In what sense could Malthus possibly be considered wrong? I’m a bit confused here. Are you actually denying the theory of evolution in general?
I’m not generally a fan of evolutionary psychology, I’m somewhat uncertain about gender differences in libido (my priors massively favor such differences, but the evidence moves me away from them, leaving me confused), and I’m moderately optimistic about polyamory, but between bad writing style, blatantly stupid conclusions and incoherent argument I wish I could vote this down more than once.
but between bad writing style, blatantly stupid conclusions and incoherent argument I wish I could vote this down more than once.
Could you qualify those criticisms? What do you dislike about my writing style? Which conclusions are blatantly stupid? Which arguments do you find incoherent?
Personally, I found that there wasn’t a sufficiently clear distinction between when an argument was part of the “standard model”, when it was made in the book, and when it was your opinion.
Also, this sentence:
There are four major research areas supporting the standard narrative that Sex at Dawn identifies in Chapter 3 as underpinned by Flintstoned reasoning, which collectively lead to the conclusion that “Darwin says your mother’s a whore.” (Ryan and Jethá, 50)
… is very confusing, and trying to be witty doesn’t help. Just look at the grammar:
A supports B that C identifies as underpinned by D, which leads to the conclusion that “E says F” (G).
I mean, what the fuck? Is the conclusion that “Darwin says your mother’s a whore.” or “your mother’s a whore.”?
I understood the sentence after three or four rereadings, but I certainly wouldn’t put it in the hall of fame of “clear and concise writing”.
What Cousin It said for starters. Really, almost every adjective that I could apply to the post as a whole is negative, every description I could make of it, etc. There’s just no reasoning there.
For what it’s worth, I upvoted Cousin It’s comment and, having slept on it, agree that the way I structured the posts in this sequence was an error; I will avoid quarantining large piles of evidence in this fashion should I write such a series in the future.
Unlike Cousin It, your criticism provided no information that would allow me to avoid offending you in the future. I suppose signaling your distaste has been satisfying, but you may want to consider being nicer; given your support for that notion, I’m really quite surprised to see this hostility in the first place.
I don’t actually feel hostile. I’m not offended at all. I don’t think you are being dishonest, hostile, lazy, or in any sense a jerk. What I feel is a desire for you to practice critical thinking somewhere with lower standards (and especially by reading discussions where people actually change their mind, admittedly those are difficult to find) before posting here. I’d like you to actually learn to think and write more skillfully and then come back.
My comment was lazy and unhelpful. It deserves downvotes (given that opinion, should I just delete it?). As noted though, what CousinIt said is only the tip of the iceberg. I really don’t want to try to explain all of what I think is wrong with it.
If I am actually bad enough at thinking and writing that I am a net loss to this community, as you seem to be implying, I do not see why this is so. If I don’t know what you are requesting that I fix, how should I know when to come back?
Your repeated refusal to justify your claims strikes me as a form of logical rudeness. When I look at my total karma and the average karma of posts and comments I’ve made, I see that there is generally some level of appreciation for my contributions to this website. Why do you disagree with the consensus strongly enough to ask me to leave?
No, I don’t think there’s room to consider a refusal to take part in a debate a form of logical rudeness. The purpose of logical rudeness is to hide the absence of a counter-argument: openly refusing to offer one is a different thing.
Is it really unobjectionable to make a strong attack on a position and refuse to explain why?
It can be justified in certain circumstances. Sometimes I see a terribly wrong argument, but providing a satisfactory counter-argument would require much more time and space than I have available. In such situations, I will sometimes write a reply that the argument is wrong, but proving this would require more effort that I can realistically afford, so that the author should take it on authority and good faith that he needs to reconsider his position (and perhaps do some more learning before he’s competent to tackle the problem constructively).
(This is not meant to imply anything more specific about this concrete dispute—I am merely giving a general answer to the question.)
Is it really unobjectionable to make a strong attack on a position and refuse to explain why?
The strength of the attack should be evaluated according to evidence contained in the attack. If it’s a statement from authority, then not very much evidence, depending on who states what on which topic. Still better than no input, but often not by much.
I don’t have time for a justification, take it for what it is. That may be rude, but it is definitely not analogous to what is discussed in the post you linked to. I suppose though, in terms of justifications, that fact is pretty close to what I’m thinking of. You seem to implicitly make analogies which are simply wrong, to do it routinely, and to do it in a manner which would be time-consuming to correct. I’d rather Karma ask for me, but I think people are far too generous with Karma in general, not just with you.
The post on logical rudeness identifies the following subtypes of the phenomenon:
Switching between two arguments whenever headway is being made against one, such that neither can ever be refuted because the topic is changed every time that becomes a danger.
Suddenly weakening a claim without acknowledging that it is any sort of concession.
Offering a non-true rejection.
Eliezer also identifies the opposite of logical rudeness, to which he aspires:
I stick my neck out so that it can be chopped off if I’m wrong, and when I stick my neck out it stays stuck out, and if I have to withdraw it I’ll do so as a visible concession. I may parry—and because I’m human, I may even parry when I shouldn’t—but I at least endeavor not to dodge. Where I plant my standard, I have sent an invitation to capture that banner; and I’ll stand by that invitation.
Saying (as you have) that “you’re stupid and bad at thinking and I won’t say why but it’s so bad that I want you to go away” is a form of logical rudeness I would generally identify as
Making strong claims, stating that they are backed up by strong evidence, and then refusing to provide that evidence.
Like the subtypes Eliezer describes, it’s a form of motivated arguing that makes losing the argument impossible.
That doesn’t sound like any sort of neck-sticking-out I’m familiar with. You have not invited me to capture your banner; you have hidden it.
The opinion “this is stupid” is correctly expressed with a downvote. The opinion “this is so stupid it requires multiple downvotes” is correctly expressed by convincing others to add their downvotes to yours. Most of us didn’t come here to read unthought personal opinions.
Presumably, however others do. One can learn thinking by observation, and we’re surely not the people to look to for writing skill, except possibly if one simply means logical care and analytical clarity as one’s definition of writing skill.
In what sense could Malthus possibly be considered wrong?
Ryan and Jetha, 154:
Malthus based his estimates of human reproductive rates on the recorded increase of (European) population in North America in the previous 150 years (1650-1800). He concluded that the colonial population had doubled every twenty-five years or so, which he took to be a reasonable estimate of the rates of human population growth in general.
In the roughly 2 million years our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers, the population rose from about 10,000 protohumans to about 4 million modern humans. If, as we believe, the growth pattern during this era was fairly steady, then the population must have doubled about every quarter million years, on average.
