Earlier this week, while I was studying for an anthropology exam, I noticed an interesting connection between an idea by a man Charles Darwin used as a source in his theory of evolution and everything we have have been talking about in our biology class so far. This mans name was Thomas Malthus, a british economist who wrote "Essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798. Darwin was focused on Malthus' observation that animals in the wild often reproduce to have more offspring than can survive, but after reading more about him, I found his ideas about human society to be interesting as well.
Malthus stated that like animals in the wild, man too is capable of overproducing, that it would inevitably happen if left unchecked and it would eventually become a problem with resources as well. I was intrigued when I saw this, that someone way back in the end of the eighteenth century had predicted the events that are happening in the world today. Of course when Malthus wrote these things he was not worried about fossil fuels and alternative energy sources but the food supply and that once rapid population growth began famine would become a global epidemic, and it is unfortunate to say that he was right.
He stated that the decline of living conditions would result from three things: people having too many children, the inability of resources to keep up with the population, and the irresponsibility of the "lower class". Malthus concluded that to keep this problem under control poor people needed to have smaller families. While his view about "classes" may be wrong if everyone began having smaller families it may lessen the burden of the problem we are currently facing, afterall Malthus has been right so far whos to say his solution isnt right as well.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/malthus.html
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It's interesting the point that Malthus makes about poor people having less babies to offset the lack of resources. I saw a movie a week ago called idiocracy which is based around the idea that in the future due to the fact that more intelligent families had fewer children and that the Jerry Springer guests of the world had more then it would be inevitable for the population to become less intelligent over time. Several thousand years from now all that will be left is fox viewers.
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