Competing Cultures- the Limits of Population Limitation

As you may have gathered from earlier posts, I have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of increasing world populations. The problem is clear to me, but the solutions, as always, are harder to grasp. One idea I had was of counties self policing to decrease their birth rates and keep populations in check. In a recent discussion of population growth rates, it was pointed out to me that world populations will naturally decrease as we reach our carrying capacity, and Italy was cited as an example. Italy does indeed have a very low birth rate, and as an Italian citizen I can assure you this is not due to mass starvation and lack of resources. Is Italy being somehow altruistic (I think not, but it's useful as a thought experiment). Either way, is self-policing by individual countries a sustainable way to keep populations in check.

Unfortunately, I think not. When delve a bit deeper into the matter, it is easy to see why Italy's decreasing population is in fact a grave problem. Although Italy's birth rate is in facts still positive, the percentage of births to Italian households as opposed to immigrants is exceedingly low. Unlike in the earlier part of the 20th century, when Italy was seen as an emigrating country, the last twenty years have been a time of mass immigration to Italy from western European countries such as Romania, Albania, Ukrain, Poland, etc., as well as a heavy influx of Africans and Asians as well.

So what happens if a country were to hypothetically decide to curb its population? It would likely be overrun in a similar way to what is happening in Italy, although due to different causes. Limiting populations as a result of intra-national policing is not a stable strategy, because it is vulnerable to exploitation from outside countries.

It is my view that history can be viewed as a series of transitions between levels of selection. Free floating DNA combined to create chromosomes, which eventually banded together to create genomes inside individual cells. The history of life then progressed along many parallel lineages to form multicellular bodies, many of which then aggregated to form communities of organisms. In some such communities, such as with social insects, policing mechanisms and the division of labor have been so extensive as to seemingly create a sort of 'super-organism'. Other societies, such as our own exhibit high degrees of functional specialization, yet we have not completed the sort of transition that would make, say the United States, into its own discrete level of selection. Or have we?

The history of such transition clearly tells us that that intra-group conflicts are almost always mediated by policing mechanisms put in place by the higher level of selection. Thus, as I see it we have two options. The first option would be to institute a global policing system that would limit birth rates for all countries, thereby keeping world populations in check. This would certainly be an effective mechanism, but it comes at a high price, namely many of the freedoms which we so cherish. It is exceedingly unlikely that there exists enough natural selective pressure as to naturally create such a policing mechanism (since to our knowledge there are not other planets with life and we are not in fact competing on a planetary level, so there is no selection), and so such a policing mechanism would be of our own devise. The second option is to continue on our current trajectory. Populations will grow, and most likely, unless we become adept at terraforming and colonize other planets (which would be really cool), populations will eventually crash as resources remain finite in the light of an increasing global human presence.

History tells us that policing mechanisms are a way to avoid disaster. We are at the crossroads- we have the option of deviating from history by policing ourselves in the absence of any selection, of creating a self-sustaining society without the tools of natural selection. But is that the kind of society we want? Sure, we might eventually have overpopulation and mass deaths, but is this worth compromising our current liberty and natural order? To foreshadow a future post by Chris, we may be crickets, but at least we're happy ones.