So that’s Malthus off by a factor of 10,000 on human population growth rates. On that basis, I’m quite comfortable accepting the conclusion that his theory of population growth was wrong.
Are you actually denying the theory of evolution in general?
No. If I were, I doubt I would be reviewing a book about evolutionary psychology.
I see no contradiction between those claims, and am surprised that you see one.
Malthus said that human population would catch up with available resources, and since the growth in resources was slower than the growth of population, and to estimate that, we can look at how fast population grows when there are very little constraints on resources, as in North America recently colonized by Europeans. When you look at population growth in the last two million years, you’re seeing population growth with resource constraints, and yes it’s much slower, which is what Malthus is saying. It certainly doesn’t prove him wrong.
Which resource constraints? Food? Prior to the appearance of agriculture, human fossils show almost no signs of malnutrition; afterwards, malnutrition is rampant.
Furthermore, you can’t look at 17th century Europeans and draw conclusions about hunter-gatherers. For example, hunter-gatherers typically breastfeed for 5-6 years, spacing out births far more than Europeans who had access to dairy animals. They also have less body-fat, pushing the onset of menstruation back to the late teens.
Like Malthus, you are looking at post-agricultural societies and assuming that pre-agricultural societies operate in precisely the same way. This is thoroughly and completely wrong.
(Again, I am drawing from Sex at Dawn’s 11th chapter.)
Like Malthus, you are looking at post-agricultural societies and assuming that pre-agricultural societies operate in precisely the same way. This is thoroughly and completely wrong.
I bloody well am not.
I’m just saying that the numbers you show (population growth in 150 years of recently-colonized US; population growth in two million years of prehistoric humanity) do not show malthus wrong. Sure there are some things that Malthus didn’t know, and his model of reality was probably less accurate than ours. If you went back in time and showed him those numbers, and those numbers only, he would shrug and say “so what?”.
So this:
So that’s Malthus off by a factor of 10,000 on human population growth rates. On that basis, I’m quite comfortable accepting the conclusion that his theory of population growth was wrong.
Sure there are some things that Malthus didn’t know, and his model of reality was probably less accurate than ours.
Is there some meaning of “wrong” which does not involve inaccurate models?
Malthus claimed that human population doubled every 25 years unless limited in some way by the amount of available food.
So if there had been some span of time during which the human population was not limited in any way by a scarcity of available food and did not double at that rate, then that would be evidence that directly contradicts his theory.
There is, in fact, such a span of time. As I have pointed out, for two million years of human existence, there is no substantial evidence of famine. And yet the population did not double at Malthus’s proposed rate. Or ten times his proposed rate. Or a hundred times his proposed rate. In what way is he not wrong?
That is a flawed argument, WrongBot. Visible signs of starvation aren’t necessary to assume humans were living along Malthusian limits. Rates of violence were extremely high amongst hunter gatherers (homicide was the most common cause of death). According to Stephen Pinker, 20-60% of males were murdered. This shouldn’t surprise those of us who understand human nature, people will gladly start killing each other before they let themselves starve to death.
In addition, females menstruating less is a natural response to malthusian conditions. The malthusian limits wouldn’t look like hungry bodies, it would look like fewer pregnant women per year, and more murders.
That probably tells me all I need to know about Ryan and Jetha. I’ll read them, but if they dislike Pinker’s conclusions rather than his writing style they probably don’t like rationality much as I understand the term, as he’s the only mainstream academic I’m aware of who visibly demonstrates the full suite of traditional rationalist virtues in essentially all of his writing. As you might guess, I’m a big fan of traditional rationalist virtues, but as you might not know unless you have seen me speak recently, I’m also a fan of those who energetically reject them, so this should be fun.
Their primary issue with him is not his writing style or his conclusions: it’s that he blatantly misrepresents anthropological data to support his bottom-line conclusions.
For example, the way he claims that “20-60% of males were murdered” in hunter-gatherer societies in order to support the superhappy conclusion that human societies are becoming less violent over time.
For example, the way he claims that “20-60% of males were murdered” in hunter-gatherer societies in order to support the superhappy conclusion that human societies are becoming less violent over time.
Wait, what exactly is wrong with this claim? If large percentages of the male population were murdered that are no longer being murdered, how is that not “less violent”?
If you’re going to address that point in your next post, then no rush.
I’ll be covering this in the next post, but the very short version is that it isn’t his reasoning, it’s that the 20-60% number is derived in an incredibly misleading way; there is substantial anthropological and fossil evidence that he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Much less than 2% to 6% of modern people are murdered. If, as you claim, the numbers were an order of magnitude lower than Pinker’s claim, the number of homicide deaths would still be an order of magnitude higher than the current global average of about 8 per 100,000 per year.
ETA: Thats a good point FAWS, thanks. I changed it.
8 per 100,000 would be per year, not per lifetime. Assuming an average life span of 70 years that would be about 0.56%, just about one order of magnitude lower.
there is substantial anthropological and fossil evidence that he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
It was a one sentence comment. I’m starting to worry about this community’s ability to argue in good faith.
(This criticism is not necessarily directed at you, knb; it’s not a preposterously unlikely mistake, and I know I’ve made errors of this type. It’s their frequency on LessWrong that’s starting to get to me.)
I am having difficulty with this thread. As I understand biology:
all organisms (not just humans) tend to be able to produce more offspring then the environment can support
those individuals that produce the most living (and reproducing) offspring have their genes in higher frequency in the population
therefore natural selection works and populations evolve
Both Darwin and Wallace crystallized their ideas on evolve after reading Malthus. It doesn’t matter if Malthus was wrong on some minor points—his general idea is one of the foundations of evolution by natural selection. If you throw out Malthus’ general idea then you throw out natural selection. You cannot have it both ways.
Also, the idea that famine did not occur throughout human history is naive.
Malthus claimed that human population doubled every 25 years unless limited in some way by the amount of available food.
So if there had been some span of time during which the human population was not limited in any way by a scarcity of available food and did not double at that rate, then that would be evidence that directly contradicts his theory.
Are you reading Malthus, or just listening to the little caricature of Malthus in your head and the popular media? Your own link doesn’t even say that!
“In the United States of America, where the means of subsistence have
been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and consequently the checks to early marriages fewer, than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself in twenty-five years.”
Basic grammar tells me that Malthus enumerates 2 checks on the population, only one of which has anything to do with food.
