Population Growth

(from Musings and Rants 1985-2016, Marcus Everett 2017, CKCPC3 Publishing, p173, written in 2007)

Several years ago a friend was telling me about a book she had read about the Blue Crab. The life cycle of the Blue Crab begins in bays and marshes along the East Coast from the Mid-Atlantic States to the Gulf States. The mature female can only mate during a 'shed', when she discards an old shell and before the new shell hardens. If she is fertilized during this event, under her 'apron' she will grow a large egg mass, which looks like a big orange sponge. She will then make her way to the inlet of the bay where she has been living to release her eggs into the outgoing tide.

The eggs hatch and the baby crabs spend the first half of their life at sea. When they reach about half of their adult size, they return to the bays to mature and mate. The question of interest, then, is what percentage on average of the thousands of eggs released by a female make it back to successfully mate?

Most people would guess that the percentage is small, and they would be right. But it is possible to be more precise. For a stable population, each successfully breeding female must, on average, produce exactly one successfully breeding female. If the average success rate is greater than 1, the population will grow exponentially; if the rate is less than 1 it will decrease exponentially. An average success rate of 2 would result in the population doubling every generation, a success rate of 0.5 would result in it halving every generation.

One might ask about the poor males, but as long as the survival rate of males is sufficient to fertilize a sufficient number of females, the population growth rates depend almost entirely on the success rates of the females.

The above consideration holds for any sexually reproducing species, whether it's crabs, birds, whales or humans. If the average female success rate differs from 1, the population will either grow or decay exponentially. This fact has rather profound implications for modern humanity.

For most of known human history, the long-term female success rate has been greater than 1, but only barely. Estimates of population growth over the 10,000 years before about 1700 put the average success rate, assuming 20 years for a generation, at about 1.01. This rate of success implies that each generation was about 1% larger than the previous, and that the population doubled about every 1500 years. Wars had little effect, since as was pointed out above only a sufficient number of males are required. (This fact is borne out by the baby boom after WWII - losing a half million males didn't even keep the growth rate flat!) Disasters that affect both sexes cause a short-term stutter, but usually this just makes it easier for the next generation or so to make up lost ground.

The problem is that, over the last 200 years, the industrial revolution together with modern medicine and agriculture has greatly increased the survival rate and therefore the potential female success rate. I say potential rate, since some cultures have voluntarily reduced the rate even below 1. China, in fact, has recently implemented a one child per couple rule which, together with a cultural bias against female offspring, has apparently resulted in an effective female success rate of something like 0.4. This is a drastically low rate, and will result in economic and social chaos in even one generation if not eased. A more reasonable target might be one female child per couple.

Unfortunately, much of the third world is reproducing at a rate significantly greater than one. The world population growth rate is currently such that the population has been doubling about every 35 years. If we assume a 20-year generation, this is an average success rate of about 1.5, or in other words each generation is about 50% larger than the previous. The third world rate must be considerably higher than this since the industrial nations (minus certain minority groups) now have rates lower than 1. If the human density on the planet were still insignificantly small, this might be a good thing. However, we are already depleting our natural resources such as fossil fuels, water, oceanic fish stocks and everything else you can think of. Our waterways are polluted, our air is polluted, and there MAY be some increase in global warming over and above the interglacial effect due to human activity such as deforestation and production of excess carbon dioxide and methane.

What is depressing is that, although there seem to be unlimited cries for more laws against SUVs, coal fired power plants, etc., there is never a discussion or even a suggestion about reducing the human population. Doing so would not only help solve all these problems, but may well be the only long-term solution. No laws and no amount of technology can long compensate for the current rate of exponential growth of the human population on Earth. We must control our numbers or face the inevitable catastrophic reduction that reality will impose upon us. This fact especially must become a part of any intelligent discussions about subjects such as global warming, as well as contraception and abortion.

It should also be noted that, although the human female success rate is considerably greater than 1, the blue crab is obviously suffering a current female success rate significantly below 1. The friend that I referred to above recently paid over $60 a DOZEN for jumbo crabs at a restaurant near Baltimore. H. L. Mencken would be aghast.

An Ethical and/or Moral Conundrum

I apparently either read or was aware of John B. Calhoun's mice and rat experiments in the 1960's and '70's and have used the phrase "too many mice (or rats) in a cage" frequently as a comment on the ever increasing problems due to population growth. I had assumed that the problems of Calhoun's mice, their extreme population growth followed by their ultimate total demise, were due to overcrowding, as apparently most people had. There is little doubt that overcrowding played a part in their abrupt change in behavior, but ultimately other factors may have contributed to the final result. A recent VDARE.com post by Lance Welton was an eye-opening re-appraisal of the reasons for the disasters, and their application to human populations.

