Dysgenics, Overpopulation and Conventional Ignorance
These days, most people seem to believe that overpopulation is not a problem, although the reasons for that belief differ. Also, most people view eugenics as both evil and unnecessary. The conventional “wisdom” on these topics is wrong. Overpopulation and dysgenics are serious problems. If we don’t solve them, they will destroy modern civilization.
The idea that overpopulation is not a problem is usually based on the evidence of recent history: that we have been able to expand food production to keep up with population growth for a hundred years or so, and thus (I guess the reasoning goes) we will be able to keep doing this…forever?? The absurdity of this is pretty obvious.
Imagine that you are walking up a mountain in the fog. You can’t see the top of the mountain, and it might take longer than you expected to reach the top. Just because you can’t see the top, and haven’t reached it yet, that doesn’t mean the mountain is infinitely tall. Just because we haven’t reached the limits of growth yet, it doesn’t follow that we never will.
Here is another analogy. Suppose that you have a box of chocolates. You greedily eat all the chocolates over a few days. When they are finished, however, you discover that there is another layer of chocolates under a cardboard separator. Does that mean you have a magic box of chocolates that never runs out? No, it just means that there were more chocolates than you originally thought. Did lifting the separator create the chocolates underneath? No. It might have required some ingenuity to discover the chocolates, but the ingenuity didn’t create the chocolates.
Finite resources are like a box of chocolates. You can’t go on consuming them forever.
Was Malthus proven wrong by recent history? Well, I don’t know what Malthus said exactly, because I have never read Malthus. From what I have heard, Malthus said that agricultural production grows linearly, while the population grows exponentially, so population growth will outpace agricultural production. If that’s what he said, then he was wrong, because agricultural production can also grow exponentially in the short run.
The correct argument is simply that limits exist, and thus neither agricultural production nor population can grow forever, regardless of whether it grows linearly, exponentially, logarithmically or any other way. That is a logical conclusion from the simple fact that the Earth is finite, and of course it has never been disproven.
So, whether Malthus was right or not, it is certainly true that populations are ultimately limited by scarcity. Every species has the potential to reproduce to excess, including human beings. Any species without this capacity would go extinct. Evolution selects for traits that maximize successful reproduction, which is essentially the number of offspring that live to reproduce themselves. The potential for explosive (exponential) population growth is built into the nature of life.
Given a good environment, the population of a species will grow exponentially. The increased population will then cause greater competition for resources (scarcity). Increased competition will make the environment worse for the species, until its population stops growing. Abundance causes population growth, which causes scarcity, which limits population growth.
We are not an exception to that rule. During times of abundance, the human population increases. This creates scarcity, which limits the population. Scarcity leads to war, disease and famine. In times of scarcity, more people die young, which prevents population growth.
During the last few centuries, the human population has exploded, because we discovered a new source of energy (fossil fuels) and invented new technologies to use that energy. New energy and new technology created a period of abundance.
This sort of thing has happened before on smaller scales. There were many local population explosions in the past, when people colonized a new land or discovered a new method of food production. In those cases, the population grew rapidly until it reached a new limit.
When humans discovered agriculture, and were able to expand their population beyond the limit of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, did the population grow forever? No, of course not. The population grew until it reached the limit of the new method of food production, and then it stopped.
Industrial civilization does not transcend physical limits. Yes, we have found ways to expand our population and economy. It does not follow that we can do so forever. The modern era of abundance is based on consuming a finite stock of fossil fuels. It is not the result of magic.
Population explosions often lead to overshoot and collapse, rather than just an end to growth. There are two reasons for this. One is that the growth phase often degrades the underlying basis of food production (e.g. intensive agriculture causing soil erosion). The other is that scarcity causes conflict, and conflict causes scarcity. There is a vicious cycle by which civilizations “unwind”. Thus, growth often ends in a catastrophic collapse, rather than a plateau.
A catastrophic collapse is very likely to occur when modern civilization reaches its limits. We are consuming the finite resource on which our civilization depends (fossil fuels). Our social order is based on perpetual growth. When growth stops, conflict over resources is likely to increase rapidly.
“But, but…” I hear the libertarians saying, “We can expand into space! The Earth is finite, but space is essentially infinite.”
This is very naive.
We can’t escape from the Earth’s limits by going into space. Space travel requires an enormous amount of energy. It is not economically feasible to extract resources from space, due to the huge cost of space travel. And we can’t expand our civilization into space, because there is nowhere else in the solar system that could support human life without complex technology.
A colony on Mars would always depend on the Earth, just like a scientific outpost in Antarctica depends on civilization elsewhere. We haven’t colonized Antarctica, because it is a terrible place to live. Mars is much, much worse than Antarctica, and much harder to travel to. We’ll probably never even have an outpost there, because it would be very costly and provide no tangible benefits.
Space does not extend the Earth’s resources. The Earth is finite, and growth is limited.
“But, but…” I hear the humanists saying, “There is no need to worry about overpopulation, because people choose low fertility when they have a good standard of living. If we raise Africans out of poverty, then their fertility will fall. Fertility in the developed world is already below replacement. Thus, there is no reason to worry about overpopulation. It will fix itself.”