Earlier, Malthus writes:
“I think it will be allowed, that no state has hitherto existed (at least that we have any account of) where the manners were so pure and simple, and the means of subsistence so abundant, that no check whatever has existed to early marriages, among the lower classes, from a fear of not providing well for their families, or among the higher classes, from a fear of lowering their condition in life. Consequently in no state that we have yet known has the power of population been left to exert itself with perfect freedom.”
If you wish to not allow this, you need to prove both points: about means of subsistence being so abundant no fear exists, and about manners being pure and simple.
And more generally, you don’t grapple with the most fundamental point: population growth can be exponential, and resource growth is not.
So if there had been some span of time during which the human population was not limited in any way by a scarcity of available food and did not double at that rate, then that would be evidence that directly contradicts his theory.
The key point here is “not limited in any way by a scarcity of available food”.
The conversation went roughly like this
WrongBot: Malthus was wrong
MichaelVassar: what! why?
WrongBot: Well, here is evidence A (population growth data)
Emile: What? Evidence A is perfectly compatible with what Malthus said!
WrongBot: There is also evidence B (no signs of malnutrition in hunter-gatherers, etc.).
What I’m saying is that Evidence A alone is not enough to say Malthus was wrong. And that if you went back in time and showed evidence A only to Malthus, he would shrug. Do you disagree with this?
Evidence A without Evidence B is insufficient to wholly refute Malthus, yes, though I will point out that he predicts cycles of growth and starvation that are inconsistent with the slow and steady changes in population that seem to have characterized the spread of prehistoric humans. (There were massive die-offs at several points, but what evidence is available ties those points to natural disasters, not famine.)
I don’t want to say Malthus is wrong. His conclusions flow naturally from his assumptions.
Perhaps both sides of this spat could simply say Malthus is irrelevant when his assumptions (positive relationship between wealth and birth rates, population grows faster than economy) don’t hold?
simply say Malthus is irrelevant when his assumptions (positive relationship between wealth and birth rates, population grows faster than economy) don’t hold?
This is the correct view; his argument is practically deductive, and the only way around it is to take one of his escape holes: people collectively choosing a higher standard of living rather than offspring. The real questions we should be discussing are:
Applied to the argument in the post, the correct view is simply that Malthus was right. Applied to understanding of Malthus and Darwin in general I agree with your comment.
The demographic transition is temporary unless natural selection can’t influence desire for offspring. Hanson I think makes a similar argument as to why the future in his view is probably sort of Malthusian.
If I understand correctly, you’re saying that prehistorical hunter-gatherers avoided the Malthusian equilibrium by practicing a collective strategy of restraint from excessive breeding. But even if such a situation came to pass, it could never be a stable equilibrium over long periods of time. In such a situation, individuals who “cheated” by breeding above average and passing the same characteristic to their offspring would have caused their descendants to spread like wildfire, completely overwhelming those who restrained their breeding.
There is a general principle operating here akin to the old saying that nature abhors vacuum—namely, any population of reproducible organisms abhors a state where additional resources exist that could support further population growth all up to the Malthusian limit.
In such a situation, individuals who “cheated” by breeding above average and passing the same characteristic to their offspring would have caused their descendants to spread like wildfire, completely overwhelming those who restrained their breeding.
What simple adaptation do you propose to allow individuals to improve their average number of offspring, given that breastfeeding duration and menstruation-onset are traits of present-day foraging societies?
Or, for that matter, how do you explain the observed low population growth? Human fossils from that era don’t show signs of chronic malnutrition, and present-day foraging societies generally don’t have problems acquiring food.
There is a general principle operating here akin to the old saying that nature abhors vacuum—namely, any population of reproducible organisms abhors a state where additional resources exist that could support further population growth all up to the Malthusian limit.
This principle ignores the necessity of a mechanism for highly-variable population growth. Absent radical environmental changes (e.g. agriculture), such a mechanism has not been demonstrated.
What simple adaptation do you propose to allow individuals to improve their average number of offspring, given that breastfeeding duration and menstruation-onset are traits of present-day foraging societies?
Anything that makes people more phyloprogenitive will do the trick. In the long run, even behavioral mutations are conceivable, but cultural changes can also have a dramatic effect, and they act nearly instantaneously on evolutionary timescales. You yourself provide one possible answer: in the situation you describe, a mere cultural change that would shorten the breastfeeding period would, ceteris paribus, boost the fertility significantly.
Or, for that matter, how do you explain the observed low population growth? Human fossils from that era don’t show signs of chronic malnutrition, and present-day foraging societies generally don’t have problems acquiring food.
Obviously, the most reasonable explanation for low population growth is that the foragers were in a Malthusian equilibrium. The Malthusian principle says only that some resource constraint will stop further population growth, not what exactly that constraint will be. Other commenters in this thread have already suggested scenarios that wouldn’t necessarily leave too many emaciated corpses around.
The facts that early human populations: (1) expanded over vast continents, and (2) recovered from population bottleneck disasters imply that the potential for population growth was there, as far as the biological constraints on fertility are concerned. If local population growth wasn’t happening through prolonged periods of time, it means that something was preventing it. The idea that it was stopped by humans somehow successfully coordinating to limit their fertility and avoid the tragedy of the commons strikes me as implausible to the point of absurdity, for the reasons already mentioned. There is no plausible way how such a state of affairs could have emerged, and even if it did, it could never be stable through any significant period of time.
If local population growth wasn’t happening through prolonged periods of time, it means that something was preventing it. The idea that it was stopped by humans somehow successfully coordinating to limit their fertility and avoid the tragedy of the commons strikes me as implausible to the point of absurdity, for the reasons already mentioned.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Anything that makes people more phyloprogenitive will do the trick. In the long run, even behavioral mutations are conceivable, but cultural changes can also have a dramatic effect, and they act nearly instantaneously on evolutionary timescales. You yourself provide one possible answer: in the situation you describe, a mere cultural change that would shorten the breastfeeding period would, ceteris paribus, boost the fertility significantly.
Errr, yes, this happened. Approximately 10,000 years ago, in fact. Agriculture is a mere cultural change that shortened the breastfeeding period with a nearly instantaneous effect, by an evolutionary timescale.
The Malthusian principle says only that some resource constraint will stop further population growth, not what exactly that constraint will be.
Predation is not a resource constraint, yet it too halts population growth. The high rates of infant and maternal mortality that prevailed in all human societies prior to the past two centuries also limited population growth. Resource constraints, food or otherwise, are far from the sole determinant of population size.
In what sense could Malthus possibly be considered wrong?
My reaction also. Google “lottke volterra”. The Lottke-Volterra equation is a well-accepted model for predator and prey populations. Remove predators from the equation, and you have Malthus.
