Science: Million-Year Prophecy

Monday, Jan. 19, 1953

It takes a hardy man to predict the future of the human race for the next million years. Such a man is
Charles Galton Darwin, 65, grandson of the late great Charles Robert (The Origin of Species) Darwin, and
former Master of Christ College, Cambridge. His just-published book, The Next Million Years (Doubleday;
$2.75), is sugar-coated with flowing, donnish English, but it contains a bitter pill for people with faith in
human progress. The ultimate future of the race, says Writer Darwin, will be much like its deplorable past.

Darwin is a theoretical physicist, but he invades sociological territory where many sociologists fear to tread.
He bases his reasoning about man's future on what is sometimes called "social physics": the idea that the
behavior of humans in very large numbers can be predicted by the statistical methods that physicists use
with large numbers of molecules.

Gloomy Prediction. Physicists know that the motions of single molecules (e.g., in a gas) are unpredictable.
They may move fast or slow and zigzag in any direction. But the impacts of billions of gas molecules against
a restraining surface produce a steady push that obeys definite and rather simple laws. In the same manner,
Darwin believes, the actions of individual humans are erratic and sometimes remarkable, but the behavior of
large numbers of them over long periods of time is as predictable as the pressure of gas. All that is needed
is to determine the basic, averaged-out properties of human "molecules."

In Darwin's view, the human molecules have one fundamental property that dominates all others: they tend
to increase their numbers up to the absolute limit of their food supply. This is the familiar thesis of Thomas
Malthus, a senior contemporary of Grandfather Darwin whose gloomy predictions of starvation have haunted
mankind for 150 years.

Grandson Darwin restates Malthus. Human increase, he says, is a "geometrical progression." The more it
has increased, the faster it will increase in the future. Food supply, on the other hand, increases only
"arithmetically" by simple addition. Past increases do not add to its speed of increase.

The natural rate of increase of passably well-fed peoples, Darwin says, leads them to double their numbers
every 100 years. To feed the doubled population, food production must be doubled too. Twice as much land
must be cultivated or the old land must be made twice as productive. In the next century the population will
double again, and the earth must produce four times as much food as it does now.

Darwin admits that present-day food production can be stepped up. He says, for instance, that a way of
turning wood into human food would be a great forward step. The Germans used this very simple process
on a large scale during World War II, and "wood molasses" for cattle feed has been produced in small
quantities in the U.S.

End in Sight. But Darwin is not interested in such small details. On his chosen scale of 1,000,000 years they
will not be important. Each laborious triumph in food production will only put off the evil day. The earth's
population will double again, again and again. After ten centuries of well-fed doubling, it will have increased
1,024 times. In the unlikely event that the food supply will have kept pace, another mere thousand years of
doubling will certainly bring the end. In the year 3953 A.D., the earth will be felted with people as thick as
mold on a Camembert cheese, and they will need 1,000,000 times as much food as is produced today. "It is
quite impossible," says Darwin, "for any arithmetical progression to fight against a geometrical progression."
When arithmetic finally loses to geometry, human increase must stop. Most babies that are born will die from
the ills of malnutrition before they manage further to replenish the earth.

This sort of reasoning is as old as Malthus, and Darwin knows the arguments that are commonly used
against it. One of them is to point out that the earth's population has increased enormously since the time of
Malthus, but that much of it is better fed now than it was then. His reply: humans have been living in a
fleeting Golden Age that is due to the impact of science on transportation and agriculture. When the Golden
Age is over (and its end is in sight), most of the earth's babies will again starve.
Another familiar anti-Malthusian argument is that modern methods of birth control can keep population down
to manageable levels. This is actually happening in many nations, including some of those that are best fed.
Perhaps such nations as India, where humans are multiplying rapidly, can be induced to do likewise.

A New Species? Grandson Darwin shakes his grey head over this hope. Birth control, he says, is possible
biologically but not sociologically. In accordance with a kind of sociological Gresham's Law,* the people who
restrain their birth rate will be supplanted by those who do not. Backward but ambitious races are sure to
defy the birth rules and increase deliberately at the cost of their prosperous, birth-restraining neighbors.

It would take drastic action by a strong world government, Darwin says, to limit the earth's population, and
no strong world government is likely to last for more than a few centuries. As soon as it weakens even
slightly, rebellious races or creeds will use the wombs of their women as weapons of social aggression.

Darwin's conclusion is that the human race will have all sorts of ups & downs, perhaps even some more
temporary Golden Ages. But the philoprogenitive pressure of its sociological molecules will undo it in the
end. No matter what science, government and religion try to do about population, humans will increase like
fruit flies in a geneticist's breeding bottle. Stability will come only when starvation sets an impassable limit.

There is one distant ray of hope. By Darwin's reckoning, the average animal species continues for only
about a million years without major change. After that time the human species, still very young, may have
produced a new species. Perhaps the neo-humans will be able to keep their numbers adjusted to their food
supply without the help of starvation.

* That bad currency drives out good.

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