Are we overpopulated? Not so much. Take a look.
… for extra fun, look for Japan and North Korea.
That is pretty cool but also keep in mind that each U.S. person is using as much lighting and other electricity as some multiple of any other country so the lights are actually brighter in the U.S. than population averages would dictate.
You’re prejudiced, that is the point of natural selection.
That’s true of places like China and India, but there’s not so much difference in places like Western Europe and Japan in the per-capita consumption of electricity.
The question is not whether natural selection is the point. The question is whether we as humans should be letting each other die when we have the capability to aid them easily. Some people would find it immoral to do so.
Anyway, let’s get detailed here, what do you propose humanity shouldn’t be doing? Should we just throw medical care out the window and let the people with the strongest genes survive? What if it turns out that natural selection favors humans who breed like cockroaches and fill up every corner of the planet in spite of lacking technology?
All in all, saying that humanity should be limited by natural selection looks to be a pretty stupid argument once you think about it.
What does “overpopulated” mean? Basically it means “too many people”, but relative to what limit? The answer to the question depends on how you define overpopulation
- Relative to available living area? The US has such a gross abundance of land that excess population density is essentially impossible.
- Relative to available energy resources? Of course the US is overpopulated. We cannot meet our energy needs without going outside our borders, sometimes with force.
- Relative to available food resources? We’re OK there.
- Relative to effective governance? Our population is too large and widespread for our system of de facto central governance. That’s my opinion.
There is no point to natural selection. It’s just a byproduct of the environment and we humans essentially create our own environment.
How exactly would you suggest we initiate “natural selection”? How would nature decide “who should and should not be here”. Have vast numbers of people starving in the streets or every man for himself style lawless anarchy? Stephen Hawking probably not be here if natural selection ran its course. There’s a good chance you or I wouldn’t either. (why does everyone assume they would be at the top of the food chain?)
Because we live in a society, not the jungle, and have eliminated a great deal of natural selection, we would have to turn to UNnatural selection. That, however, sounds an awful lot like genocide.
When a country is really overpopulated, you will see vast amounts of homelessness and starvation because the resources and infrastructure can no longer support the population. Anything less is just “crowded”.
Of course that’s the point of it. My point is that I think it’s a perposterous notion that we should abandon two hundred years of medical progress and say, “Let’s let nature take its course.”
Should we shut dentists’ offices because it’s “natural” for our teeth to rot? Should we no longer vaccinate children and let epidemics take their course to thin the herd? Should we no longer set broken bones, and also allow accident victims to bleed to death before our eyes?
Realize, if you will, that without medical intervention, you probably wouldn’t be here. I’m willing to lay money that somewhere in your family tree, one of our ancestors would have died if not for medical science.
I’m not arguing for a reversion to relying solely on natural selection to decide who lives and who dies, nor am I suggesting that genocide (while tempting) is the answer (nor do I have anything personal against you, Lissa). I would say, however, that morality has no place in the discussion.
I stated that I believe that as a species we’ve diverted natural selection, and that that fact is largely responsible for the overpopulation as I see it. If I had the answers, I wouldn’t be sitting at home right now posting to the SD, I’d be making headlines with my radical new approach to population management and getting lambasted by special interest groups for my apparent callousness.
And, I’m well aware that if we relied more upon natural selection that I or the people I care about might not be here, why does everyone assume that that obvious thought escapes me?
If you’ll forgive my saying so, most people who post things like that don’t seem to put a lot of thought into it.
Morality does have a place in this discussion. One way or another, mandated population control will always violate someone’s rights, not to mention religious freedoms, since some faiths denounce birth control. Nor does the idea of allowing nature to take its course with people who are “unfit” sit well with many people.
First of all, Lissa is not prejudiced any more than anyone else. She may think her opinion is colored by her life experience, but I seriously doubt that she would feel any differently about this if her birth had been completely without complication. In any case, most people in the US have at least received an antibiotic for an illness or a vaccine to prevent one, so none of us are truly “objective” when it comes to this, and none of us knows who would be alive and who would be dead if it were not for these medical advances. I think that anyone with any moral center, not to mention common sense, at all would know that it would be wrong for any powers that be to decide who should reproduce and who should not, and who is deserving to live and who is not.
