Sex at Dawn полностью

If the measure of an idea is its endurance through time, Thomas Malthus deserves his spot as Wikipedia’s eightieth Most Influential Person in History. More than two centuries later, one would be hard pressed to find a single student of economics unfamiliar with the simple argument put forth by the world’s first professor of economics. You’ll recall that Malthus argued that each generation doubles geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32 ...), but farmers can only increase food supply arithmetically, as new fields are cleared and productive capacity is added in a linear fashion (2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ...). From this crystalline reasoning follows Malthus’s brutal conclusion: chronic overpopulation, desperation, and widespread starvation are intrinsic to human existence. Not a thing to be done about it. Helping the poor is like feeding London’s pigeons; they’ll just reproduce back to the brink of starvation anyway, so what’s the point? “The poverty and misery which prevail among the lower classes of society,” Malthus asserts, “are absolutely irremediable.”

Malthus based his estimates of human reproductive rates on the recorded increase of (European) population in North America in the previous 150 years (1650-1800). He concluded that the colonial population had doubled every twenty-five years or so, which he took to be a reasonable estimate of the rates of human population growth in general.

In his autobiography, Darwin recalled that when he applied these dire Malthusian computations to the natural world, “it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work ...”² Science writer Matt Ridley believes Malthus taught Darwin the “bleak lesson” that “overbreeding must end in pestilence, famine or violence,” convincing him that the secret of natural selection was embedded in the struggle for existence.

Thus was Darwin’s brilliance sparked by the darkest Malthusian gloom.³ Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the mechanism underlying natural selection independently of Darwin, experienced his own flash of insight while reading the same essay between bouts of fever in a hut on the banks of a malarial Malaysian river. Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, “When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you.” Shaw lamented natural selection’s “hideous fatalism,” and complained of its “damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.”⁴

But while Darwin and Wallace made excellent use of the Malthus’s dire calculations, there’s a problem with them. They don’t add up.

The tribes of hunters, like beasts ofprey, whom they resemble in their mode of subsistence, will. be thinly scattered over the surface of the earth. Like beasts of prey, they must either drive away or fly from every rival, and be engaged in perpetual contests with each other.. The neighboring nations live in a perpetual state of hostility with each other. The very act of increasing in one tribe must be an act of aggression against its neighbors, as a larger range of territory will be necessary to support its increased numbers.. The life of the victor depends on the death of the enemy.

THOMAS MALTHUS, An Essay on the Principle of Population

If his estimates of population growth were even close to correct, Malthus (and thus, Darwin) would have been right to assume that human societies had long been “necessarily confined in room,” resulting in “a perpetual state of hostility” with one another. In Descent of Man, Darwin revisits Malthus’s calculations, writing, “Civilised populations have been known under favourable conditions, as in the United States, to double their numbers in twenty-five years ... [At this] rate, the present population of the United States (thirty millions), would in 657 years cover the whole terraqueous globe so thickly, that four men would have to stand on each square yard of surface.”⁵