Hmm, Maybe the Population Bomb Fizzled

The ‘Population Explosion’ Myth Blows Up

The 'Population Explosion' Myth Blows Up
(AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)
People in the United States and Europe have long taken for granted the idea that the world is in the midst of a “population explosion” that threatens to cause the starvation of millions and render the earth uninhabitable The world, we were told, would simply run out of food, and could not possibly sustain the population it would soon have. This was how generations of people were sold on the idea that it was the “responsible” thing to do to have small families, and it even led to the weakening of the idea of the family itself as contributing to the looming problem that looked as if it would kill us all. There was just one problem with the whole scenario: there was no population explosion at all, as a new study has now confirmed.

The UK’s far-Left Guardian admitted Monday that “the long-feared ‘population bomb’ may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.” The Club of Rome study, which was “carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School,” predicts that “on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly.” This being the Guardian, it added: “The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels.”

It’s jarring to read this. Population explosion hysteria has been a staple of education for decades, and there are no doubt millions of people who still take the idea that soon there will be many more people on earth than can possibly be fed as axiomatic fact. Americans have so internalized this belief that people with large families are guilt-tripped on a routine basis. I myself can remember being inundated with this propaganda in public school at all levels, although of course, no one recognized it as propaganda in those palmy days, as far back as the early 1970s. The population explosion myth became the basis for many of the Left’s other favored agendas, including the “climate crisis,” the bug-eating plan, and even the sexual revolution, which was in large part made possible by the contraception and abortion that we were told had to be readily available in order to try to bring the world’s population under control.

All this is largely the work of one man, Paul Ehrlich, who despite being an obvious fraud (or perhaps because he’s an obvious fraud) is enjoying a new vogue among Leftists today. The Wall Street Journal noted in Jan. 2023 that the establishment media treats the 90-year-old Ehrlich “with an obsequious deference,” as evidenced in a “recent cringe-worthy segment on CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’” that retailed the population explosion myth yet again.

Ehrlich started the hysteria rolling in 1968 with his bestselling book The Population Bomb. It began, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” In April 1970, he amplified the warning, saying: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” Ehrlich even predicted that England would cease to exist by the year 2000.

England still exists as of this writing (although some may think it is in such bad shape that it would have been better off shuffling off this mortal coil 23 years ago), and 100-200 million people have not been starving to death every year. And now we learn that the whole thing was false.

But Leftist hysteria doesn’t die that easily. The authors of the new study that definitively debunks the idea of the population explosion still “caution that falling birthrates alone will not solve the planet’s environmental problems, which are already serious at the 8 billion level and are primarily caused by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority.” See? We need global socialism, with the forced confiscation and redistribution of wealth. That’ll fix everything!

Ben Callegari, one of the authors of the new study, emphasized this: “This gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won’t go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective. We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.” What is coming? Socialism is coming, and the resulting famines and starvation will take care of overconsumption once and for all.

from:    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/03/27/now-they-tell-us-new-study-shows-that-the-population-explosion-was-a-myth-n1681928

Genetic Mutations & Supermen

Scientists Ask If A New Race Of Super Earthlings Are Being Born

October 26, 2015

Scientists Ask If A New Race Of Super Earthlings Are Being Born

Scientists have made an unexpected and unsettling discovery – a large number of new and previously unseen mutations have been detected among humans.

There are those who suggest that there will soon be fantastic X-men among humans. These super earthlings do not come out of secret laboratories, as in famous blockbuster movies, but are born naturally. Other scientists are less optimistic and consider the unforeseen development can to lead to unknown changes in the human body.

This unexpected and terrifying discovery is a result of a study conducted by scientists from Cornell University (USA) and University of California.

When they examined genes of several thousands of people from around the world, it turned out that mankind has acquired over the past few years new, previously unseen mutations.

The scientist studied 202 genes in 14,002 people. The human genome contains some 3 billion base pairs; the scientists studied 864,000 of these pairs. While this is only a small part of the genome, the sample size of 14,002 people is one of the largest ever in a sequencing study in humans.

This project led by John Novembre of the University of California Los Angeles and Vincent Mooser of UK-based drug company GlaxoSmithKline, reports that more than 95% of variants found by sequencing 202 genes in 14,002 people were rare, and that 74% of the variants were carried by only one or two people in the study.

“I knew there would be rare variation but had no idea there would be so much of it!” said the senior author of the research, John Novembre, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of bioinformatics at UCLA.

In the study, 10,621 people had one of 12 diseases, including coronary artery disease, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, osteoarthritis and Alzheimer’s disease; 3,381 did not have any of the diseases.

“The large sample size allows us to see patterns with more clarity than ever before,” Novembre said.

“If rare variants are like distant stars, this kind of large sample size is like having the Hubble Telescope; it’s allowing us to see more than before.

We see a ton of rare variation, and these rare variants more often make changes to proteins than not. In that way, this study has important implications for the genetic basis of disease in humans. It’s consistent with the idea that many diseases may be partly caused by rare variants.”

“Research carried out fifty years ago, showed that the mutant gene had only one man among a thousand, and now five people”, explained John Novembre.

What is causing the mutations?

Previously it was thought that genetic abnormalities are caused by of radiation, viruses, transposons and mutagenic chemicals, but now scientists have identified yet another factor that results in mutations – overpopulation!

Human population growth helps to explain the large number of genetic variants, the scientists said.

“The fact that we see so many rare variants is in part due to the fact that human populations have been growing very rapidly,” Novembre said. “Because the human population has grown so much, the opportunity for mutations to occur has also grown. Some of the variants we are seeing are very young, dating to population growth since the invention of agriculture and even the Industrial Revolution; this growth has created many opportunities for mutation in the genome because there are so many transmissions of chromosomes from parent to child in large populations.”

As a result of overpopulation, rare gene variants are much more likely to occur. And scientists do not rule out that soon there may be new types of mutations that lead to unknown changes in the human body.

Is a new race of X-men being born?

There are scientists who see benefits with mutations. Professor Darren Kessner of Univerist of California has for example suggested that among Earthlings there will soon be a fantastic group of “X-Men.” They beings do not come out of secret laboratories, as in the famous blockbuster movies, but are born naturally.

“New mutations are the source of inherited variation, some of which can lead to disease and dysfunction, and some of which determine the nature and pace of evolutionary change. These are exciting times.

We are finally obtaining good reliable estimates of genetic features that are urgently needed to understand who we are genetically,” said Joseph Nadeau, from the Case Western Reserve University in the US.

Both useful and harmful mutations have always existed as a completely normal phenomenon, but if the number of mutations increases dramatically, one cannot help wondering what implications this development will have for the human race.

from:    http://in5d.com/scientists-ask-if-a-new-race-of-super-earthlings-are-being-born/