So…what ARE you arguing? Whether or not the earth is overpopulated is not a moral issue. What should be done about it (and whether or not anything should be done about it) IS a moral issue. There is no question that our large brain has caused us to thrive in a manner that we wouldn’t have been able to without it (based on the rest of our physiology). That large brain also gives us a conscience & a “human-ness” that makes us more than just another product of evolution. We literally cannot live our lives according to the just the laws of nature, even though at our core we are animals…these issues, for humans, will always have a moral component. So, what are humans to do in the face of this?
I am curious as to why you are relying on demonstrably false theories of population growtrh from the 1970s to assert a condition that does not exist, then asserting we need an amoral “fix” to the situation when the only reason to fix it would be to satisfy some moral imperative.
I reverse order:
There is no need to “fix” overpopulation unless you have a moral imperative to “save” humanity, but outside morals, we could simply let natural selection take its place and if we breed ourselcves to extinction, so what? Suggesting an amoral solution to a moral problem is irrational.
The Earth is not now overpopulated and all the evidence we have indicates that we will not overpopulate the Earth with humanity. The hype of geometric progression in population that began before the 1950s and came to full bloom in the 1970s has already been shattered. People who actually study population growth have had to successively lower their estimates of population benchmarks over the last 25 - 30 years and those people see the world population topping off and then beginning to decline by themiddle of this century. (And since their numbers have been much better predictors of actual trends than the numbers of the ZPG folks, it would seem to make sense to placve more credence in them than in the cries of overpopulation.)
There are certainly locations in the world where the infrastructure is failing to support the population, but as more countries come out of a “developing” status to a “developed” status that changes. One problem is that better hygiene and medicine extends life before the birth rate falls. However, all the evidence indicates that the very extension of life expectancy triggers a loweringof the birth rate. There is a period where the population swells horrendously, following which, the birth rate falls and the population numbers begin to recede.
I forgive you.
Since all I did was answer what was effectively a poll of opinion, I don’t quite understand how I was appointed the defender of natural selection as the sole means for population control (since I never suggested it) and the defender of the belief that population control is not a moral issue (since it’s not what the thread is about), but I’ll play devil’s advocate since I’m here and I’m not opposed to stirring up the morally righteous every now and again:
Take any social problem that exists today. Would this problem be reduced or otherwise eliminated if there were less people? The answer is, inescapably, yes. With that belief, it isn’t difficult to rationalize that the morally correct thing to do would be to reduce the population so that, ultimately, everyone might benefit from reduced social inequity. Morality does not belong in the discussion because any one can warp their interpretation of what is moral to fit their desires, and no two people can even seem to agree on exactly what is or isn’t moral.
By removing morality from the discussion entirely, the remaining possibilities are more likely to be untainted by personal bias, but they’ll still be biased because, afterall, it is within human nature to think of ones own survival first. So, the question is, how do you arrive at a means of limiting the population that is completely neutral; that does not show favoritism? Quite simply, it already exists: natural selection. If they’re fit enough to survive, they will.
As it stands now, people who would be unfit to survive under “natural” conditions are passing on their inferior genetic code and weakening the human gene pool. Some people who are incapable of supporting themselves are alive today because some people feel morally obligated to care for them. This so-called morality is merely wasting resources on someone who contributes nothing to society just so someone else can sleep at night.
I’m curious as to what theories or condition you’re talking about. I went back and read my posts and can’t see where you gather that I’m referring to anything other than a personal belief that the country is overpopulated.
Nor am I able to locate any instance where I asserted any type of “fix”, be it moral or amoral.
Ah, but you have me wrong. I don’t much care for humanity at all and have no desire to save it. If I were about “fixing” overpopulation, it would be because I was personally inconvenienced by it, or that I thought the survival of the planet were threatened.
As an aside though, how would breeding ourselves into extinction be amoral exactly?
