May I kindly ask, why do you feel the need to jump out and defend the human species as also being good in the face of what is described in the article?

I am genuinely interested in understanding what motivates this reaction.

You are here, so obviously you feel "good" enough and worthy to exist. With population control its always the "others" need to be eliminated. No one wants to start with themselves. Its an extremely selfish position really. Its also not very logically viable, since those that feel the world is over populated and kill themselves, will just be selected out of the gene pool. Leaving only those that want to live, procreate and prosper behind.

> making a start by not choosing the ego-project of procreation would already make a huge difference.

In general, it is procreation that makes humans think about the long term. The truth is, no matter what you do, you will be dead in a hundred years. Wanting to leave the world a better place for your children and grand-children is a much more powerful motivator than abstract philosophical principle.

I wonder if this is the majority view? I hear it often but it's not something I feel (disclosure: I have one child).

I certainly think in terms of leaving the world better for all living things rather than for my children (although I guess they would benefit).

I personally feel shame that I am a part of the destruction of this world which in turn motivates me to want to make it better.

This is something that has grown as I have aged, I feel now that I'm older I can see things in the longer term and I can see how long it takes to make change and make it stick.

That's true. On the other hand, if the desire to have one's own biological progeny is heritable, then the previous poster's point still stands. Given a mixed population of people who want to reproduce their own genomes and those who don't, over time the balance will shift to favor those who do.

Parents who don't care whether the children are theirs biologically will have a greater tendency to raise children regardless of biological relationship. That means they are more likely to expend their finite resources on other people's children. That increases the likelihood that other lineages will prosper and expand, and decreases the likelihood that their own will.

Therefore we should expect that, with the passage of generations, the desire to have one's own biological progeny will spread and come to dominate the population.

That is, if such inclinations are heritable--or if a heritable desire to have one's own children appears in the population at some point.

> Therefore we should expect that, with the passage of generations, the desire to have one's own biological progeny will spread and come to dominate the population.

Yeah, but this will only happen over the course of millions of years... not in 2050... Not to mention this is already the dominant desire...

Idiocracy

Seems pretty natural, when information is provided, to offer another perspective. It's one of our core functions as human beings in a social construct.

I also think there's a tendency to anchor on what "is". Just because things are natural doesn't make them implicitly "good". And how does one define quality in the first place?

Put another way, what is the distinction between natural and artificial? Are humans not part of nature? And will "nature" not be here long after we've destroyed ourselves, if in fact we do?

Humanism is a fairly common value system.

> Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too

They can but they (mostly) do not. And the best way to have a beneficial impact on environment in the current situation would be "simply" to reduce its numbers. Unfortunately that's not so easy.