Suppose Malthus were right. What would you see looking back over a 2 million year period? You wouldn’t see 40 trillion people alive today. You’d see repeated cycles of boom-bust: Population growth, overpopulation, population crash.
If you could state how the observation would differ if Malthus were wrong vs. if Malthus were right, I might listen to you.
The way Malthus was wrong was in not observing that viruses and pathogenic bacteria are predators of humans.
Suppose Malthus were right. What would you see looking back over a 2 million year period? You wouldn’t see 40 trillion people alive today. You’d see repeated cycles of boom-bust: Population growth, overpopulation, population crash.
And this is not what we see! Please take note of the Hanson quote in my original.
If you could state how the observation would differ if Malthus were wrong vs. if Malthus were right, I might listen to you.
If Malthus were wrong, we could expect to see any number of things that don’t involve growth-overpopulation-crash cycles. For example, we might see slow and steady population growth with very irregular population crashes which correspond with major natural disasters (which are responsible for sudden, large, discontinuous declines in the available food supply). In this particular scenario, we would expect to see very few human fossils that show signs of malnutrition. Whereas if Malthus had been right, we would expect to see much more fluctuation in population levels, and therefore a proportionally high number of human fossils with signs of malnutrition, because deadly famines would be proportionally more common.
And whether or not JanetK thinks I am naive, archaeologists have not found very many malnourished human fossils. Furthermore, if Malthus had been right, we should expect to see most modern forager tribes having at least occasional difficulties getting enough to eat. We should likewise see heavy fluctuation of prey animal populations in the vicinity of human hunter-gatherers.
The Lotka-Volterra equation may do a wonderful job of explaining simple predator-prey relationships, but it assumes exponential growth of the prey population, which is exactly what I’m disputing. [ETA: I took a closer look at the Wikipedia page and noticed that the LV equation also assumes that “the prey population finds ample food at all times.” Removing predators from this equation doesn’t give you Malthus. It gives you infinite growth forever.]
The way Malthus was wrong was in not observing that viruses and pathogenic bacteria are predators of humans.
Disease epidemics as we currently imagine them did not exist pre-agriculture. Small, widely-dispersed human populations can’t support a sustainable population of bacteria or viruses. The rate of transmission is too low.
The Lotka-Volterra equation may do a wonderful job of explaining simple predator-prey relationships, but it assumes exponential growth of the prey population, which is exactly what I’m disputing.
I’ve got a book somewhere (small trade paperback, dull silver cover[1], title might be Life) which claims that no one has ever gotten those pretty predator-prey equations to cycle nicely in the real world, not even with two species of micro-organisms in a test tube.
The Wiki page for the equation didn’t seem to mention real-world examples.
I’ll update with more detail if I find the book.
[1] It’s a shame amazon doesn’t have searches based on the way people really remember books.
The Wikipedia page does mention the wolf and moose populations in Isle Royale National Park as its sole real-world example. The paper it cites, though, doesn’t seem to find the LV equation to be among the most useful available models, which is a pretty bad sign for its actual descriptive power.
I’ve got a book somewhere (small trade paperback, dull silver cover[1], title might be Life) which claims that no one has ever gotten those pretty predator-prey equations to cycle nicely in the real world, not even with two species of micro-organisms in a test tube.
With 3 species, the LK equation can become chaotic, so I wouldn’t expect to be able to duplicate a real-world history even if the model were perfect.
Perhaps we could find a 2-species real-world LK case involving bacteria deep underground.
You’d see repeated cycles of boom-bust: Population growth, overpopulation, population crash.
And this is not what we see! Please take note of the Hanson quote in my original.
It isn’t? What would we see that would be different? Do you expect to be able to pick out boom-bust cycles that occur in 3 or 4 generations, in a fossil record going back 2 million years?
In this particular scenario, we would expect to see very few human fossils that show signs of malnutrition. Whereas if Malthus had been right, we would expect to see much more fluctuation in population levels, and therefore a proportionally high number of human fossils with signs of malnutrition, because deadly famines would be proportionally more common.
This is an interesting point. You’d have to do the math to figure out how many malnourished fossils we would expect to find.
The Lotka-Volterra equation may do a wonderful job of explaining simple predator-prey relationships, but it assumes exponential growth of the prey population, which is exactly what I’m disputing.
Yes; which is why I mention the Lotka-Volterra equation, and its general acceptance by biologists, as evidence that you are wrong.
Disease epidemics as we currently imagine them did not exist pre-agriculture. Small, widely-dispersed human populations can’t support a sustainable population of bacteria or viruses. The rate of transmission is too low.
Okay. You got me. Malthus was completely right pre-agriculture.
No, seriously. You just said that hunter-gatherers had no viruses or bacteria. Then why did they have immune systems?
Agricultural communities, and people with animals, and people living in towns, had progressively increasing numbers of parasites, and more dramatic boom-crash cycles, true.
The important point is that hunter-gatherers reached “carrying capacity” before humans even evolved; so you wouldn’t expect to see exponential growth, ever. This is a general truth: Species don’t exist at far-below-carrying-capacity levels, except after a population crash, or on introduction into a new environment. For a fair test of Malthus, you should look at the population growth on introducing a new species into an environment where it has no predators. The introduction of cane toads and rabbits into Australia would be perfect case studies. And, they show Malthus was right.
Also remember that carrying capacity increases with technology. It is not correct to assume that there was no growth in technology before agriculture! Some hunter-gatherers have thousands of impressive technological achievements. “Hunter-gatherer” is not a single level of technology. Just enumerating the number of different snares or traps in the repertoire of some 19th century Native Americans would get you to around 100 technological devices, none of which most college graduates would be able to invent independently. Tanning deer hide required 6 major technical innovations. Flintknapping is a skill similar to playing chess; it requires memorizing countless patterns of rock ledges and lumps, and predicting what will happen several moves ahead. Likewise tracking, weather prediction, and hunting. Basketweaving, cooking, firebuilding, making rope or thread, felting, dyeing, waterproofing, pottery, bow-making, flute-making, waging war—each of these involves a multitude of technological inventions that a modern-day genius would be hard-pressed to come up with on their own.
Anecdotal evidence suggests competition with other groups was the major limiting factor on first contact with Europeans in most of the now United States; while food was the major limiting factor in the far north (and starvation was extremely common).
I think you need to clarify what you mean when you say Malthus was wrong. Do you mean that population does not grow exponentially in the absence of predation or food or territory or other limitations? Then you are wrong. Do you mean that famine and population collapse is not the necessary outcome of reaching carrying capacity? Then you are right. “Carrying capacity” is harder to reach than it sounds, in the same way that running out of oil is hard. It is a limit that is a repulsor in configuration space; the closer you get to it, the harder it is to get any closer.