As was discussed in the post, the affluence of the West made possible by the Industrial Revolution and the attendant decrease in mortality resulting from better nutrition, better medical care and an overall rise in the standard of living has virtually erased natural selection from the first world human population. Now most people think of natural selection as improving a species, or allowing a species to cope with changes in their environment, but there is also a very necessary weeding out of negative attributes. In addition to the occasional mutant resulting from environmental accidents, sexual reproduction intentionally tries many variations of genetic characteristics. In the natural state, defective combinations usually fail to reproduce. But in the modern human Welfare societies, we go to extreme efforts to salvage every fertilized human egg. Thus defectives have a high likelihood of not only surviving, but reproducing. As Welton noted, these defective genes are then able to spread throughout the gene pool, thus debasing it. This does not bode well for Western societies.

There have always been some doubts as to whether 'helping' people is always desirable. The old truth that giving a man a fish feeds him for a day but teaching him how to fish feeds him for a lifetime emphasizes the relative importance of education over welfare. In addition, however, giving him a fish may feed him for the day, but it also encourages him to resort to looking for another handout the next day rather than trying to feed himself. This shows that charity can produce cultural distortions that, if allowed to fester and reproduce, are as detrimental to societal health as genetic defects. One must conclude that charity or welfare for all but the most disabled is not a good idea, and even sparing those that cannot survive without help still poses a question of whether they should be allowed to reproduce.

To paraphrase an old wheeze, it's not nice to try to frustrate Mother Nature. Our culture frowns on the subject of eugenics, where the term is referring to attempts to intentionally improve the gene pool (although animal breeders have been using it for ages). But in effect we have, for the last couple of centuries, been practicing what might be called inverse eugenics, where, by frustrating natural selection, we are unintentionally debasing the human gene pool. What seems to be a noble principle of taking care of the less fortunate members of our society has a dark side. This creates what seems to be a moral or ethical dilemma. We must take steps to counter the reproduction of defective genes, or humans will suffer the same fate as Calhoun's mice, at least in the Western welfare states,. As Welton observes, this seems to be further along than we would like to think.

The moral dilemma is that any attempts to purge defective genes flies in the face of religious and cultural taboos. Even current research trying to edit genes before they can be passed to future generations is under attack, and sterilization or worse is virtually unthinkable, especially if it can be labeled genocide. Yet ignoring the problem may well not be an option. Although termination of carriers of defective genes would be a repugnant and unnecessary extreme, rethinking Western Civilization's religious and cultural proscriptions against abortion, testing of fetuses for genetic abnormalities, and sterilizing obvious mutants might be necessary.

There are some things that can be done to stop making the situation worse. A first mandatory step in the U.S. would be to stop importing defective genes from third world populations. Whether any immigration is necessary or desirable, a minimum response to the problem must be to set the bar for admission very high for genetic traits such as intelligence and industriousness, and against negatives such as criminality and genetic diseases. In their native environments a significant number of third worlders would perish from natural selection, but not only do we keep them alive if they get here, but pay them to breed. This is insane.

The second step of a sane response to the problem is to stop paying welfarites to breed. Although not every welfarite has defective genes that cause diseases, the likelihood that they have undesirable genetic characteristics is sufficiently high that encouraging the propagation of their genes is a poor policy. Trying to test for bad vs. good genes in the welfare community smacks of eugenics, and therefore it would be best to just not provide public reward or even support for welfare breeding.

Forced sterilization is a solution of last resort, although it might be worth seriously considering in the case of those convicted of violent criminal behavior. Short of refinement and acceptance of genetic engineering to eliminate less blatant cases of defective genes, voluntary contraception or sterilization would be commendable, but as a compassionate society one hopes that such drastic measures could ultimately be unnecessary with technology. Currently abortion or sterilization of Downs Syndrome children is tolerated or even encouraged, but ultimately gene editing or other high tech solutions may be able to identify and remove such defective genes from the gene pool.

The problem of affluence frustrating natural selection is sufficiently subtle that its magnitude has only recently come to light. As was pointed out in Welton's post, we are already seeing increases in genetic diseases such as autism, and a decrease in intelligence. Western civilization is already mired in a morass of problems, although many may be related to this one. In any case, as Welton said, we're headed for a disaster, and time to reflect may not be on our side. Some form of eugenics to offset the inverse eugenics of Western civilization's incredible survival successes is necessary.

Population and Immigration

Most animals instinctively understand that, to the extent that one's territory is necessary to survival and reproduction, that territory must be defended against encroachment by others that would threaten one's survival. All resources are finite, and must not be over-consumed. This is especially relevant to the human immigration problem. Whereas immigration may be easily accommodated if population density is low, and may even be beneficial, once a certain population density is achieved, additional immigration becomes detrimental.

Currently the United States population density is a little under 100 persons per square mile of land, including marshes, swamps, deserts, mountain ridges and other unusable terrain. Although this translates to about 6-7 acres per U. S. resident, probably a quarter or so is unusable, and the remainder must not only provide living space but also supply food and other necessities and absorb the wastes. So far this density has been tolerable, although consumption of water supplies and other resources may be pushing critical limits.

