The linked article doesn't say we can sustain our numbers indefinitely, It argues that we can grow our numbers indefinitely. Grow != sustain.

The future will be completely different than the past, but in the same way -- consistent with the Logistic function and its description of the relation between species and environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

There are any number of unpredictable aspects to how events unfold, but physical laws remain the same.

Bend doesn't equal break. Obviously a species will adopt more and more ingenious measures to stave off the inevitable, but that doesn't change the inevitable, only its arrival date.

The basic equation collides a finite planet with an infinite capacity for growth. Ultimately the finite planet determines the outcome, not the infinite capacity for growth.

The fact that news has this dynamic means you can't take the amount of news coverage as an indication of how serious or common a problem is. We DO do that due to a cognitive error called "availability bias", but if anything, the reverse strategy would be more sensible.

In short: if you see a threat in the newspapers, you should assume it's news because it happens so rarely that it isn't worth your worrying about anymore (if it ever was).

You're making a common statistical error, one that climate change deniers use daily -- if you perform a moving average using a long averaging interval, the climate is warming up. If you perform a moving average using a short averaging interval, the climate is cooling off.

The second measurement is an error because it can only predict the future if the future is limited to a year or two in duration. But the long averaging interval is a more honest and reliable predictor of the future. That predictor shows a warming of the climate, and it also shows that eventually, population growth will collide with mass death.

In the case of climate change, the trend for the last decade is flat/cooling - that's more than "a year or two". Which is not terribly consistent with the models - the models clearly have been running hotter than observations and are have been unreliable predictors.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:...

To make that claim, you need to define "rate". Does "rate" mean the absolute number of murders per day or year, or the number of murders per day or year divided by the population?

The absolute rate is obviously higher -- the burden must be is yours to offer evidence that it's unchanged since 1800. But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point.

Also, when you perform a moving average, you can "prove" anything by choosing the right interval. But, because the future is expected to be long, so should our averaging interval. To do otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

For example, climate change deniers use short averaging intervals to "prove" that the climate is actually cooling, where the same measure using a longer averaging interval shows this is false.

Oh, I see you do just that. Too bad -- choosing an inappropriate averaging interval is not science, it's politics.

> ... population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining.

Well ... now that you're arguing my points for me, I guess we're done.

"rate" means per capita per year. By "a century ago" I meant around 1913; 1800 would be TWO centuries ago. The murder rate in the US has been in the general ballpark of 5-10 per 100,000 annually since 1910. Currently we're near the low point of the last century. Um, here:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/listening_to_the_late...

Quote: "Today's murder rate is essentially at a low point of the past century. The murder rate in 2011 was lower than it was in 1911. And the trend is downward. Whatever we've been doing over the last 20-30 years seems to be working, more or less. The murder rate has been cut by more than half since 1980: from 10.7 to 4.7."

> But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point.

You now appear to be stark raving bonkers. No, silly, if the rate is unchanged it does NOT support your point. Yes, as there are more people, there are likely to be more murders as an absolute number. There are also likely to be more hugs, more kisses, more birthday parties, and more people making silly arguments over the internet. NONE of those constitute a population-limiting crisis.

Well, except maybe that last one. :-)

That's by no means the only meaning of "rate". The meaning of a rate depends on the two values involved -- the dividend and divisor. The identity of both defines a specific use of the term "rate".

"Murders divided by years" is one example of a rate.

"Murders divided by (years times population)" is another.

And "(mb-ma) divided by ((yb-ya) times (pb-pa))" starts us toward a moving average.

Rate doesn't have only one meaning -- to accept your definition would severely constrain mathematics.

> No, silly, if the rate is unchanged it does NOT support your point.

Of course it does -- given a rapidly increasing population and the same rate, it means the absolute number of incidents has increased. That was my point.

> There are also likely to be more hugs, more kisses, more birthday parties, and more people making silly arguments over the internet. NONE of those constitute a population-limiting crisis.

But in truth, all of them do. It's a classic case of an increasing population held within a finite land mass -- eventually the system collapses.

