POSITIVE FEEDBACKS AND THE OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM

By Jay Hanson – April 15, 2007
Permission to reprint expressly granted.

“The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.” – Sir Peter Medawar

ABSTRACT

The fact that global oil production is peaking now, is not, in and of itself, a problem. The “peak oil problem” will manifest itself in the violent behavior of people who can not get enough resources to feed their families, and the aggressive behavior of governments who will wage war to secure those resources for its citizens. This aggressive behavior was clearly seen in the aggressive behavior of Germany and Japan which led to World War Two. In other words, our peak oil problem is actually our “overpopulation problem” (too many people chasing too few resources). Moreover, since the American government was specifically designed to mitigate social problems by increasing economic activity – and all economic activity reduces available energy – any measure that our present government takes to mitigate our overpopulation problem will make our overpopulation problem even worse by further reducing per capita available energy.

HUMAN NATURE

Every discipline that studies human behavior (economists, sociologists, military planners, police, sports teams, advertising agencies, etc.) assumes that humans are likely to behave in certain ways given a specific environmental stimulus. For example, advertising agencies try to make products appear attractive so potential customers will decide to buy them. Indeed, all of us expect people to act certain ways in certain environments. If we notice someone who isn’t acting as we think they should, we say he or she is acting “suspiciously.”

Evolution theory tells us that people are genetically biased to act in ways that increase their “inclusive fitness”[1]. This includes acting violently in certain environments:

“War is a male reproductive strategy. All that is needed for the strategy to evolve, is that aggressors fight and win more often than they lose.”[2]

SAME GENES, DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Human behavior is determined by genes and environment.[3] Genetically, we are still the same animals we were in the 16th century.[4] What HAS changed since the 16th century is our environment. Given our present environment, the overwhelming majority of Americans decide that fitness is best served by cooperation instead of confrontation. This is because cooperation (working at a job for a paycheck) appears to provide a better fitness payoff than violent behavior.

Humans are genetically-biased to split into smaller tribes when they can’t feed their families by cooperation (as in post WW1 Germany), then migrate and/or wage war on their former allies over resources.[5] We know that these events are coming to America for three fundamental reasons:

1)       America’s political system was not designed to solve social problems.[6] Social problems were intended to be solved by economic activity in the private sector.

Our Founders, for excellent reasons, didn’t trust government, so they founded a “pseudo government” which was controlled by the rich with media and lobbyists. Our Founders based their design on two core assumptions:

a.             Individuals know best how to improve their lives.

b.             The best way to solve social problems is through economic growth.

The best way to increase economic growth is to simply ask people who are good at it for advice. That’s why lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our unskilled elected officials and their appointed cronies would have absolutely no idea what to do.

In other words, elected officials are forced (by design) to ask the factory owners what government can do to increase their profits, so they will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make themselves better off.

Elected officials will keep giving the rich people (factory owners) a greater fraction of the economic pie so they will keep increasing the size of the pie. That’s how our Founders designed it, and that’s how public policy is made today!

Since our country was specifically designed to solve social problems via economic growth, the only remedy our present government can offer for social problems is even MORE economic growth. Thus, everything our government does to mitigate the problem (stimulate economic growth) will make our overpopulation problem even worse because all economic activity reduces our dwindling natural resources.

2)       America’s infrastructure was specifically designed by the rich (e.g., General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil) to “make a profit” by requiring fossil fuel and automobiles [7] for American society to function.

3)       Since all economic activity reduces the remaining energy resources,[8] sooner or later, Americans will not be able to earn enough money to pay the energy overhead of their employment. Sooner or later, ever-rising natural resource costs will make America’s infrastructure too expensive to maintain and it will collapse taking our life-support system with it.

THE NEW/OLD ENVIRONMENT

Genetic and thermodynamic laws inform us that sooner or later an environment which favors violence must re-emerge and Americans will become, once again, “red in tooth and claw.”[9] As per-capita available energy continues to decline, more-and-more Americans will be forced to resort to violence in order to survive. In the new/old environment, it will just make “good sense” to murder your neighbor and take his resources!


[1] “Inclusive fitness” is measured by success at putting one’s genes into the next generation, whether possessed by the individual or by that individual’s relatives.

