THE BIOLOGICAL URGE AND THE FUTURE

Whether science fiction should be prophecy or recreation has long been a bone of contention among fans. Certainly there is room for both conceptions, but at the first Annual West Coast Scienti-Fantasy Conference, Ray Bradbury rather decisively cast his vote for the former by saying that our brave new world was going to be an unpleasant one in which to live and it was the S-F authors' duty to warn their readers of this fact, More and more S-F is becoming based upon the "probabilities of possibilities." More and more S-F is turning from mechanical considerations to sociological ones. Let us leave aside atomic Dower, rocket ships cosmic power and similar concepts and consider here only the sociological situation which we may expect to encounter during the next one hundred years.

Physically and mentally mankind's biological evolution ceased before he became civilized. The evolutionary impetus which carried the race from an ape-like ancestor to modern man seems to have spent itself by the time of the appearance of Cro-Magnon man some 25,000 years ago. Philosophically, evolution is no longer viewed as a cosmic scheme of continued progress. It is now recognized as being rather an uncertain and chance laden affair. Modern men may be degenerating rather than improving. We will not evolve into Slans. Some unforeseeable force may cause mutations in the race, but if so they will be totally unpredictable

Bradbury indicated that one reason for the unpleasantness of the coming decades will be the tremendous pressure of world population. We discussed this point in one brief paragraph in 'The Future and Man" in the first issue of PRISM. In the years since that article was written the topic seems to have become a favorite subject of discussion. Books such as Human Breeding and Survival, Geography of Hunger, Human Fertility The Modern Dilemma, and Our Plundered Planet are pouring off the presses faster than one can read them. "Thot" magazines such as READERS DIGEST, AMERICAN MERCURY, HARPERS, and SATURDAY EVENING POST feature articles on the same subject. The Population Reference Bureau periodically issues gloomy bulletins. The Scripps Foundation for Research in Population takes a dim view of the situation. The 1948 convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted its meetings to worrying over the growth in population. The Los Angeles County museam recently displayed an "Our Plundered Planet" exhibit. Etc. Etc. It is clear that no citizen can afford to overlook this matter; no science fiction fan can help but regard it with something resembling horrified fascination. If Bradbury is typical, this is the nexus of the stories which the S-F authors will be writing in the immediate future. Let us then examine it in some detail.

In Road to Survival William Vogt establishes five premises:

The crux of the matter is that the population is increasing faster than is our ability to support it. Malthus, of course, made this same point long ago.

In 1925 Dr. Raymond Pearl, of John Hopkins, published a most remarkable book - The Biology of Population Growth. Dr. Pearl showed that growth of yeast cells, pumkins and nations alike all proceeded according to a curve that could be plotted in the form of a distorted S. Wars, fertility, climatic conditions, etc. had little effect on this curve. By it, future population growth of a nation could be plotted with considerable accuracy, If this sounds fantastic, we need only add that the predictions he made in 1921 of the population of the country in 1950 appears to be more accurate than those made by such organizations as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1931 and the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems in 1938. In Our Plundered Planet fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society, estimates that there were about 400 000,000 people on this earth in 1630. By 1830 this figure had doubled. By 1900 it had doubled again. Now the total is about 2,330,000,000 and the annual increase is in the neighborhood of 20,000,000. The present population of the USA is about 151,000,000 and Pearl estimates it will reach a maximum of 196,681,000 about 2100. By comparison Russia now has a population of 180,000,000 and is expected to have 240,000,000 by 1970. There are more (540,000 000) people alive in Europe alone today than there were in the entire world in 1630. Twenty-five years from now there may be an additional 500,000,000 people. Fifty years from now the world's population may be in excess of 3,000,000,000

It requires 2.54 acres of land per person to feed the population properly. It is estimated by geographers that there are only 4,000,000,000 acres of arable land in. the world, or 1.77 acres per person on a of a population of 2,310,000,000. Thru hydroponics, more scientific farming, etc. science can increse the food supply, but at the same time advances in medicine hygiene etc. tend to increase the population even faster. In such books as Burch and Pendell's Human Breeding and Survival and Vogt's Road to Survival we are warned that one third of our top soil has disappeared. About 100,000,000 acres of crop land has already disappeared and the equivalent of 200 forty acre farms is disappearing every day thru erosion. The Pan American Union's 1946 Report on Activities of the Conservation Section states "It is also no exaggeration to say that Mexico, central America, and South America together form a vanishing continent." One half of our timber is already gone, the great Mesabi iron range is said to be nearly finished, economists are worried about our petroleum supply and the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for 1945 says that "Our known usable reserves of essential minerals have dwindled to a 35-year supply or less..." This same process is going on all over the world. Natural resources are being steadily used up while growing populations ever cry for more.

(The next time some S-F writer depicts a battle between great fleets of space ships, it would be pertinent to enquire where Earth found the material with which to build such fleets.)

