Pop Control?

[Vox Animo]

to Trustwomen:

I do not really bother getting caught up in to thought pertaining to whether humans are inately good, or inately evil. I believe people are simply at nature survivors. Your decisions are made to prolong your life and welfare. IN consideration of evolutionary Red Queen hypothesis, we must always be utilizing our efforts in survival just to keep our ahead above water. There really is no level we reach evolutionarily where we become the end all be all of life. We must continuing changin and adapting for survival. That being said, we represent 3.5 billion years of constantly adapting to stress. And when the stress is gone, maybe people lose themselves. Think about it, i may be stretching it a little here, but depression, suicide, anorexia etc. All these are more common among the well-off.

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[BiOGoly]

Yes, population control is going to be a huge problem in the future. Right now, this is accoording to a professor at my school who is an environmental scientist, the growth rate of the US is 2.1%. This is fine because that is replacement rate, our population will not raise too dramaticly. American citizens though only have 1.8% growth, its the immigration rates that keep us afloat. China's growth rate is .7%. They have implemented the strongest birth control laws in any country. However, there still are so many people at reproducting ages, that there population (1 billion) will not start to drop for over 40 years. Here is a scary thought, if every couple in the world decided to have only one child, the Earth's population would rise to over 9 billion before it would begin to level off (again this is base of information from class). There are many areas of the globe that are have continual exponential growth, so someting is going to have to be done, this planet can only support so many people.

You've confused growth rates with fertility rates, the population growth rate for the US is currently .9% (doubling time of about 78yrs) with a total fertility rate of about 2.1 children per woman (the replacement rate); .9% total growth is due to immigration.

The problem of exponential growth is the biggest challenge facing us as a species. We will be the first generation of humanity to truly experience fundamental limitations to continued growth, although these limits will probably not become directly apparent for another 50 or 60 years.

For anyone that hasn't heard it, here is a link to Arithmetic, Population, and Energy, an excellent lecture by Dr. Al Bartlett on the importance of exponential growth and the apparent inablity of humanity to comprehend it.

 

[chef_NU]

You just answered your own question. Unwanted children born to unfree women will probably have a lower quality of life. That has precisely nothing to do with genetics. You guys are not thinking along evolutionary time here. f_w is right.

As I stated before I would rather the human race die out while trying to do the right thing than survive because of inhuman and evil tactics.

I made this point because there is evidence that both environment and genetics play a strong role in determining one's future (for example, propensity to become a criminal, drug addict, NBA star, physicist, etc.). You seem to be claiming that it is ONLY environment that causes people to be criminals (of course, our genes also can influence the environment that we surround ourselves by). While politically incorrect, I strongly disagree. I do not deny that environmental factors have a strong play in human outcomes, but to say that genetics has nothing to do with it is to me completely naiive.

I know that the media and the American public doesn't like it when people say that human beings ARE NOT all fundamentally the same, even excluding the superficial (i.e. physical appearance). It's simply not true. To deny that there is variation in a population for the sake of not offending anyone is to me really dumb. Everyone isn't special. Everyone can't succeed. Everyone can't be intelligent regardless of the environment they are brought up in. Genetics plays a significant role.

 

[f_w]

No doubt that there are genetic influences on intelligence. You just can't draw that conclusion from Levitts 'study' on the influence of abortion on crime rates (as someone pointed out, there are probably as many intelligent crooks as there are dumb ones). Levitts 'study' can make a statement about the likelihood of delinquency, certainly not intelligence. Also, he had no way of controlling for societal factors on the postulated cohort of potential criminals that abortion eliminated.

Social circumstances favoring delinquency we can influence from one generation to the next, the genetic factors we can't alter on that timeframe.

 

[trustwomen]

To deny that there is variation in a population for the sake of not offending anyone is to me really dumb. Everyone isn't special. Everyone can't succeed.

I was with you for the first two sentences. But I think almost everyone can succeed at something - though maybe not what you would define as "success" (being a doctor?). But I think the genetic variation is, on the contrary, overestimated in our society. This is why we don't question things like wealthy white kids scoring higher on the SATs (oh, their parents were smart, that must be why). The idea we are trying to put forward here is that genetic variation is dwarfed by socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental variation. Things they used to think were genetic, or due to "innate temperament" are now found to be due to intrauterine environment and maternal emotions during pregnancy (stress, fear, anger), ferchrissakes.

 

[murphy54]

it is very good sometimes