If the population is increasing without constraint, it doesn't matter what those people are doing apart from increasing their numbers -- the fact that they're increasing their numbers eventually becomes the only issue worth addressing.

>That's by no means the only meaning of "rate".

It is the standard definition when talking about a CRIME rate. Googling "define crime rate" returns things like this:

"the ratio of crimes in an area to the population of that area; expressed per 1000 population per year" http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=crime%20rate

A "murder rate", being a fair bit smaller, is almost always expressed per 100,000 people per year.

> If the population is increasing without constraint

It isn't. Population growth rates have rapidly declined all over the world. The US population would already be shrinking were it not for immigration. Even Bangladesh and India are currently reproducing at right around replacement levels.

That wasn't your claim, and it's false in any case. There's no standard definition of "rate" -- you need to define your terms, and "rate" means a measure of change, not any specific measure without additional information. In any case, the exchange below tells me that you really don't understand what "rate" means.

>> If the population is increasing without constraint

> It isn't. Population growth rates [emphasis added] have rapidly declined all over the world.

Honestly. I say population is increasing. You reply by saying that the "growth rate", i.e. the first derivative of population, has declined. Both are true. To sort this out, take Calculus. Until you understand the difference between a function and its first derivative, we won't be able to discuss this issue.

http://www.arachnoid.com/calculus/

Also, for the actual worldwide population growth rate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

"In 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.1%."

That rate, if sustained, means the world's population will double in 63 years.

No. What you said was that population was increasing without constraint. It's that last bit I was responding to.

The fact that the rate of growth is declining does suggest the presence of one or more constraints, even if the overall growth rate hasn't quite reversed just yet. The primary form of the constraint appears to be that as childhood survival rates and living standards improve, families voluntarily choose to have fewer kids. This is happening all over the world, there's no reason to think it will stop any time soon, and it argues against your implication that "mass death" is the only likely way out.

(For what it's worth, I have taken calculus. And if you're the guy who wrote AppleWriter: Nice job! I liked that program. I used it in high school.)

And that's correct -- any population increase above zero is without constraint. All one need do is calculate the doubling time:

http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/populati.html

> The fact that the rate of growth is declining does suggest the presence of one or more constraints ...

Yes, or more likely, it's a random fluctuation indicative of nothing in particular. The latter assumption, which may seem overly skeptical, is how a scientist is expected to look at an unexplained change in the rate, based on a precept called the null hypothesis -- a presumption that (in a manner of speaking) it's all random and meaningless.

> ... and it argues against your implication that "mass death" is the only likely way out.

Not really. Remember that nature efficiently picks out those with the highest birthrates and makes them the entire future population. My point is that population growth is naturally unstable, depending only on food sources and a willingness to push other species out of the way.

1.1% per annum may not seem like a very large rate of increase, but 63 years doesn't seem like a very long time to double the world's population either.

Exponential increases of all kinds are rather scary to model. They're scary enough when one looks at compound interest and how that naturally creates a chasm between rich and poor over time, but the "big show" for exponential increases is population, where much more is at stake.

> For what it's worth, I have taken calculus.

Okay, glad to hear it. Given that, I think you will appreciate what I thought when I heard you object that population couldn't be increasing because the rate of increase was decreasing.

> And if you're the guy who wrote AppleWriter: Nice job! I liked that program. I used it in high school.

Yes, that's me. Thanks.

It's NOT UNEXPLAINED and it's NOT RANDOM.

Does your browser support Flash? If I point you at a chart composed using gapminder.org could you please please LOOK AT IT? (Or if you can't, could you let me know what the constraints are on what your browser can see, so I can find another way to get you the information?) The link will follow this paragraph. Press the "play" button below this chart to see an animated plot of fertility versus child mortality. Several specific countries are hilighted - you see a trail of their progress over time - but the ENTIRE MASS of countries follows much the same pattern - it moves down and to the left. Here's the link:

http://www.bit.ly/18hUMjA

It truly boggles my mind that you could think even for a second that the slowdown in population growth is "likely a random fluctuation indicative of nothing in particular". It is a TREND. The phenomenon is quite consistent. Across the ENTIRE PLANET, countries are increasing their GDP, decreasing child mortality and decreasing the rate at which they have kids, with all those changes roughly in tandem. And it's not a random walk where one needs to cherry-pick any specific interval to see these trends - if you just look at the entirety of ALL the data we have available and plot it, you can see a consistent movement.

