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:
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.
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.