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from the On-a-Pale-Horse-vs-Being-a-Green-Mother dept.
The world population is growing because the birth rate exceeds the death rate, so to stabilize the world population either the birth rate needs to drop, or the death rate needs to increase. The most cited reference for population studies is the projections of future population (PDF) made by the Population Division of the United Nations. The UN report projects the world population to eventually stabilize as a result of countries settling in to a birth rate that falls around the replacement level.
A commentary by Stephen Warren in the open access journal Earth's Future takes the UN report to task for focusing on birth rate. He notes that all species generate offspring in numbers well above the replacement level of two, but you don't see historically the kind of population growth like you do with humans. He argues that despite all the negative feedback mechanisms on population (such as war and pestilence), it seems that Malthus (PDF) was correct that food supply is the driving factor, and wonders whether it is even possible to stabilize the world population until food production levels off.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:10PM
Following your other link leads to an apparent explanation, http://www.gapminder.org/videos/will-saving-poor-children-lead-to-overpopulation/ but again, he just makes the same assertion again that only one variable can affect the other(s).
He also fails to mention *all the other variables* which can be modified, such as education level (in particular of females - the gender which now has the higher education level in many of the most advanced countries), infrastructural investment (to expand local markets), international trading opportunities (such as us not fucking them over in the same way that we have been for centuries), ...
After watching his vids, I'm pretty sure that the best thing for the starving africans to do is to raise spherical cows in a vacuum.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:41PM
I'm gonna stick my neck out here, and claim that maybe, just maybe, that law was something to do with the drop in birthrate in China between 1960 and 2010.
I also notice in that video, when he explodes Ethiopia, the scatter pattern of each region seems to have a much flatter regression line than the historical 1960 world plot. Regression lines getting flatter over time is very interesting. What if that continues (should there be any reason for it not to?) The limitting case of regession lines getting flatter is a state we mathematicians call "uncorrelated" (no change in one variable would be expected to cause a change in the other variable). So his insistance that correlation actually is causation, and that nothing else can be causation, for this pair of variables even starts to look less supportable.
If he wants to really show the causal trend that he's claiming, he should be plotting infant mortality at time T with birth rate at time T+delta, for some delta, and show that that is better correlated than the non-lagged data. (It shows more clearly that one follows the other - compare the leaded petrol vs. crime 20 years later plots from freakanomics (one of their more reliable analyses, some are pretty poor).)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming there's no connection, in particular once an appropriate lag is found I'm pretty sure there'll be a clear correlation between movement on one axis and movement on the other, I'm merely a perturbed by his insistance that there's *only* one way of changing one of the variables.
Maybe he's trying to dumb things down for the masses so much that they've become wrong?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by albert on Wednesday May 27 2015, @03:34AM
To suggest that any of these matter in the long term is to deny evolution. If any one of those things should happen to retard population growth, it will be selected against. In the end, there is nothing that can stop humans from having lives that are as expected for normal organisms: in squalor, barely clinging to survival.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 27 2015, @07:17AM
Having said that, Idiocracy...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by albert on Thursday May 28 2015, @01:37PM
What people happen to choose (fewer kids) is not the fitness function. People making this choice have low fitness in the current environment.
The fitness function can only select for fewer kids if that increases the number of offspring in the Nth generation. Here you are talking about "replacement-level breeding" and not about poverty-line kids really actually dying of starvation, so that doesn't apply. The fitness function therefore selects for more kids. All that matters is the number of offspring in the Nth generation.
This isn't just leisurely selection. This isn't the sort of thing that might give Danes height (took only a century BTW) or Irish freckles. This is much more severe.
Evolution moves fast when the selection pressure is high. To pick an extreme example, imagine that we hunted down and eliminated everybody without blue eyes. In such a case, evolution would be pretty much instant.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:19PM
The fitness function can select for fewer kids if the people expressing that meme are not competing with those who are not expressing it. Which is how things are at the moment. You seem to assume that eventually they will be in competition, but all the evidence of the last 50 years points to that not being the case. Sure, those who adopt the meme earlier will end up as a smaller proportion of the total population when steady state is achieved, but that doesn't mean they're dying out, or even being resource-starved. Of course, there's no proof that the trends of the last 50-100 years will continue, and no proof that we will S rather than J (which has several wildly different possible outcomes) - we're all just passengers on this ride.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by albert on Friday May 29 2015, @05:25AM
Something did select for traits which now, in a different environment, lead to fewer children. Nothing is currently selecting for fewer children, at least not in the parts of the world where large families don't actually lead to death by starvation.
We had a different environment just a century or two ago. There was no welfare state, child support, birth control, or secure food supply. A bit of resistance to having kids was beneficial. That bit of resistance was balanced off by sexual desire, leading to people producing roughly the number of kids that would maximize the ultimate (accounting for death) number of offspring.
Our environment has changed, but our population still largely contains traits more suited to the prior environment. Those traits don't go away instantly, though they are very strongly being selected against.
A few generations from now, we'll be back to double-digit families as the norm. The traits which lead to this are uncommon in our population today, but this is rapidly changing.