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To: Flavius; CutePuppy
From the Optimum Population Trust's site:

The Optimum Population Trust believes that Earth may not be able to support more than half its present numbers in the next century, and that the UK's sustainable population level in the 22nd century may be as low as 30 million. Research and policy are summarised on this website and available to all members in the OPT Journal.

I wonder if these people had anything to do with the London Zoo "human" exhibit which highlighted humans as a "plague species".
67 posted on 05/07/2007 7:45:28 AM PDT by The Pack Knight (Duty, Honor, Country. Thompson/Franks '08)
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To: The Pack Knight
I wonder if these people had anything to do with the London Zoo "human" exhibit

I couldn't link them directly to that "exhibit", I think that was London Zoo self-initiative but, no doubt, this and similar neo-Malthusian groups have above-average influence on people running "humanitarian" / "humanist" organizations, like Zoo.

From AP news account:
The exhibit, which opened Friday, puts the three male and five female Homo sapiens side by side with their primate relatives — though separated from them by an electric fence. While their neighbors might enjoy bananas and a good scratch, these eight — chosen from 30 applicants who entered an online contest — have diverse interests, from a chemist hoping to raise awareness about apes to a self-described actor/model and fitness enthusiast.

"A lot of people think humans are above other animals," chemist Tom Mahoney, 26, said. "When they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we're not that special."


Here's is an interesting list of people influenced by Malthus - from Thomas Malthus Wikipedia entry

This Principle of Population was based on the idea that population if unchecked increases at a geometric rate (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.) whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.).

...

At Haileybury, Malthus developed a theory of demand-supply mismatches which he called gluts. Considered ridiculous at the time, his theory was a precursor to later theories about the Great Depression, and to the works of admirer and economist John Maynard Keynes.

Previously, high fertility had been considered an economic advantage, since it increased the number of workers available to the economy. Malthus, however, looked at fertility from a new perspective and convinced most economists that even though high fertility might increase the gross output, it tended to reduce output per capita. Malthus has been widely admired by, and has influenced, a number of other notable economists such as David Ricardo (whom Malthus knew personally) and Alfred Marshall.

...

Ironically, given Malthus's own opposition to contraception, his work was a strong influence on Francis Place (1771–1854), whose Neo-Malthusian movement was the first to advocate contraception.

...

Malthus’ idea of man’s “Struggle for existence” had decisive influence on Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. Other scientists related this idea to plants and animals which helped to define a piece of the evolutionary puzzle.

Thanks to Malthus, Darwin recognized the significance of competition between populations of the same species, as well as competition between species. Malthusian population thinking also explained how an incipient species could become a full-blown species in a very short time frame.

...

Founder of UNESCO, evolutionist and Humanist, Julian Huxley wrote of "The Crowded World" in his Evolutionary Humanism (1964), calling for a World Population Policy. Huxley was openly critical of Communist and Roman Catholic attitudes to birth control , population control and overpopulation. Today world organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund acknowledge that the debate over how many people the Earth can support effectively started with Malthus. Julian's brother, author Aldous Huxley, in his book Brave New World, refers to Malthusian theories on population. In Brave New World, the popular form of birth control is known as the Malthusian Belt. It is mentioned frequently by the females in the novel including the female protagonist Lenina Crowne.

Karl Marx's social determinism has its roots in Malthus’s theory as well. Marx however rejected Darwin’s biological determinism and instead embraced social determinism (in other words one’s decisions are made as a direct reaction to one’s circumstances). He saw social ills as caused by unjust or faulty institutions and social arrangements in large part caused by capitalism.

Malthus continues to have considerable influence to this day. One famous recent example of this is Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Ehrlich predicted, in the late 1960s, that hundreds of millions would die from a coming overpopulation crisis in the 1970s, and that by 1980 life expectancy in the United States would be only 42 years. Other famous examples are the 1972 book The Limits to Growth from the self-styled Club of Rome, and the Global 2000 report to the then President of the United States of America Jimmy Carter. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov issued many appeals for population control reflecting the perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich.

More recently, a school of "neo-Malthusian" scholars has begun to link population and economics to a third variable, political change and political violence, and to show how the variables interact.

...


69 posted on 05/07/2007 11:21:12 AM PDT by CutePuppy (If you don't ask the right questions you may not get the right answers)
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