[2] p. 165, THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, by Michael P. Ghiglieri; Perseus, 1999; http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073820076X

[3] “Environment” in this paper is everything that is not a gene.

[4] http://www.JayHanson.US/ahistoryofviolence.htm

[5] Migration has always been an important factor in the development of America. Examination of the geographical and residential status of early Nineteenth Century Americans reveals that the “persistence rates” (the percentage of those who remained in one location from one census to the next) were approximately 30 to 50 percent. Those rates meant that over one-half of the population would have relocated within ten years. Often the determining factors were lack of economic success, available land, and ways to make a living. For many, overcrowding in towns and cities forced them to move.

HUMANS OVERPOPULATED:

The evidence for and characteristics of past warfare come together, again, in Tikopia, that particularly appropriate example from the “paradise” of the South Pacific. In spite of the efforts to control population, including infanticide and periodic “explorations” for resettlement, the Tikopians could not control their numbers, nor were the sea and land of limitless bounty. In such a small society, with an entire island population of fewer than fifteen hundred people, severe resource stress would not be expected to result in warfare. If there were any place where people might starve when all other courses of action were exhausted, it would be a small island in the middle of nowhere. Yet there was warfare in paradise. At one time Tikopia had three political entities. In the mid-1700s, the group living in the least productive area of the island virtually annihilated the other two political entities or forced them to flee. We know from historical accounts that at least one other major act of warfare had taken place a couple of centuries previously. When Tikopia was not under a single political leadership, violent and annihilating warfare took place at least every few centuries. http://www.JayHanson.US/constantbattles.htm

CHIMPS OVERPOPULATED:

Pieces of this puzzle fell into place in the early 1970s. The process began after Jane Goodall stopped her eight-year program of giving Gombe chimps six hundred bananas a day to habituate them to human observers and to keep them nearby. Her study community split into two factions. The biggest, the Kasakela community of thirty-five apes, stayed in the north. The Kahama faction of fewer than fifteen chimps went south. Within a year or two, the Kasakela males forayed south to the Kahama Valley in sortie after sortie, during which they killed at least five of the seven Kahama. males (the last two vanished due to causes unknown). They likely also killed two of the old females. These gang killings were at least as brutal as the one described at the beginning of this section. Males stomped on, twisted, bit, yanked, dragged, gouged, pounded, dismembered, and threw boulders at their outnumbered opponents with such fierce and deliberately lethal aggression that Goodall admitted, “If they had had firearms and had been taught to use them, I suspect they would have used them to kill.” http://www.JayHanson.US/thedarksideofman.htm

[6] http://www.JayHanson.US/founded.htm

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

[8] Thermodynamic laws, evolution theory, and modern genetic sciences were unknown by our Founders. Today, these laws and sciences signal the end of our form of government.

The first law of thermodynamics (conservation law) states that there can be no creation of matter/energy. This means that the economy is totally dependent upon natural resources for everything. The German physicist Helmholtz and the British physicist Lord Kelvin had explained the principle by the middle of the 19th century.

The second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) tells us that energy is wasted in all economic activity. In 1824, the French physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law’s concepts while working on "heat engines". Lord Kelvin and the German physicist Clausius eventually formalized Carnot’s concepts as the second law of thermodynamics.

Our government was designed to require more-and-more energy (endless economic growth) to solve social problems, but the thermodynamic laws described above limit the available energy. Energy "resources" must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called "sinks" (this is known as the "net energy" principle). In other words, if it costs more-than-one-barrel-of-oil to "produce" one-barrel-of-oil, then that barrel will never be produced -- the money price of oil is irrelevant!  Thus, the net energy principle places strict limits (in the physical sense) on our government’s ability to solve social problems. Although bankers can print money, they can not print energy!

Not only does all economic activity reduce the remaining available energy, all manufacturing activity reduces available minerals: “We must emphasize that every Cadillac or every Zim – let alone any instrument of war – means fewer plowshares for some future generations, and implicitly, fewer future human beings, too.” – Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen ; http://www.dieoff.com/page148.htm

[9] http://www.JayHanson.US/ahistoryofviolence.htm