It isn’t? What would we see that would be different? Do you expect to be able to pick out boom-bust cycles that occur in 3 or 4 generations, in a fossil record going back 2 million years?
WrongBot:
If Malthus were wrong, we could expect to see any number of things that don’t involve growth-overpopulation-crash cycles. For example, we might see slow and steady population growth with very irregular population crashes which correspond with major natural disasters (which are responsible for sudden, large, discontinuous declines in the available food supply). In this particular scenario, we would expect to see very few human fossils that show signs of malnutrition. Whereas if Malthus had been right, we would expect to see much more fluctuation in population levels, and therefore a proportionally high number of human fossils with signs of malnutrition, because deadly famines would be proportionally more common.
Since I guess I wasn’t sufficiently clear: each bust generation should contain a high percentage of individuals who die of starvation or are significantly malnourished during their childhood. For simplicity’s sake I’ll make an incredibly generous assumption that that percentage is 10%, though I’d expect it to be much higher in reality. If one in every four generations is a bust, then that’s 2.5% of all humans in the past 2 million years whose skeletons would show significant signs of malnourishment. But the fossil record contains many fewer malnourished humans than that already conservative figure!
PhilGoetz:
Yes; which is why I mention the Lotka-Volterra equation, and its general acceptance by biologists, as evidence that you are wrong.
Please see the edit to my earlier post. The Lotka-Volterra equation assumes infinite food.
Please also see this link, which JoshuaZ posted. Key quote:
Are such cyclic systems common in Nature? No. How well does the model predict population changes in the real world? Not well, and some of its shortcomings are apparent.
PhilGoetz:
No, seriously. You just said that hunter-gatherers had no viruses or bacteria. Then why did they have immune systems?
Yeah, my bad. I stand by what I said about epidemics, but that bit is obviously wrong.
I don’t think food shortages necessarily leave malnourished fossils behind. Two other things could happen: people could run out of stored food during winter and freeze to death; or people could detect a food shortage coming, and fight over supplies until the population is small enough to support.
Yes; which is why I mention the Lotka-Volterra equation, and its general acceptance by biologists, as evidence that you are wrong.
Please see the edit to my earlier post. The Lotka-Volterra equation assumes infinite food.
But do you understand how biologists use it, and for what uses they accept it? Or is your explanation “well, biologists are stupid, duh”?
If you’re going to go around saying the methods and conclusions in a particular domain are wrong, you need a quite deep understanding of that domain. So far, you haven’t given that impression in your posts on Malthus.
In what sense could Malthus possibly be considered wrong?
I’m a bit confused here. Are you actually denying the theory of evolution in general?
I’m not generally a fan of evolutionary psychology, I’m somewhat uncertain about gender differences in libido (my priors massively favor such differences, but the evidence moves me away from them, leaving me confused), and I’m moderately optimistic about polyamory, but between bad writing style, blatantly stupid conclusions and incoherent argument I wish I could vote this down more than once.
Could you qualify those criticisms? What do you dislike about my writing style? Which conclusions are blatantly stupid? Which arguments do you find incoherent?
Personally, I found that there wasn’t a sufficiently clear distinction between when an argument was part of the “standard model”, when it was made in the book, and when it was your opinion.
Also, this sentence:
… is very confusing, and trying to be witty doesn’t help. Just look at the grammar:
I mean, what the fuck? Is the conclusion that “Darwin says your mother’s a whore.” or “your mother’s a whore.”?
I understood the sentence after three or four rereadings, but I certainly wouldn’t put it in the hall of fame of “clear and concise writing”.
Not my best work, I agree. I’ve edited the post to make that section clearer.
What Cousin It said for starters. Really, almost every adjective that I could apply to the post as a whole is negative, every description I could make of it, etc. There’s just no reasoning there.
For what it’s worth, I upvoted Cousin It’s comment and, having slept on it, agree that the way I structured the posts in this sequence was an error; I will avoid quarantining large piles of evidence in this fashion should I write such a series in the future.
Unlike Cousin It, your criticism provided no information that would allow me to avoid offending you in the future. I suppose signaling your distaste has been satisfying, but you may want to consider being nicer; given your support for that notion, I’m really quite surprised to see this hostility in the first place.
I don’t actually feel hostile. I’m not offended at all. I don’t think you are being dishonest, hostile, lazy, or in any sense a jerk. What I feel is a desire for you to practice critical thinking somewhere with lower standards (and especially by reading discussions where people actually change their mind, admittedly those are difficult to find) before posting here. I’d like you to actually learn to think and write more skillfully and then come back.
My comment was lazy and unhelpful. It deserves downvotes (given that opinion, should I just delete it?). As noted though, what CousinIt said is only the tip of the iceberg. I really don’t want to try to explain all of what I think is wrong with it.
If I am actually bad enough at thinking and writing that I am a net loss to this community, as you seem to be implying, I do not see why this is so. If I don’t know what you are requesting that I fix, how should I know when to come back?
Your repeated refusal to justify your claims strikes me as a form of logical rudeness. When I look at my total karma and the average karma of posts and comments I’ve made, I see that there is generally some level of appreciation for my contributions to this website. Why do you disagree with the consensus strongly enough to ask me to leave?
No, I don’t think there’s room to consider a refusal to take part in a debate a form of logical rudeness. The purpose of logical rudeness is to hide the absence of a counter-argument: openly refusing to offer one is a different thing.
I would think that if one were not interested in taking part in a debate, one wouldn’t start one.
Is it really unobjectionable to make a strong attack on a position and refuse to explain why?
WrongBot:
It can be justified in certain circumstances. Sometimes I see a terribly wrong argument, but providing a satisfactory counter-argument would require much more time and space than I have available. In such situations, I will sometimes write a reply that the argument is wrong, but proving this would require more effort that I can realistically afford, so that the author should take it on authority and good faith that he needs to reconsider his position (and perhaps do some more learning before he’s competent to tackle the problem constructively).
(This is not meant to imply anything more specific about this concrete dispute—I am merely giving a general answer to the question.)
The strength of the attack should be evaluated according to evidence contained in the attack. If it’s a statement from authority, then not very much evidence, depending on who states what on which topic. Still better than no input, but often not by much.
I don’t have time for a justification, take it for what it is. That may be rude, but it is definitely not analogous to what is discussed in the post you linked to. I suppose though, in terms of justifications, that fact is pretty close to what I’m thinking of. You seem to implicitly make analogies which are simply wrong, to do it routinely, and to do it in a manner which would be time-consuming to correct. I’d rather Karma ask for me, but I think people are far too generous with Karma in general, not just with you.
