Throughout history geographers have tried to understand the connection between population dynamics and the environment. By analyzing this newspaper article by Hannah Waters, we are able to grasp the fundamental ideas of Paul Ehrlich as well as Julian Simon. Ehrlich had studied the population dynamics of butterflies for many years and believed that the human population was too large and would eventually eliminate the earth’s resources. However an economist by the name of Julian Simon would soon argue that humans are not the same as butterflies and that the market economy will prevent resource scarcity. Simon highlights that when a resource becomes rare it will also become costly, which will soon lead to the need of finding more of this resource or creating alternatives.
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Thomas Malthus perspective on the population is no doubt the most elaborate as far of Population analysis is concerned. His insight on the correlation between population growth and resources available serves as the basis of population management worldwide. The ideas Thomas hypothesized in his essay on population have been applied immensely not only in academic disciplines but also in social policy making by providing remedies to problems associated with population growth.
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A long-standing debate on the dynamics of population growth in human history has become polarized between a Malthusian stance and a Boserupian one. The former tends to view population growth as limited by carrying capacity, dependent on environment and technology, whereas the latter sees population growth itself as a major inducement to social, economic and technological developments. In this paper the authors experiment with approaching this debate by using recent developments in evolutionary theory. According to these, evolutionary principles, as expounded by Charles Darwin and subsequent evolutionary scientists, apply not only to biological evolution but also to social or cultural evolution. Here, the role of genes is taken over by culture and, since culture is much more pliable than our DNA, evolution speeds up. As the only organisms on Earth whose evolution relies as heavily on culture as on genes, humans have become extremely adaptable. Their hyper-adaptability suggest that humans, through their cultural evolution, have managed increasingly to adapt to their own growing population, thus succeeding in accommodating ever- growing numbers. This hypothesis fits the Boserupian approach to population very well but less so the Malthusian one, perhaps indicating a gradual shift from a Malthusian regime to a Boserupian one in human history. The hypothesis is discussed and examined through four case studies: The beginning of farming around Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey, the productive farming systems of Tiwanaku in South America, the population crisis of late medieval and early modern Iceland, and the ‘collapse’ of Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
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Trends in Ecology & Evolution
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