No, it won’t. The human population will not be limited by voluntary low fertility, because voluntary low fertility is self-eliminating.
If most offspring live to adulthood, then high fertility is selected for. Even if most people choose low fertility today, that choice selects against the traits that cause it. The future is determined by who shows up. Human nature (like the nature of every other type of life) is determined by who reproduces. Those who reproduce pass their traits on.
Modern abundance has not taken the struggle out of life. It has just changed the nature of that struggle, from a struggle over resources to a breeding contest. Today, whoever has the most children wins.
It’s true that most people in developed societies choose to have few or no children. However, it doesn’t follow that most people in the future will have low fertility. Why? Because the people of the future have to be born, and more of them will be born to people with high fertility than low fertility. Even if almost everyone chooses low fertility, those with higher fertility will simply outbreed them in a few generations. I have gone through these arguments before, so I won’t repeat them now. I will just say that the Amish alone, at their current rate of growth, could replace the entire world population in less than 300 years.
See Population, Fertility and Evolution and Fertility and Destiny.
The future is not predicted by the average behavior of people today. The future is predicted by who is reproducing today. That is the fundamental principle of evolution. What is normal today will be extinct in the future if it doesn’t reproduce.
Now, let’s consider whether eugenics has ever been disproven or discredited. What is the argument against eugenics?
There isn’t any rational argument against eugenics. Eugenics was never discredited or disproven rationally. It was just labeled “evil”.
After WWII, eugenics was linked to Nazism, although it wasn’t specific to Nazi Germany. Eugenics was a fairly popular idea in the 1920s and 1930s among educated people, for good reasons. Somehow, in the conventional “wisdom” (ignorance), eugenics was linked to the Nazis and equated with genocide or mass murder, even though it doesn’t imply either of those things. Eugenics is now considered to be evil, along with other forms of biological realism and pragmatism.
Eugenics is just selection for traits that we value in other human beings, such as intelligence and responsibility. No matter what we do, the social environment places selective pressures on the human genome. Eugenics is the social control of reproduction to improve and/or maintain the genome. Dysgenics is the opposite: social conditions that degrade the genome.
Making people better doesn’t sound like such a horrible thing, but it does imply that people aren’t born equal. Thus, it conflicts with the humanist belief in the intrinsic value and equality of human beings. The racial aspect makes it even more taboo. Individuals are not equal, and races are not equal. Eugenics doesn’t require racial genocide, but any race-blind eugenics program would affect racial demographics.
Rather than dealing with the philosophical and social issues involved, our culture pretends that human nature transcends evolution. This is not rational. It is willful ignorance.
Eugenics could be easily done by requiring people to meet certain conditions before they have a child, such as having a certain level of income and no serious criminal record.
We don’t allow people to indiscriminately kill one another, or even drive without a license, so why do we allow people to indiscriminately give birth to children? We don’t (or shouldn’t) allow people to enter our societies at will by walking across borders, so why do we allow parents to bring people into our societies at will through vaginas?
Eugenic reproduction control is a reasonable limitation on individual freedom. It should be no more controversial than requiring a license to drive or having criteria for immigration.
The genome is not stable without positive selection. Even without dysgenic fertility or selection, the genome would gradually degrade by mutation. Random noise is always being added to the genome by mutation. To maintain the quality of the genome, most mutations must be removed by selection. That selection could come from differential fertility or differential survival to adulthood. In the long run, the only alternative to eugenics is high childhood mortality.
Currently, the global IQ is declining, due to dysgenic fertility. This is a serious problem. IQ is a valid measure of intellectual ability, and it is predictive of social and economic outcomes, such as income and criminality. With other factors taken into account (such as capitalism vs. communism and natural resources), IQ also predicts the outcomes of societies. Higher IQ people create societies that are better in many ways.
For now, industrialization is still raising the global standard of living (and the global rate of fossil fuel consumption), but a growing population and falling IQ will eventually reverse that trend. Overpopulation and dysgenics both lead inexorably toward civilizational collapse. They lead back to the ancestral condition, in which the population and the genome are regulated by war, disease and famine. There is only one way to have peace and prosperity in the long run: eugenic reproduction control.
The human population will be regulated somehow. It cannot grow forever, because the Earth is finite. It will not settle into a pattern of voluntary low fertility, because that behavior is maladaptive.
If we do not impose reproduction control on our population, it will grow until modern civilization collapses and scarcity returns. Then the population will be regulated by war, disease and famine, as it was in the past.
Likewise, the human genome will be regulated somehow. By socially guaranteeing the survival of all children, we are allowing the genome to degrade by mutation. This also makes evolution into a breeding contest, in which any trait that increases fertility is adaptive. This will gradually eliminate the traits that make civilization possible, such as intelligence, creativity and impulse control, because those traits are negatively correlated with fertility in this environment. To maintain them, we need to select for them, not against them.
If we do not regulate the genome with eugenics, it will degrade until our civilization collapses. Then the genome will be regulated by war, disease and famine, as it was in the past.
With eugenic reproduction control, we could sustain modern civilization and prosperity indefinitely. Otherwise, our civilization will eventually collapse. When it does, the population and genome will once again be regulated by war, disease and famine. There are no other alternatives.