Malthus estava errado, Darwin se baseou em Malthus: Darwin está errado?

Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash by Fred Pearce

Alok Jha on why Malthus was wrong to fear a population explosion

Alok Jha
The Guardian, Saturday 27 March 2010
Article history

Thomas Malthus has a lot to answer for. As the young cleric performed birth and death rites at the end of the 18th century, he began to notice that there were far more christenings than funerals. The insight led him to write his "Essay on the Principles of Population", a dark warning against the perils of unchecked human reproduction. Overpopulation was a looming threat because the masses were on a treadmill of sex and procreation, he argued. Eventually, the world would run out of food. People would die of starvation. It was nature's way of keeping populations in check.

This "dark and terrible genius" may have been right to pinpoint the idea that population was a potent economic force, says Fred Pearce, but he was wrong about almost everything else. And yet Malthus's ideas persisted among the elites for hundreds of years, spreading a fear of population time bombs and seeding ideas for eugenics programmes up to the last half of the 20th century.

By the 1950s, "population controllers" were everywhere, wringing their hands in NGOs and United Nations agencies, worrying about the coming Malthusian population catastrophe, looking to the poorest parts of the world to curb the population growth. Mass US-funded family planning programmes were targeted at a number of countries, with foreign aid and even trade sometimes dependent on meeting western targets. In India, the government put pressure on citizens to get sterilised, while China's one-child policy led to brutal forced abortions.

But the population-controllers' predictions of world famine in the 1940s and the 1980s never came true. Why? As the numbers grew, so agricultural technology improved. Norman Borlaug won a Nobel prize for developing high-yielding varieties of dwarf wheat in the late 1960s which, if fed with water and fertiliser, would grow large heads without falling over. By the mid-1970s, wheat and maize yields had doubled in places such as India. Some environmentalists have questioned whether this green revolution was such a good thing, tying so many of the world's peasant farmers to mechanised, energy-guzzling farming practices, and Pearce sees their point. "But would they prefer billions starving?" he asks. Even today, whenever famines occur, the problem is rarely an absolute shortage of food but an inability to buy it.

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Read more here: The Guardian

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Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash

by Fred Pearce
352pp,
Eden Project Books,
£12.99

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NOTA CAUSTICANTE DESTE BLOGGER:

Onde foi mesmo que eu li que Darwin se inspirou em Malthus para elaborar a sua teoria da evolução através da seleção natural? Onde foi mesmo? Gente, eu acho que vocês são telepatas.Vocês acertaram em cheio: Origem das Espécies (1859).

Malthus estava errado. Darwin se inspirou em Malthus. QED: Será que Darwin está errado? Pereça tal pensamento, o homem que teve a maior ideia que toda a humanidade já teve não pode ter errado assim tão feio quanto Malthus, y otras cositas mais, oops respostas retóricas desprovidas de evidências.

Fui, nem sei por que, pensando que a ideia de Malthus é de Economia, não é de Biologia. Economia é uma ciência ou não? Ciência 'dura' como a Física? Há controvérsia. Mas em que areia movediça epistêmica Darwin foi 'fundar' sua teoria? Ah, será que eu estou exigindo demais de Darwin...