Headline, November06, 2013

''' EVADING MALTHUSIAN DOOM '''

ONE of the most significant phenomena of modern history is the demographic transition; as people get richer, they have smaller families.

This slowing of reproduction with economic development is the reason why Thomas Malthus's prediction of disaster, caused by the human population outstripping its supply of food, is unlikely ever to come true.

In the short term, Malthusian doom has been evaded by innovations that increased the food supply. But in the long term it is likely to be a ceiling on demand that helps to save humanity. The world's population, now some 7 billion, is expected to level out at a little over 10 billion towards the end of century.

Why the demographic transition happens, though, is obscure -for this reaction by Homo sapiens to abundance looks biologically bonkers. Other species, when their circumstances improve, react by raising their reproductive rate, not curtailing it.

And work just published by Dr Anna Goodman of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and her colleagues, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, suggests what humans do is indeed bananas.

Dr Goodman has shown that the leading explanation advanced by biologists for the transition does not, in the context of the modern world, actually deliver the goods.

This explanation is that, according to circumstances, people switch between two reproductive strategies. One, known to ecologists as : 'r-selection'', is to produce lots of offspring but invest little in each of them. This works in environments with high infant mortality.

The other, known as ''k-selection'', is to have only a few off-spring but to nurture them so that they are superb specimens and will thus do well in the competition for resources and mates, and produce more grandchildren for their parents than their less well-nurtured contemporaries.

The present demographic transition, according to this analysis, is a shift from r-type to k-type behaviour.

To test this idea, Dr Goodman turned to Sweden =specifically, to a group known as the Uppsala Birth Cohort. These people -there about 14,000 of them- were born between 1915 and 1929 in Uppsala University Hospital. They and their descendants have subsequently been tracked by Sweden's efficient system of official records.

Among other things these records show their income and socioeconomic status (which, crucially, are also known for the parents members of the original cohort), how many children have been born to cohort members and their descendants, and when. These data were Dr Goodman's raw material.

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With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Sweden. See Ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' !!! The Future !!! '''

Good Night & God Bless!

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