Wanted to briefly respond to this post by Asteroid. I was originally going to do it in the comments, but now I think it warrants a post of its own. if you haven’t read Asteroid’s post, go do that and then come back.

Welcome back.

Asteroid begins by quoting the Bible and asserting that the “be fruitful and multiply” phrase in the Bible has been taken way too literally by too many religious nuts and that they have as a result overpopulated the earth. But to my knowledge, only the Mormons place a significant amount of emphasis on that phrase. And Asteroid is incorrect to assert that Christian proscriptions against the use of birth control stem from an edict to have children. Rather, Christian sexual mores come from St. Paul’s letters.

In his letters, St. Paul asserts the following “logic”: Because the Holy Spirit resides within the human body, the body is a temple. And just as it would be grossly inappropriate to have sex in a temple, so it is inappropriate to have sex with one’s body. This means that the purest of Christians lead celibate lives, as St. Paul himself was doing. But St. Paul also understood that most humans were incapable of living celibate lives, and that the human race requires sex to continue. And so he instructed followers that they should really only have sex for procreative purposes, and that all other forms/purposes of sex were inappropriate.

It’s worth noting that this is quite different from the “be fruitful” line of reasoning, and from the “every sperm is sacred” line of reasoning made famous by Monty Python, which also derives from the Old Testament. In fact, St. Paul’s letters are, to my knowledge, the only source of sexual mores to be found in the New Testament.

And arguably, this is all beside the point, as Asteroid is more or less making a malthusian argument:

Even if you think we are not choking on our own waste already, how long do you think it will be until we do? How will you know? Think about it this way:

Say you have a jar. In this jar, you will be breeding some sort of organism (yeast or bacteria or something). Let’s say these organisms breed really quickly, with the population doubling every minute. You start breeding at 11am. By noon, the jar is full. Given that the population doubles each minute, what time is it when the jar is half-full?

People who don’t understand the problem (or exponential growth) will naïvely say 11:30. This is wrong, of course. What is not as obvious is that the mathematically correct answer (11:59, one minute before noon) is also wrong. It’s wrong because the population would never actually fill the jar at all. In the real world, the waste products produced by the existing organisms would kill the whole population long before the jar got anywhere near to full.

Now, imagine you are one of the organisms in this jar. What time would it be when you started saying to yourself “man, it is getting really crowded and smelly in here?” And once you notice, is there anything you can do about it? Or is it already too late?

I have two things to say about this, as to why Asteroid’s fears are unfounded. And then I want to talk about a population related fear that Asteroid has missed, but which is much more worrisome.

First I want to say that we will never reach the point where we poison ourselves in the jar because we humans have a natural population control mechanism built into ourselves. That is to say, the more wealthier we become, the fewer children we tend to have. In many parts of the world, most notably the white first world, birth rates are below that of replacement requirements. Why would that be? Well why wouldn’t that be? We have such great access to birth control and we basically have the ability to live vastly better than the royalty of years past. Even if we work too hard, we are having way too much fun to want to have too many children. So we don’t. So if Asteroid wants to decrease the rate at which we replace ourselves, his best bet is to spread Western capitalism and lifestyles far and wide.

Second even if we don’t believe that we will limit our own population by virtue of being rich, I believe that we will find other places to live by way of human ingenuity. Human ingenuity always overcomes malthusian math, and always in the nick of time. That’s why Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the pricing mechanism work so damned well. If life on Earth becomes expensive and miserable due to overpopulation in a world reminiscent of Soylent Green, then we will find other places in which to live. Terra-form Mars. Build colonies on the moon and under the sea. Melt the polar ice caps and live in antarctica. Who knows what we’ll think up. But we’ll do something. Humans are not bacteria sitting in a closed glass jar, and we will not be so limited in our options.

Finally I am concerned about our world population, but not about how many people exist per se, but how many men exist in relation to how many women:

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

There are only three ways for these countries to deal with their sex imbalance problems, which stem from aborting girls for irrational cultural reasons:

1. Killing off excess males: This likely would involve war between China and India, both of whom have this same problem. This is convenient for these countries insofar as they share a border.
2. Opening free state run brothels: Ancient Rome did this albeit for entirely different reasons. But free public brothels is not without precedent. Such brothels will satisfy unmarried males, at least to some degree, and put off the violence and domestic insurrection that will ensue without access to women.
3. Exporting the problem: Send your young males overseas to other countries to live. Young men may be motivated to get advanced degrees and the like for the privilege of living in a country where it’s possible to find female companionship.

I think that option 3 is a very real possibility, and not a pretty one for us here in the west. I think we should impose new immigration laws, forbidding unmarried men from immigrating here without bringing a wife, unless they come from a country with a balanced male/female ratio. But young men from China and India should have wives they bring with them. You may argue that this policy discriminates against gays, but not really. They need only find a lesbian to immigrate here with. But no matter. The point is to not let other countries’ insane population problems be exported to our country. Because there is zero likelihood that we will open state run brothels to deal with the problem, and I doubt that we could or would press recent immigrants into service for a war that we enter into for the express purpose of thinning our artificially high male population. So barring either of those two options means we would see domestic violence the likes of which would make England seem tame by comparison.

Generally immigrants are a blessing. But they could become a curse.

Tags: asteroid, Holy Bible, immigration, population, Sex

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Humor & Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.