The post on logical rudeness identifies the following subtypes of the phenomenon:
Switching between two arguments whenever headway is being made against one, such that neither can ever be refuted because the topic is changed every time that becomes a danger.
Suddenly weakening a claim without acknowledging that it is any sort of concession.
Offering a non-true rejection.
Eliezer also identifies the opposite of logical rudeness, to which he aspires:
Saying (as you have) that “you’re stupid and bad at thinking and I won’t say why but it’s so bad that I want you to go away” is a form of logical rudeness I would generally identify as
Making strong claims, stating that they are backed up by strong evidence, and then refusing to provide that evidence.
Like the subtypes Eliezer describes, it’s a form of motivated arguing that makes losing the argument impossible. That doesn’t sound like any sort of neck-sticking-out I’m familiar with. You have not invited me to capture your banner; you have hidden it.
I’m not making an argument. I’m making a request, or stating a fact about my opinion if you prefer.
The opinion “this is stupid” is correctly expressed with a downvote. The opinion “this is so stupid it requires multiple downvotes” is correctly expressed by convincing others to add their downvotes to yours. Most of us didn’t come here to read unthought personal opinions.
Valid point.
Apparently your post hits a nerve with some people here.
Not as a rule. The obvious, minor reason is that it provides context for the discussion following it. The less obvious, major reason (one which doesn’t apply here, I think, but which deserves frequent mention) is that revising history is liable to cause massive unpleasantness and reputational damage.
I’ve been known to edit comments to say essentially “OK I take it back”.
Proper protocol, I believe, is to insert an “[edit: disclaimer]” note.
Oh, absolutely it’s best to let the original contents stand when you add such a remark, yes.
How is WrongBot going to learn to think and write more skillfully by moving to a place that’s collectively worse at doing so?
Presumably, however others do. One can learn thinking by observation, and we’re surely not the people to look to for writing skill, except possibly if one simply means logical care and analytical clarity as one’s definition of writing skill.
MichaelVassar:
Ryan and Jetha, 154:
Robin Hanson:
So that’s Malthus off by a factor of 10,000 on human population growth rates. On that basis, I’m quite comfortable accepting the conclusion that his theory of population growth was wrong.
No. If I were, I doubt I would be reviewing a book about evolutionary psychology.
ETA: You may want to review r/K selection theory.
(I should also note that I pulled these citations from the endnotes of chapter 11 of Sex at Dawn.)
I see no contradiction between those claims, and am surprised that you see one.
Malthus said that human population would catch up with available resources, and since the growth in resources was slower than the growth of population, and to estimate that, we can look at how fast population grows when there are very little constraints on resources, as in North America recently colonized by Europeans. When you look at population growth in the last two million years, you’re seeing population growth with resource constraints, and yes it’s much slower, which is what Malthus is saying. It certainly doesn’t prove him wrong.
Which resource constraints? Food? Prior to the appearance of agriculture, human fossils show almost no signs of malnutrition; afterwards, malnutrition is rampant.
Furthermore, you can’t look at 17th century Europeans and draw conclusions about hunter-gatherers. For example, hunter-gatherers typically breastfeed for 5-6 years, spacing out births far more than Europeans who had access to dairy animals. They also have less body-fat, pushing the onset of menstruation back to the late teens.
Like Malthus, you are looking at post-agricultural societies and assuming that pre-agricultural societies operate in precisely the same way. This is thoroughly and completely wrong.
(Again, I am drawing from Sex at Dawn’s 11th chapter.)
I bloody well am not.
I’m just saying that the numbers you show (population growth in 150 years of recently-colonized US; population growth in two million years of prehistoric humanity) do not show malthus wrong. Sure there are some things that Malthus didn’t know, and his model of reality was probably less accurate than ours. If you went back in time and showed him those numbers, and those numbers only, he would shrug and say “so what?”.
So this:
.… is unwarranted.
Is there some meaning of “wrong” which does not involve inaccurate models?
Malthus claimed that human population doubled every 25 years unless limited in some way by the amount of available food.
So if there had been some span of time during which the human population was not limited in any way by a scarcity of available food and did not double at that rate, then that would be evidence that directly contradicts his theory.
There is, in fact, such a span of time. As I have pointed out, for two million years of human existence, there is no substantial evidence of famine. And yet the population did not double at Malthus’s proposed rate. Or ten times his proposed rate. Or a hundred times his proposed rate. In what way is he not wrong?
That is a flawed argument, WrongBot. Visible signs of starvation aren’t necessary to assume humans were living along Malthusian limits. Rates of violence were extremely high amongst hunter gatherers (homicide was the most common cause of death). According to Stephen Pinker, 20-60% of males were murdered. This shouldn’t surprise those of us who understand human nature, people will gladly start killing each other before they let themselves starve to death.
In addition, females menstruating less is a natural response to malthusian conditions. The malthusian limits wouldn’t look like hungry bodies, it would look like fewer pregnant women per year, and more murders.
Ryan and Jetha have a lot to say about Steven Pinker, and none of it is kind. I suspect you will have your objections answered in my next post.
That probably tells me all I need to know about Ryan and Jetha. I’ll read them, but if they dislike Pinker’s conclusions rather than his writing style they probably don’t like rationality much as I understand the term, as he’s the only mainstream academic I’m aware of who visibly demonstrates the full suite of traditional rationalist virtues in essentially all of his writing. As you might guess, I’m a big fan of traditional rationalist virtues, but as you might not know unless you have seen me speak recently, I’m also a fan of those who energetically reject them, so this should be fun.
Their primary issue with him is not his writing style or his conclusions: it’s that he blatantly misrepresents anthropological data to support his bottom-line conclusions.
For example, the way he claims that “20-60% of males were murdered” in hunter-gatherer societies in order to support the superhappy conclusion that human societies are becoming less violent over time.
Wait, what exactly is wrong with this claim? If large percentages of the male population were murdered that are no longer being murdered, how is that not “less violent”?
If you’re going to address that point in your next post, then no rush.
I’ll be covering this in the next post, but the very short version is that it isn’t his reasoning, it’s that the 20-60% number is derived in an incredibly misleading way; there is substantial anthropological and fossil evidence that he is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Much less than 2% to 6% of modern people are murdered. If, as you claim, the numbers were an order of magnitude lower than Pinker’s claim, the number of homicide deaths would still be an order of magnitude higher than the current global average of about 8 per 100,000 per year.