On March 15, 1948 the U. S. Census Bureau issued a statement that a down trend in population would be desirable because "it will postpone the exhaustion of our national resources, contribute to economic stability, and lessen the likelihood of deterioration of the quality of the population." The last point may require a little elucidation. Educational achievement seems to be closely related to IQ. The lowest IQ third of our population is breeding about twice as many children as the upper third. Women with less than a grade school education average 3.31 children per woman; those with high school diploma average 1.75; and those with college degree only 1.23. As a result intelligence is being slowly bred out of our population. Dr. Pitrim A. Sorokin, Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, has noted (Crisis of Our Age) that our creative ability seems to be declining. Since the end of the Nineteenth Century the rate of increase of discoveries and inventions has slowed down and the absolute number of discoveries and inventions has declined. The climax (number and importance of discoveries and inventions) was reached in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In a a recent speech Dr. Karl T. Compton, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referred to this problem in the following words:

(Will our descendants have the intelligence necessary to construct and operate space ships?) Further, the age level of our population is constantly increasing. There are now 10,000,000 persons 65 years or over in the U.S. It is estimated by the National Industrial Conference Board that by 1960 this figure will have incresed to 18,000,000, or one for every five productive workers. (Will our descendants have the aggressiveness necessary to set out upon a space voyage or will the conservatism characteristic of old age paralyze such actions?)

Such are the facts and figures as they are seen by many students of the. subject. Their importance may perhaps be better realized. from the fact that the Book of-the Month Club the Nonfiction Book Club and the Semantics Book Club have all chosen Vogt's Road To Survival as one of their. monthly selections. Joseph Henry Jackson, one of America's foremost book reviewers has termed it "in many respects the year's most important book." Harold Ickes, former Secretary of the Interior, says "Everyone who can read, and who is capable of two consecutive thoughts, ought to read this book." There are, of course, those who dispute these findings. The Catholic Church, for instance, is fanatically opposed to any attempts toward a logical solution of the problem by restricting the birth rate. TIME devotes several pages in its November 8, 1948, issue to exposing the errors of the Neo-Malthusians. It argues that scientific farming and industrialization can greatly increase the number of people a given area can support. "The conclusion is that world starvation is not around the corner - - - The land is there, the hands to work it are there, the brains are there. If he uses his head (man) can eat heartily - indefinitely." Paul H. Hallett also contends that science and cooperative effort can increase the food supply to an almost unlimited quantity and that larger populations can better extract natural resources. In the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences K. K. Kucynski estimates the earth can support 10,000,000 000 people. W. F. Wilcox, an agronomic expert, sets the figure at 36 000 000 000. Franz Oppenheimer, a German, economist, places it at 200,000,000,000!

There seems to be little reason to doubt that if - and it is a big if - man uses his knowledge to the best advantage the world can support far more people than it does at present. But is it desirable that it do so? It is significant that those who assure us of the world's ability to support immense numbers of people do not discuss the sociological consequences of such a population increase. Ignoring national and international dislocations, how would you like to live in a world all of which was as crowded as India or China or Puerto Rico today? And even so, we are bit deferring the problem. What is to stop the rate of human increase when it reaches the figures set by the most enthusiastic of Malthus' opponents? Will we not simply have to face the problem again when the situation is even more acute than ever before? (Will this press of population force our descendants to seek other worlds because conditions on this one will have become intolerable?)

In The Human Mind Dr. Karl Menninger remarks that "civilization and culture owe their existence to the thwarting of primitive tendencies.... in this sense civilization itself is a neurotic product." Imagine, if you can, a civilization of 200,000,000,000 population. Here indeed would be a Dreadful Sanctuary rather than the earthly paradise so often predicted in tales of the future. Here indeed would be Ortegay Gasset's "mass man". Hallett and others like him look to science and cooperative effort to save us. Let us enquire as to what is the outlook for science and cooperative effort in a neurotic civilization composed of mass man. There will be scant comfort in the answer. The quotation that follows is taken from an article by Manchester Boddy, editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, who has given a great deal of thot to this very question:

If science is to save mankind from starvation on an earth already overcrowded, our first concern must be centered on the stability of science itself,

Science made mass man possible. Today it is the victim of its own work. In the United States, which has only 6 per cent of the crowded earth's population, science seems secure. But madmen armed with atomic weapons may change that. Elsewhere in the world science is being submerged.

Even if science struggling for existence in a world of hatred, civil, war and insecurity, creates a workable prescription for producing food for the rising flood of humanity, can mass man apply it? The facts, as they exist today, would seem to exclude this possibility.

Everywhere we see civil unrest, strikes, civil wars, revolutions, destruction and preparations for destruction. This is mass man caught in a vicious circle; insecurity and near-starvation driving him into chaos, which, in turn, destroys science and production which alone can save him from the very fate that his increasin numbers portend.

(What are the odds that The Twenty Fifth Hour, Unthinkable and The People of the Ruins are not more logical answers than The Legion of Space, Venus Equilateral or World of A?)

Text entry and page scans provided by Judy Bemis

Updated May 16, 2003. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.