The world population density is somewhere around 140 per square mile, and again this includes all mountains, deserts, and other unusable areas except Antarctica, which we cede to the penguins. Thus we in the U. S. are a little better off than most, but even increasing our density to the world average would not make a dent in conditions elsewhere. China and India, both large geographical areas, have densities in the order of 1000 per square mile, and this in spite of unusable areas in the Himalayas and the Gobi Desert. Again, we could double our population density by absorbing 150 million from each of these two countries, and not make a noticeable dent in the density of either. And since the human population is currently increasing at a rate of more than a quarter million per day, during the time that it might take to move 300 million people to the U. S. the population of the rest of the world could easily increase by more than the 300 million, and therefore nothing would be achieved except basically destroying the U. S.

As I discussed in my essay 'Population'(1), the growth rate of a bisexual species is primarily a function of the female reproduction success rate (the average number of successfully breeding females each female produces), and depends much less on the number of males. This presents an interesting conundrum with respect to war philosophies. In the past, with adequate land and resources, the objective of wars was to annex the opponent's land and resources, including their breeding stock (females). This bluntly translated into killing off or enslaving the males, but not killing the females. One could then spread one's own genes by breeding the conquered females. In this scenario, the invading army consisted solely of male combatants.

The problem facing Western Civilization in the 21st Century differs in several respects. In addition to a horde of invading male 'combatants', e.g., the illegals, refugees, etc., that are pouring into First World Western countries, part of the invading army consists of immigrating women, children and complete immigrating families. These members of the invading 'army' intend to win the war of conquest by out reproducing the native population, and incredibly the invaded countries are supporting their attempt to do so. Once the resident 'army' is sufficiently large, the male combatants will attempt to kill or enslave the native population.

The moral of all this is that, unlike in previous wars, women and children cannot be spared. If possible, they, along with the invading male battalions, must be removed as soon as and as completely as possible. Territorial borders must be defended from any and all encroachment. Any residue of the resident 'army' must be required to obey all laws and must NOT be supported to breed (welfare) here or abroad. If this is not successfully implemented immediately, Western Civilization is over, we will lose the 'war', and will be the subjects/slaves of the occupying invaders. The only alternative will be a no-holds-barred ethnic/race/religious conflagration where all men, women and children will be fair game. Humanity has achieved a 'critical mass', and avoiding a runaway detonation may not even be possible. As an aside, Google 'too many mice in a cage' and read the report entitled 'Behavioral Sink' by John B. Calhoun on the experiments he ran from 1947 to 1973. It's a little scary.

(1) Musings and Rants, p. 173, Marcus Everett, CKCPC3 publishing, March 2016, RR1 Box 510. Nowata, Oklahoma 74048

(c) Copyright 2016 by Marcus Everett, Wallback, WV

marcus.everett@citlink.net

We Need More Growth - NOT

I have often challenged the budding young geniuses that I know with the following problem: We have been doubling the human population on Earth every 35 to 50 years for several centuries. If we had maintained that rate from the beginning, when would Adam and Eve have lived?

The current population is approaching 8 billion people, or in scientific notation, about 8x10^9. For those that have a background in digital computers, a convenient approximation is that 2^10 is just a hair more than 10^3 (2 to the 10th power is 1024, which is 2.4% more than 1000). Thus a billion (10^9 or 1,000,000,000) is 1000x1000x1000, or approximately 1024x1024x1024, which is 2^30. 8 is 2^3, so 8 billion is about 2^33. Thus the population has doubled 33 times since Adam, or 32 times since Adam and Eve.

For a doubling rate of 35 years, 32 times 35 years is 1120 years, so Adam and Eve would have started just about 900 AD. Even at a slower rate of doubling every 50 years, 32 times 50 is 1600 years, so we still could have made it to the present starting at 400 AD.

Obviously the human population growth rate has been much less over most of our history. The problem has been the growth possible in recent history due to the industrial, technological and medical advances.

Now maybe making it from 2 people to 8 billion people in 1100 or 1600 years doesn't scare everybody. But consider this: in another 1100 to 1600 years at this rate, there will be 4 billion people for EVERY ONE of us here today. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to happen - people would be a couple miles deep over the entire planet. Even at the slower rate of doubling every 50 years, by the end of this millennium there would be a million times as many people with only 5 square feet of land or water to stand on.

Currently the human density on usable land is about 250 per sq. mile, or about 2.5 acres for each person. At current rates we would expect the population to at least quadruple over the next century, which would leave less than an acre per person. By the end of another century we're down to less than a quarter acre, and by 2300 we're down to an area of a small apartment. Remember, if you want roads, farms, malls, etc., then you have to give up part of your apartment for that.

It is the opinion of the author that we are already over a sustainable population for the planet. But even if that is not so, in very few years it will certainly be true. If we do not learn to live with stability, not growth, catastrophe is inevitable.

(c) copyright Marcus Everett, Wallback WV 25285