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By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations.
But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."
The World Might Actually Run Out of People (archive)
Who do you think is right ? The United Nations or Darrel Bricker/John Ibbitson ?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Gault.Drakkor on Tuesday February 05 2019, @02:22AM (13 children)
Then how do you explain that any region that has reasonable health care (key indicator low child mortality) and reasonable education level of women has experienced a sharp drop of fecundity?
Ie look at G7 nations. Much more resources then many places, yet birthrate around 2.1 per couple in last few decades.
Women have a burning desire to have successful children reach adulthood. That is easier to do with fewer offspring low infant mortality. With education, women can understand this and make family planning decisions.
In other words, the broad general trend is quality over quantity for majority of humanity when it comes to more humanity.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @02:46AM (12 children)
Those G7 nations will not retain low fecundity long-term.
Reliable birth control is recent in human terms. It's only been 2 or 3 generations. That's not very much, although the selection pressure is high. It would take a few dozen generations to fully spread a strongly-selected trait throughout the entire world, starting from one person.
The optimal desire is to maximize the number of children who go on to have children and so on. In previous environments that our gene pool is well-adapted to, concern for survival made sense. Today, survival is nearly ensured in G7 nations, so it makes more sense to produce as many children as possible. People who do this will leave more offspring and thus a greater influence on the gene pool.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 05 2019, @06:05AM (11 children)
What is it like to be this...nihilistic, this completely mechanistic, this utterly joylessly zero-sum?
Do you truly think the human race is nothing more than the aggregate of its reproductive capacity? I will take quality of life over quantity any day. And, if this is just a dogwhistle about "OLAWD THE BROWN PEOPLEZ IS OUTBREEDIN' US WHITES!!!!!" then shove it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Tuesday February 05 2019, @08:04AM (10 children)
It may be a joyless picture, but nobody ever said nature was nice.
The AC is right, evolution hasn't stopped, it's just that the current selection conditions have changed to include birth control, modern society, the health and welfare systems. The drop in fecundity is temporary and will be evolved around in a few generations.
The solutions vary in their nastiness, but at some point the human race is going to have to pick one. Licence to reproduce is probably the least nasty ~ 2 kids and then sterilization.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @10:23AM (9 children)
No, no it will not. People don't have lots of kids because they have other things to do. As long as you have other things to worry about, you do not want to have lots of kids. If it wasn't for artificial birth control, everyone would have like 10+ kids today, but they DO NOT WANT. That's why there is a drop in number of kids.
You make stupid ass assumptions that people in the past wanted to have 12 kids. Most did not. But there was not much choice or understanding. This is not the case anymore.
The author is also completely wrong on the numbers. The main reason why there is a decline in numbers is because there is lots of people around. Which means competition for resources. You can't just move into middle of nowhere and claim homestead anymore. So you have less kids because we are already full. When we have 10x less people on the planet, maybe we'll reach equilibrium.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Tuesday February 05 2019, @10:56AM (8 children)
Bolding added to highlight the important part.
No, I make the one assumption that people wanting more than 2 kids is an inheritable trait.
The rest is evolution. Learn some science, your feelz do not beat reality.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 06 2019, @07:44PM (7 children)
You can't select for one trait at a time in isolation. You assume that wanting more than two kids is an inheritable trait, and you also assume that this trait is strong enough to override anything else, and that it isn't coupled to anything else, and that the number of kids that one has is the only measure of "fitness" that matters.
Suppose instead we make one assumption that responsible/logical decision making is an inheritable trait. People who have this trait would see that infinite population growth is unsustainable, and would therefore refrain from having children when the population starts to get too high. By having fewer children, they would concentrate more resources on the children that they do have. They have more time and money to spend on each child's healthcare and education and social arrangements, making each of those children more fit than the children of the parents with the "have as many kids as you can" gene, therefore the responsibility gene will out-compete and prevail.
That story is probably bullshit. But so is yours.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday February 06 2019, @11:12PM (6 children)
In our current society we go to great lengths to not only keep everyone alive, but to help them have kids. eg IVF clinics.
Evolution is currently stalled, with the single exception of those people who have more kids are outbreeding those who have less.
The tautological outcome is that the people who have more kids are going to have more descendants in the future.
Not having kids is not an inheritable trait. Like the old joke, "If your parents didn't have any kids, neither will you."
People who are rational enough to look around and say "We have too many people, I won't have kids" are simply eliminating both themselves and that rationality from the gene pool.