Please look at the animation. Play around with it - use the checkbox list on the right to highlight other specific countries. Get a sense of what the data is actually DOING before you claim it's a random fluctuation.

A random walk WOULD be susceptible to cherry-picking - the trend would only show up if you pick certain time ranges or certain sets of countries.

This is not that.

(Given current trends, the world population would not double again - it would stop growing short of that.)

You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932. You don't get to have your cake and eat it.

And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita.

> And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita

Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita compared to 1932. 1932 was near a local maximum in terms of violence rates in the US; currently we are near a local minimum. (The current homicide rate is less than half what it was in 1932.)

No, not if a reasonable moving average is performed. And per capita modifies the logic in a way that reduces the importance of population, when my point is the size of that population.

Here's a small interval graph that shows an increase per capita since 1960:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim...

Another graph that shows the same trend:

http://www.utahfoundation.org/img/briefs/2008_08_crime_fig4....

The above graph shows the risk of using too short a sampling interval. If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased.

How about instead of SAMPLING, and without performing any sort of "moving average", you just SHOW the homicide rate, and do so over a range wide enough to INCLUDE 1932. Can you do that?

If you do that, I think you will find that you are wrong about this - the homicide rate today is lower than it was in 1932. Because there was a huge peak around the 1930s PRIOR TO the relatively low point in the 1950s. I don't see much point in applying "a reasonable moving average" since the underlying trend is pretty smooth, but if you did, say, a 5-year moving average it would STILL be lower today than in 1932.

The answer is simple -- it serves no purpose. If the point is to establish historical trends, and in particular if it's desirable to create a future trend line, the first thing to do is avoid the classic mistake of examining the raw data. (This is true in climate studies also, for the same reasons.)

In this case, a moving average meant to confirm or refute the thesis that crime rates are higher now than in the past, is best conducted with a long interval. Such an interval shows that crime per capita is much, much higher now than it was in the past, along with population (which also fluctuates over time).

The 1930s were a historical anomaly -- the Great Depression (an increased level of social upheaval and desperation), and prohibition coming to an end (which meant that gangsters had to think of a new way to make a living), arriving at once, make it unrepresentative. Any statistician hoping to establish social trends would treat that period as an obstacle to producing a meaningful trend line.

> I don't see much point in applying "a reasonable moving average"

Yes, I got that. And I won't be likely to successfully explain to you why it's needed.

E.g. in Europe the story of Madeleine McCann, a girl that disappeared in 2007 is still regularly getting headlines, not just in the UK where she grew up, but elsewhere as well (I'm Norwegian, and regularly see her covered in the Norwegian press, for example).

When I wanted to look up the year she disappeared, autocomplete on google brought up her name by the time I got to "mad". A search for "madeleine" on google.co.uk brings "findmadeleine.com" in the first spot, and a picture of her and three headlines from the last two days related to her case, and a further 4 links on the first page.

Why? Because the parents have raised hell, and because of all kinds of intrigue (allegations of all kinds of things flying from her parents against the investigators; by some people involved in the investigation against the parents; and more).

Add to that fame, and the amount of attention the Lindbergh story got was "nothing special", especially given the circumstances:

In the Madeleine McCann case, there is no body, no real suspects, and there's been little news for the last 3-5 years or so.

