Population
Comment on Sex and Fertility in the Post-Petroleum Age
Blog comment in response to Sex and Fertility in the Post-Petroleum Age by Jan Lundberg,
27 July 2010
Look at Historical Evidence
Developed societies like ours, with sanitation, medical care, artificial contraception, and optional bottle feeding of infants, are a recent exception in the history of humanity. The prevailing patterns over the history of our species have involved females becoming fertile at a somewhat later age (16-18 years old), due to less adequate food supply; prolonged breast feeding of infants, which suppresses fertility and ensures a longer inter-pregnancy interval; higher infant and maternal mortality; less investment of effort and calories in infants that have a poor chance of survival or less social utility (e.g., the Greeks abandoning deformed infants at birth); a certain amount of infanticide, usually by men, who kill a woman's children by a former male partner; etc, etc.
Gone Forth and Multiplied
It didn't take the Biblical injunction to "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28), for humankind to go about the task of filling and subduing the earth. It did take a few centuries, however, before some people began wondering about the implications of doing so.
In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, the British political economist Thomas Malthus argued that the future rate of human population growth would increase exponentially while the rate of agricultural food production could only increase geometrically. The result, he predicted, would be an inexorable divergence between population and resources, entailing an inevitable train of grim consequences: poverty, famine, war, misery. The theory underlying this depressing scenario has been frequently challenged over the years, but its haunting power and intuitive plausibility suggest that Malthus was not completely off the mark.