I don't know how to say it any clearer, there seems to be some mental block where people like to think they are not animals and that evolution therefore doesn't apply. Maybe try applying your theory to breeding rabbits. Start selecting the ones that don't have any offspring and try to breed rabbits that don't make baby rabbits.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:25PM (5 children)
Having zero kids obviously can't be inherited, but having *fewer* is definitely an evolutionary advantage which could be passed on (there's even a name for this -- K selection), and logical decision making could be as well. All of those great medical wonders aren't always available to a typical janitor -- you need wealth too. Wealth often (though not always) comes from intelligence or from inheritance. Inheritance increases if your parents had fewer kids. Intelligence I think will also correlate with fewer kids. Plus fewer kids gives more time to focus on each child's education. Quantity doesn't always beat quality.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:59PM (4 children)
K-selection applies when resources are limited and dividing them amongst more offspring results in fewer of those offspring surviving than if those resources were concentrated on a few.
Selection effects can only work when there is actual selection, where resource deficiency results in actual non-survival.
We as a society have done our best to eliminate that. Almost everyone survives past procreation age, and the ones that don't are mostly a random selection.
The only selector left is how many kids you have.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:00PM (3 children)
No, it's not. It's just not based on raw instinct and brute force anymore. The new selectors are mostly social factors, although there are also things like "darwin awards" -- which mostly go to those who are completely incompetent at dealing with modern technology -- as well as disease -- I know more than one woman who is now because of cancer, PCOS, and other such issues. Just because you don't die doesn't mean you automatically get to pass on your genes. Just ask some of those "incels".
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:57PM (2 children)
New selectors? Unless they are killing people or effectively rendering them sterile then they are not selectors. Volunteering not to have kids is a selector, it is the same as being rendered sterile, and will be selected against.
Darwin awards are less than a fart in a hurricane. Car accidents - 30,000 out of 300,000,000 - would be barely noticeable, and that effect is diluted because it often isn't the victims fault.
Evolution is just a tautology. If you have more kids you have more kids. That's it. Noble goals, reason, and ethics don't matter to evolution. It is a cold remorseless process and it doesn't give a shit how upsetting or offensive people find that process. There is no way around it either. Any attempt is simply another selector. Start pushing zero-pop-growth propaganda and you select for those who ignore that propaganda. Promote birth control and you select for those who don't want it or are too stupid or careless to use it. Pick anything which reduces the number of kids people have and it will be selected against.
It may take a few generations for the effect to really show up, but the human race is pretty diverse and the behaviour to get around your limits will be out there somewhere, and will be selected for.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:43PM (1 child)
One person, alone, cannot have kids. Not yet anyway. Not everyone who wants kids but doesn't have any is a "volunteer", sometimes they're just screwed...or not screwed as the case may be...and that is a selector as well. This is why I mentioned "incels" -- short for "INVOLUNTARILY celebate". As dumb as I think those folks are, they do serve as a great example that just wanting it ain't enough.
Absolutely. But first you have to get to the step of having more kids. For humans, that's usually about a twenty year journey that you have to be well adapted to in order to have any chance at all. Sure, we're not dying of the plague anymore, but that doesn't mean there's zero selection pressure during those years.
Right. The number of kids people *actually have*. Not the number they want, not the number they fantasize about, but the number that actually exists in reality. There is no single gene which controls that.
Yeah, and if the limit turns out to be that there's too many damn people on this planet, then that will be the limit that we will get around. And one of the ways to do that would be to have fewer kids. If you're living in a dirty crowded dystopian city, the person who wants to add more people and more strain on your resources isn't a perfect life partner, he's the asshole fucking everything up that nobody wants to be around. And society would select against that.
It's not like all I have to do is wish for babies and they'll start falling out of my pants. Does wanting kids make you more attractive to members of the opposite sex? I dunno, how often have you seen "I want to make babies with you as soon as possible" work as a pick-up line? 'cause I certainly never have. It's not enough to have a gene that makes you want kids, you also need a gene that helps you get a date, and a gene that helps your partner think you're worth the long-term commitment that having children generally entails. And those might require genes that make you more likely to succeed economically, or genes that increase muscle mass, or genes that improve intelligence. And any of those may, even as a side-effect, reduce the odds of having or wanting large numbers of kids. Or even if it doesn't reduce the desire, it might contain it -- just because you have the gene to WANT ten kids doesn't mean you'll actually have that many.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday February 08 2019, @04:59AM
That would require group selection, which is a discredited theory. Most of what seems to be group selection is actually kin selection.
I would recommend reading "The Extended Phenotype" by Richard Dawkins. It was not as big a hit as "The Selfish Gene" but in my opinion it provides extra insights over his earlier book. Although if you have the time and like reading, I advise reading both, starting with "The Selfish Gene". They are both very entertaining, as well as thought-provoking.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.