http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...
In it Hans Rosling explains how something simple as making people able to use a washing machine to clean their clothes, will ultimately reduce population growth.
This is because the knock-on effects of that are that women are more able to educate themselves, more able to keep their kids alive as a result of education and thus the family has no need to reproduce massively.
The key is not to educate people about overpopulation, but to educate them effectively in how to remove the need for high reproduction while increasing their life quality.
This doesn't take the Population Paradox into account. I'm not saying such measures shouldn't be pursued. To do otherwise would be to abandon democratic principles and the uncontroversial advantages of education.
But it won't make any difference. When medical researchers discovered antibiotics, they believed that marked the end of bacterial infectious diseases. But that was not to be -- natural selection reacted to these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of bacteria that proved resistant to antibiotics, and we now face bacterial strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies (MRSA, tuberculosis and others).
In the same way, natural selection will react by these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of people that prove resistant to education and gender equality, and we will face human strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies.
In case anyone thinks this is some kind of veiled racist rant, I personally think the resistant strain will turn out to be white people of European descent. The reason? We can and do rationalize anything to ourselves -- for example, that environmental projects will save either us or the planet, in the face of uncontrolled population growth.
See, in the Population Paradox, it's not the people who get it that are the problem -- it's the people who don't, who can't, get it. And history proves that there's no political solution that doesn't turn out to be much worse than the problem itself.
"We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Pogo
More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution
Because it's bullshit. The core of it is this statement:
> Insensitive, unintelligent, uncompassionate listeners don't -- they will have the usual number of children.
It entirely ignores the fact that having children and rearing them is WORK, EFFORT. People in poor countries do the work for a single reason: They NEED their kids to care for them in old age. As you remove this need, even dumb people will want to avoid having kids, because it's less work.
There's a reason the US fertility rate has stabilized to 2 childs per woman, and an overpopulated country like china is even below it, and it is that the complex real world pressures cause an equilibrium on their own.
In short: Don't just write massive posts, also ask "why?" a LOT more.
Yes, that explains why people who lived in the early agricultural societies, who had easy lives, also had a lot of children. It explains why, today, those with the highest birthrate end up becoming the majority, consistent with the principles of natural selection.
You need to realize something about natural selection -- the future population belongs to those with the highest birth rate, whoever and wherever they are. You should know this, but you clearly do not.
In Israel, arabs are outbreeding Jews and will eventually become an absolute majority:
Title: "High Arab birth rate in Israel raises concerns about country’s Jewish identity":
http://www.ibtimes.com/high-arab-birth-rate-israel-raises-co...
In the U.S., groups other than White descendants of Europeans are outbreeding them and will soon become an absolute majority, as they already are in California:
Title: "California: Whites are no longer the majority"
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/01/california-whites-are-no-long...
I'm not complaining about the ethnic makeup of the future, I'm only making the point that natural selection blindly chooses those with the highest birthrate, and it is that group that becomes the future population of the world.
> Don't just write massive posts, also ask "why?" a LOT more.
It is you who needs to educate yourself on this issue. You posted opinions, I posted facts. You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
Quote: "As of September 10, 2013 the world's human population is estimated to be 7.11 billion by the United States Census Bureau, and over 7 billion by the United Nations. Most contemporary estimates for the carrying capacity of the Earth under existing conditions are between 4 billion and 16 billion. Depending on which estimate is used, human overpopulation may or may not have already occurred. Nevertheless, the rapid recent increase in human population is causing some concern. The population is expected to reach between 8 and 10.5 billion between the year 2040 and 2050. In May 2011, the United Nations increased the medium variant projections to 9.3 billion for 2050 and 10.1 billion for 2100."
Do note that the trails both start in 1960 and the child mortality axis is scaled logarithmically, meaning that at any time Yemen's child mortality was an order of magnitude larger than that of the USA. Also note that you can switch child mortality with expected lifespan and get pretty much the same curve.
When, where?
Also, your links only affirm what i already said. People with a perceived lack in the "secure future" department have more children.