ETA: Thats a good point FAWS, thanks. I changed it.
8 per 100,000 would be per year, not per lifetime. Assuming an average life span of 70 years that would be about 0.56%, just about one order of magnitude lower.
Me:
It was a one sentence comment. I’m starting to worry about this community’s ability to argue in good faith.
(This criticism is not necessarily directed at you, knb; it’s not a preposterously unlikely mistake, and I know I’ve made errors of this type. It’s their frequency on LessWrong that’s starting to get to me.)
I am having difficulty with this thread. As I understand biology:
all organisms (not just humans) tend to be able to produce more offspring then the environment can support
those individuals that produce the most living (and reproducing) offspring have their genes in higher frequency in the population
therefore natural selection works and populations evolve
Both Darwin and Wallace crystallized their ideas on evolve after reading Malthus. It doesn’t matter if Malthus was wrong on some minor points—his general idea is one of the foundations of evolution by natural selection. If you throw out Malthus’ general idea then you throw out natural selection. You cannot have it both ways.
Also, the idea that famine did not occur throughout human history is naive.
Are you reading Malthus, or just listening to the little caricature of Malthus in your head and the popular media? Your own link doesn’t even say that!
Basic grammar tells me that Malthus enumerates 2 checks on the population, only one of which has anything to do with food.
Earlier, Malthus writes:
If you wish to not allow this, you need to prove both points: about means of subsistence being so abundant no fear exists, and about manners being pure and simple.
And more generally, you don’t grapple with the most fundamental point: population growth can be exponential, and resource growth is not.
The key point here is “not limited in any way by a scarcity of available food”.
The conversation went roughly like this
WrongBot: Malthus was wrong
MichaelVassar: what! why?
WrongBot: Well, here is evidence A (population growth data)
Emile: What? Evidence A is perfectly compatible with what Malthus said!
WrongBot: There is also evidence B (no signs of malnutrition in hunter-gatherers, etc.).
What I’m saying is that Evidence A alone is not enough to say Malthus was wrong. And that if you went back in time and showed evidence A only to Malthus, he would shrug. Do you disagree with this?
Evidence A without Evidence B is insufficient to wholly refute Malthus, yes, though I will point out that he predicts cycles of growth and starvation that are inconsistent with the slow and steady changes in population that seem to have characterized the spread of prehistoric humans. (There were massive die-offs at several points, but what evidence is available ties those points to natural disasters, not famine.)
Why do you separate natural disasters from possible causes of famine?
Because Malthus’s theory doesn’t (so far as I’m aware) discuss discontinuous decreases in the available food supply.
But you are right that much of the devastation wrought by natural disasters is due to a shrunken food supply.
I don’t want to say Malthus is wrong. His conclusions flow naturally from his assumptions.
Perhaps both sides of this spat could simply say Malthus is irrelevant when his assumptions (positive relationship between wealth and birth rates, population grows faster than economy) don’t hold?
This is the correct view; his argument is practically deductive, and the only way around it is to take one of his escape holes: people collectively choosing a higher standard of living rather than offspring. The real questions we should be discussing are:
why does the demographic transition exist?
will it last indefinitely?
if it willn’t, when does it end? And will it reverse itself to high-fertility and either a population increase or a decrease in standard of living?
What repercussions does the end of the transition signal?
Question 4 leads us right into Robin Hanson’s crack of a future dawn and Dream Time scenario.
Applied to the argument in the post, the correct view is simply that Malthus was right.
Applied to understanding of Malthus and Darwin in general I agree with your comment.
The demographic transition is temporary unless natural selection can’t influence desire for offspring. Hanson I think makes a similar argument as to why the future in his view is probably sort of Malthusian.
If I understand correctly, you’re saying that prehistorical hunter-gatherers avoided the Malthusian equilibrium by practicing a collective strategy of restraint from excessive breeding. But even if such a situation came to pass, it could never be a stable equilibrium over long periods of time. In such a situation, individuals who “cheated” by breeding above average and passing the same characteristic to their offspring would have caused their descendants to spread like wildfire, completely overwhelming those who restrained their breeding.
There is a general principle operating here akin to the old saying that nature abhors vacuum—namely, any population of reproducible organisms abhors a state where additional resources exist that could support further population growth all up to the Malthusian limit.
What simple adaptation do you propose to allow individuals to improve their average number of offspring, given that breastfeeding duration and menstruation-onset are traits of present-day foraging societies?
Or, for that matter, how do you explain the observed low population growth? Human fossils from that era don’t show signs of chronic malnutrition, and present-day foraging societies generally don’t have problems acquiring food.
This principle ignores the necessity of a mechanism for highly-variable population growth. Absent radical environmental changes (e.g. agriculture), such a mechanism has not been demonstrated.
WrongBot:
Anything that makes people more phyloprogenitive will do the trick. In the long run, even behavioral mutations are conceivable, but cultural changes can also have a dramatic effect, and they act nearly instantaneously on evolutionary timescales. You yourself provide one possible answer: in the situation you describe, a mere cultural change that would shorten the breastfeeding period would, ceteris paribus, boost the fertility significantly.
Obviously, the most reasonable explanation for low population growth is that the foragers were in a Malthusian equilibrium. The Malthusian principle says only that some resource constraint will stop further population growth, not what exactly that constraint will be. Other commenters in this thread have already suggested scenarios that wouldn’t necessarily leave too many emaciated corpses around.
The facts that early human populations: (1) expanded over vast continents, and (2) recovered from population bottleneck disasters imply that the potential for population growth was there, as far as the biological constraints on fertility are concerned. If local population growth wasn’t happening through prolonged periods of time, it means that something was preventing it. The idea that it was stopped by humans somehow successfully coordinating to limit their fertility and avoid the tragedy of the commons strikes me as implausible to the point of absurdity, for the reasons already mentioned. There is no plausible way how such a state of affairs could have emerged, and even if it did, it could never be stable through any significant period of time.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Errr, yes, this happened. Approximately 10,000 years ago, in fact. Agriculture is a mere cultural change that shortened the breastfeeding period with a nearly instantaneous effect, by an evolutionary timescale.
Predation is not a resource constraint, yet it too halts population growth. The high rates of infant and maternal mortality that prevailed in all human societies prior to the past two centuries also limited population growth. Resource constraints, food or otherwise, are far from the sole determinant of population size.
My reaction also. Google “lottke volterra”. The Lottke-Volterra equation is a well-accepted model for predator and prey populations. Remove predators from the equation, and you have Malthus.