In the Lindbergh case, after two months the baby was found, the subsequent investigation lasted for "only" two years, and then came the court case and trial. The whole thing was 4 years where there was a steady availability of actual new developments: The race to try to find the baby; finding the body; the hunt for suspects in what was now a gruesome baby murder rather than "just" a kidnapping; the court case, with a suspect that insisted on his innocence; the execution, with a suspect that still insisted on his innocence. Coupled with a famous couple as the distraight and grieving parents. It was an intense human interest story.

If anything, the Madeleine McCann case shows that it's possible to sustain media interest far longer than with the Lindbergh case, even for parents that were not celebrities, even today, as long as the human interest angle is there.

Syria is poor comparison: At some point when the number of people go up, our empathy dampens. That's nothing new - it's basic psychology: We can't deal with the numbers; we can't personalise it.

It's something e.g. aid organizations (like psychologists) have known for decades, when they parade some little malnourished girl in ads and ask us to adopt her, by name, rather than give us the raw numbers, that ought to be far more horrifying and get us to react far more strongly.

Showing that we are reacting even less to mass deaths would be big news, and requires rather more than some anecdotes.

That's not a perfect response to people's attitude toward population control by mass death, which is what I'm describing -- it's exactly the same argument that's offered in the linked article: "In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it." Indeed it will.

> What a myopic view.

It's myopia to imagine, as the linked article does, that we can force the earth to provide sustenance regardless of our numbers. That's a fantasy.

> ... scientifically described but nevertheless: still superstition.

This isn't a creative writing class.

I posted any number of links to scientific evidence, evidence heavy on observation and measurement, light on controversy.

Currently world produces enough food for everyone. Then why do we have 700 - 800 million malnourished people, even more people facing food insecurity, why we are destroying farmland and why are we wasting the primary macronutrients: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K).

Overpopulation is real because we as species are not distributing resources equally and we are not rational.

The main point of this article is that the archeological record proves that this is the case. 200,000 years of evidence suggests that, in spite of our superstitions, we humans are capable of managing our resources and replenishing the world from which we derive our sustenance.

Are you sure you're not just harboring a fixed superstition on the subject, which has just been challenged?

In this case, I would simply argue that the ideal amount is somewhat lower than the amount of humans which would necessitate covering the entire Earth's landmass and oceans with a planet-sized city, obliterating all natural landforms and all species except those found in factory farms and zoos.

I guess what I am trying to say is, if we consider overpopulation not to be a problem, then we must believe that humans are wise enough to stop multiplying before Earth becomes a monoculture. This is the argument that I find hard to believe.

DO you know what they say on Wall Street? "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns"? The same rule applies to biology. The reason the future diverges from the past is because it's guaranteed to be different. As to human population growth, there's no basis for comparing the future to the past. But I will say this -- on at least one occasion in the past, humans were nearly wiped out by just one volcanic eruption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck

Quote: "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans."

Ten thousand humans. The only reason we survived as a species is because of chance, not destiny. And that event is easily seen in the genetic record -- it's very likely to be just one of many examples where we survived only by chance, on a planet where 90% of all species have been wiped out.

> Are you sure you're not just harboring a fixed superstition on the subject ...

I just quoted the scientific record. I can also describe the Logistic function, a scientific biological modeling tool that reliably predicts the future of species who try to exceed the carrying capacity of their environments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

The curve is nearly flat at the left because there are too few organisms to sustain a higher growth rate.

The curve is nearly flat at the right because mass starvation results in too few surviving organisms to sustain a higher growth rate.

Welcome to natural selection, and to science.

Welcome to logical positivism. :P

Just because some humans 'are stupid' doesn't mean all humans are. There is a lot of evidence that we, who choose to manage, will outlive those who choose to be stupid. 200,000 years of it, in fact.

(Stupidity might be contagious; the point is though: so is intelligence.)

>>Overpopulation Is Not the Problem

But Of course it is. It's much easier to feed 500 million people instead of 7.5 billion or 15 billion so . The world produces food as it is and will but at what ecological cost? (think of pesticides, pollution, GM etc)

>>There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future.

I take this wonderful professor will give up movies, fancy cars, air conditioning and all that is unnecessary to feed xxx kids in Africa :-)