Lastly, i never said overpopulation isn't a thing. It's unclear why you quote wikipedia.
Generally because of constant attempts to flip population numbers (oh no ! too many ! oh no ! too few ! oh no ! too many ! ...) the population numbers start to fluctuate wildly. Then at some point, they hit 0. Whoops.
Keep in mind that if you do seek to reduce birthrate, to have more than extremely small changes in the rates is likely to result in outcomes vastly different from what you envisioned. So far, the most famous of those rate-adjustment fuckups have been with rabbits, cats and kangaroos. If the same happened to people, we'd be in shit so deep you wouldn't believe it.
> Anyway, the question I think people should talk about -- and it's absolutely taboo -- is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be?
http://www.ted.com/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_hum...
If only people were rational. But population doesn't follow rationality, it follows the Logistic function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
The Logistic function's left-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too few organisms to support a larger growth rate.
The Logistic function's right-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too many starving organisms to support a larger growth rate.
Welcome to natural selection. :)
I'm not even sure that we are in disagreement. Reducing the birth rate would be one (admittedly important) prong in a multi-prong approach. But given current environmental realities, reducing the birthrate, even drastically, would not have the desired impact on current CO2 levels.
Also, given humanity's energetic sexuality I do not think such a goal is realistic in practice, at least not enough to prevent apocalypse, and certainly not in the time frame required.
I hope you aren't talking about me. Population growth is the problem, but there is no solution, at least not one that civilized people would or should accept.
Maybe you should read my first post again. I don't wave my hands at population as though control is an easily applied remedy -- I state it as an insoluble problem.
In the above post I did explicitly point out that there are no political solutions to the population problem -- I called them disasters, and eugenics is certainly on the list of all-time political disasters.
The reason is simple -- nature is smarter than us. When evolution works, when nature produces something remarkable, it's not because we're smart, it's because nature is.
We're faced with a problem that's easy to state and impossible to solve. Virtually anything we can think to try would make the problem worse. We've proven that with our total mishandling of the antibiotic issue. We now know what can go wrong, we have the required information, but we don't seem to be able to craft an effective remedy.
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...
You mean, speaking as the product of random, undirected evolution by natural selection? My remarks were meant to suggest that evolution sometimes produces results that are so fantastic that poorly educated people are tempted to attribute the outcome to supernatural forces.
> I've heard of no convincing explanation of natural selection that describes it as an intentional force.
Who said anything about intention? Evolution by natural selection is a totally random process that selects the most fit genotype during a random selection process. We are the result -- everything we are, results from a process with no goal or even complex rules. What's truly amazing about evolution is how much results from such simple rules.
> On the contrary, nature is about as dumb as a rock.
Quite true -- and the smartest person, the most beautiful creature, the richest works of art, all sprang from nature "dumb as a rock". Which means nature is smarter than us. Maybe this time you'll understand what I'm trying to say.
No God, no designer, no wizard behind a curtain, just natural resources and natural selection. With the results that we see around us.
I have some bad news:
* The problem isn't pollution and CO2 release, at last not directly. The problem is the number of people doing the polluting and CO2 releasing.
* A solution would be to have a smaller worldwide birthrate. Easy to say.
* But any solution to the above point is very likely to collide with equality and fair play, as well as crashing into the "Population Paradox".
* The Population Paradox goes like this -- someone delivers a reasoned appeal to have fewer children, in the name of human survival and that of the earth. It's perfectly worded, and delivered to a huge audience.
* Sensitive, intelligent, compassionate listeners resolve to have fewer children.
* Insensitive, unintelligent, uncompassionate listeners don't -- they will have the usual number of children.
* That's the Population Paradox in a nutshell: because of evolution, over time people become less sensitive to the damage they cause. And history proves that political "solutions" aren't solutions at all, but disasters.
I hate to break this to you, but the biggest obstacle to a human solution to this problem is ... humans. Or nature, if you prefer, in the guise of natural selection.
EDIT: People, do try to avoid downvoting posts that are truthful but upsetting, solely on the ground that they're upsetting.