Suppose Malthus were right. What would you see looking back over a 2 million year period? You wouldn’t see 40 trillion people alive today. You’d see repeated cycles of boom-bust: Population growth, overpopulation, population crash.
If you could state how the observation would differ if Malthus were wrong vs. if Malthus were right, I might listen to you.
The way Malthus was wrong was in not observing that viruses and pathogenic bacteria are predators of humans.
And this is not what we see! Please take note of the Hanson quote in my original.
If Malthus were wrong, we could expect to see any number of things that don’t involve growth-overpopulation-crash cycles. For example, we might see slow and steady population growth with very irregular population crashes which correspond with major natural disasters (which are responsible for sudden, large, discontinuous declines in the available food supply). In this particular scenario, we would expect to see very few human fossils that show signs of malnutrition. Whereas if Malthus had been right, we would expect to see much more fluctuation in population levels, and therefore a proportionally high number of human fossils with signs of malnutrition, because deadly famines would be proportionally more common.
And whether or not JanetK thinks I am naive, archaeologists have not found very many malnourished human fossils. Furthermore, if Malthus had been right, we should expect to see most modern forager tribes having at least occasional difficulties getting enough to eat. We should likewise see heavy fluctuation of prey animal populations in the vicinity of human hunter-gatherers.
The Lotka-Volterra equation may do a wonderful job of explaining simple predator-prey relationships, but it assumes exponential growth of the prey population, which is exactly what I’m disputing. [ETA: I took a closer look at the Wikipedia page and noticed that the LV equation also assumes that “the prey population finds ample food at all times.” Removing predators from this equation doesn’t give you Malthus. It gives you infinite growth forever.]
Disease epidemics as we currently imagine them did not exist pre-agriculture. Small, widely-dispersed human populations can’t support a sustainable population of bacteria or viruses. The rate of transmission is too low.
I’ve got a book somewhere (small trade paperback, dull silver cover[1], title might be Life) which claims that no one has ever gotten those pretty predator-prey equations to cycle nicely in the real world, not even with two species of micro-organisms in a test tube.
The Wiki page for the equation didn’t seem to mention real-world examples.
I’ll update with more detail if I find the book.
[1] It’s a shame amazon doesn’t have searches based on the way people really remember books.
The Wikipedia page does mention the wolf and moose populations in Isle Royale National Park as its sole real-world example. The paper it cites, though, doesn’t seem to find the LV equation to be among the most useful available models, which is a pretty bad sign for its actual descriptive power.
With 3 species, the LK equation can become chaotic, so I wouldn’t expect to be able to duplicate a real-world history even if the model were perfect.
Perhaps we could find a 2-species real-world LK case involving bacteria deep underground.
This source claims that some real life examples have actually done this correctly including the archetypal rabbit/lynx example.
Upvoted for your footnote :)
It isn’t? What would we see that would be different? Do you expect to be able to pick out boom-bust cycles that occur in 3 or 4 generations, in a fossil record going back 2 million years?
This is an interesting point. You’d have to do the math to figure out how many malnourished fossils we would expect to find.
Yes; which is why I mention the Lotka-Volterra equation, and its general acceptance by biologists, as evidence that you are wrong.
Okay. You got me. Malthus was completely right pre-agriculture.
No, seriously. You just said that hunter-gatherers had no viruses or bacteria. Then why did they have immune systems?
Agricultural communities, and people with animals, and people living in towns, had progressively increasing numbers of parasites, and more dramatic boom-crash cycles, true.
The important point is that hunter-gatherers reached “carrying capacity” before humans even evolved; so you wouldn’t expect to see exponential growth, ever. This is a general truth: Species don’t exist at far-below-carrying-capacity levels, except after a population crash, or on introduction into a new environment. For a fair test of Malthus, you should look at the population growth on introducing a new species into an environment where it has no predators. The introduction of cane toads and rabbits into Australia would be perfect case studies. And, they show Malthus was right.
Also remember that carrying capacity increases with technology. It is not correct to assume that there was no growth in technology before agriculture! Some hunter-gatherers have thousands of impressive technological achievements. “Hunter-gatherer” is not a single level of technology. Just enumerating the number of different snares or traps in the repertoire of some 19th century Native Americans would get you to around 100 technological devices, none of which most college graduates would be able to invent independently. Tanning deer hide required 6 major technical innovations. Flintknapping is a skill similar to playing chess; it requires memorizing countless patterns of rock ledges and lumps, and predicting what will happen several moves ahead. Likewise tracking, weather prediction, and hunting. Basketweaving, cooking, firebuilding, making rope or thread, felting, dyeing, waterproofing, pottery, bow-making, flute-making, waging war—each of these involves a multitude of technological inventions that a modern-day genius would be hard-pressed to come up with on their own.
Anecdotal evidence suggests competition with other groups was the major limiting factor on first contact with Europeans in most of the now United States; while food was the major limiting factor in the far north (and starvation was extremely common).
I think you need to clarify what you mean when you say Malthus was wrong. Do you mean that population does not grow exponentially in the absence of predation or food or territory or other limitations? Then you are wrong. Do you mean that famine and population collapse is not the necessary outcome of reaching carrying capacity? Then you are right. “Carrying capacity” is harder to reach than it sounds, in the same way that running out of oil is hard. It is a limit that is a repulsor in configuration space; the closer you get to it, the harder it is to get any closer.
PhilGoetz:
WrongBot:
Since I guess I wasn’t sufficiently clear: each bust generation should contain a high percentage of individuals who die of starvation or are significantly malnourished during their childhood. For simplicity’s sake I’ll make an incredibly generous assumption that that percentage is 10%, though I’d expect it to be much higher in reality. If one in every four generations is a bust, then that’s 2.5% of all humans in the past 2 million years whose skeletons would show significant signs of malnourishment. But the fossil record contains many fewer malnourished humans than that already conservative figure!
PhilGoetz:
Please see the edit to my earlier post. The Lotka-Volterra equation assumes infinite food.
Please also see this link, which JoshuaZ posted. Key quote:
PhilGoetz:
Yeah, my bad. I stand by what I said about epidemics, but that bit is obviously wrong.
I don’t think food shortages necessarily leave malnourished fossils behind. Two other things could happen: people could run out of stored food during winter and freeze to death; or people could detect a food shortage coming, and fight over supplies until the population is small enough to support.
But do you understand how biologists use it, and for what uses they accept it? Or is your explanation “well, biologists are stupid, duh”?
If you’re going to go around saying the methods and conclusions in a particular domain are wrong, you need a quite deep understanding of that domain. So far, you haven’t given that impression in your posts on Malthus.