Just because the planet can support the current population (which is farcical because it requires massive environmental alterations and enormous feats of engineering to support this many people), doesn’t mean it should. Why does complete coverage of every inhabitable piece of land in the world appear to be the apparent point at which we’ll consider the fact that there might be too many people?
Because you were the one who brought natural selection up in the first place. According to you:
So, what ARE you saying about the people who are “burdens?” Seems to me, there was no use in bringing up this point, since it wasn’t the point of the discussion, but since you did, what is your proposed solution?
I don’t think this is an inescapable conclusion at all. It is quite obvious that even when the population was much smaller, people starved to death, died of disease, etc.
But, as Tomndebb points out, the morally correct thing to do cannot be to help some people at the expense of others. So, your rationalization that this would be the morally correct thing to do is just that…a rationalization, but certainly not justifiable by any standard definition of the word “moral.”
And, as I stated before, even if we wanted to use natual selection to decide who lives and who doesn’t, it would be impossible to accomplish, given that humans have rational thought & a conscience that lifts us above the laws of nature.
Which is all invalidated by the fact that there are plenty enough resources to go around…the problem is one of distribution.
The idea that the either the world or the U.S. is overpopulated. This was a wonderful conceit forty years ago, (one that some people who do not pay attention continue to believe), but one which has been demonstrably disproven.
Your smart-assed response to Lissa (since it actually bore no content) would most charitably be inferred to indicate that we should embark on a “hands off” policy to life to allow some vaguely implied natural phenomena to lower population–a process that would, in fact, be amoral. (Less charitably, we might infer that you were simply posting to rile up other posters, but I have a strong charitable streak that mitigates against assuming that you are violating board rules.)
Since we are in no danger of actually covering the Earth with people and since we already have very good evidence that the world population will begin to decline long before “complete coverage of every inhabitable piece of land,” your statement merely echoes the views of failed doomsayers such as Paul R. Ehrlich. Given that your rhetoric is reminiscent of his, I infer that you believe those errorneous projections. Of course, it is possible that you have not even read Erlich and his cronies and your belief in overpopulation rests on no evidence at all.
Agreed, but women’s rights and access to birth control would solve most of that.
Should Stephen Hawking have been left to starve ? Why should I care what natural selction “wants”, anyway ? It’s totally amoral, incredibly brutal, and mindless. It’s like opposing skyscrapers because they defy gravity; natural selection is a description of how things work, not a moral imperative.
Of course it does; interactions with people always involve morality; that’s the point of morality.
Without morality, why would you care about social problems or inequity in the first place ?
They’ll be the best at surviving and breeding, not necessarily anything else.
And that’s natural selection at work; convincing others to support you is a perfectly valid survival stratagy from a Darwinian standpoint. You seem to be confusing evolution with the work ethic.
Teach every woman to read and the spectre of overpopulation goes away on its own. Screw natural selection.
True, but bringing up my belief as to why the planet was overpopulated has nothing to do with defending it as a cure. Regardless, I submitted to playing devil’s advocate, there’s no need to convince me to defend my statements.
Since I’m advocating natural selection, my proposed solution would be to let those incapable of supporting themselves die.
Disease and starvation are extensions of nature. Regardless of that fact, with a smaller population now, those things could be better managed than they were thousands of years ago.
Oh, I don’t know. Morality has been used as a rationalization for all sorts of atrocities. Weighing the benefits of the many against the rights of the few is often a moral dilemma. In any event, that was only an example to demonstrate that morality doesn’t belong in the discussion exactly because it adds unnecessary distinctions to a simple matter.
The laws of nature are all we have and to think that a brain developed enough to allow you to ponder unanswerable questions like why you’re here somehow lifts you above that simple fact is ridiculous.
While you’ll get no argument out of me on the point of distribution being a legitimate problem, I don’t see how my point is at all invalidated. There very well may be enough resources to go around, but to balance things out those with more would have to give up some of what they have. How many people do you know that are moral enough to take food from their family to allow people they’ll never meet the ability to eat?
Wrong. we have enough, now. We need to find better methods of distribution, but we do not have to take from anyone to give to anyone else.
Another error popular in the 1970s but unsupported by facts.