World Population Day, 11th July

 

Thailand's 'Mr Condom' Mechai Viravaidya, 82

I’m on the mailing list for Population Matters (patron: David Attenborough) and was sent a press release for ‘World Population Day, 11^th July’.  This blog began just before 8 Billion Day and population is a theme, so I was interested in reading the report.

While I think that it’s inevitable that population will fall steadily form mid-late century, we have a torrid time to get through in our, our children & grandchildren’s time. The Cerberus heatwave around the Mediterranean is looking very ugly and all the bad stuff is linked to human numbers and people’s reasonable aspirations, including to migrate in search of better opportunities (like the great European migration to the U.S.A. in the nineteenth century).

The report is basically encouraging reading and gives case studies on four countries/regions – Thailand, Rwanda, Costa Rica and the Indian state of Kerala. The nutshell message is that family size drops and economic prosperity rises following on from female education and gender equality. All four examples now have higher GDP per capita and lower TFR (total fertility rate) than their neighbours with less enlightened policies. All this is done with emphasis on human rights and not on coercion, and doubtless the neighbours are watching and learning so the important thing is to get the message out and spread best practice.

Rwanda is getting some critical focus in the UK for valid reasons unconnected with its government’s social policies (the report makes interesting reading) but seems to have had something of a turn-around. It was of course the country of the notorious genocide in 1994 where a million people were murdered in a country with a population of just eight million (and a million fled). In the 1980s, the country had a TFR of 8.5 and became the most densely populated country in Africa; it’s hard not to draw an obvious conclusion.

To quote the report, “In the early 2000s, population started to resurface as a policy concern. The National Policy for Sustainable Development was introduced in 2003. The plan identified the importance of addressing population growth as part of a holistic programme for sustainable development, including ensuring universal education for all children, and equal economic opportunity for men and women. Political will was growing, with population action internally motivated, rather than heavily influenced by external donors as it had been in the past.” All pretty sensible so no need to despair in the developed world that Africa isn’t doing its stuff (which would be a racist trope anyway), and get on with putting our own house in order on environmental and equality issues.

But, in a blog which praises a local hero from the 1890s (this village in Oxfordshire), it’s good to see local heroes at work around the globe, such as Thailand’s 82 year old ‘Mr Condom’ (main picture).

Picture credit:  BBC

To the Nursery!

 

"Go Forth and Multiply", she says

While waiting last Friday for our “you’re-the-experts-so-you-do-the-picking” take-away Bangladeshi menu (they chose delicious, aromatic Lamb Shatkora), I picked up a copy of The Sun - you know how you do, chaps - 8^th June. There, on the anti-Woke page, was a demographic scare story Brits face serious consequences if our birth rate continues to decline by darling-of-the-Conservative right, Miriam Cates MP: (probably saved from a speech in May but trotted out by the Sun to match with a gender-wars story on policing).

Readers of this blog will know, eg from the piece We Forgot the Begat that demographics is the future, including its relevance for how we will meet the Aliens). I read the article with interest, and also as a piece of attempted social engineering. Mrs Cates, who has a degree in genetics and been a science teacher, has impeccable pro-natalist credentials, including doing her bit. She scores highly on the Kinder, Kirche categories but it would be unfair given her present employment to insist too much on the Küche aspects (but see on). She has just picked up on the fact that UK TFR (Total Fertility Rate) has been below replacement rate for the last 50 years (since 1973), with Conservative-led administrations for 32/50 years if that alone makes a difference to women’s choices (which seems unlikely). Her Sun article makes it clear that she doesn’t like immigration as a way to population stability (which would indicate around 200k per year net immigration to be the target for stability). Instead, she calls on her own government to ‘Remove the Barriers’ to women choosing to have children. As a father of two daughters in their early thirties, I’m right with you. But she rejects free childcare, because of the choices made by her Finnish sisters, although my daughters would vote for more help there (to counter the prevailing wisdom that ‘one partner’s wages all go on childcare’, as one of them told me). Cates wants the husband’s taxes to be, effectively, fully remitted (following her link from “Until the 1990s, our tax system…” will fail to inform you of the full details).­ This is supposed to provide funding and esteem for the wife’s many years out of the world of employed work. (Cates was lucky herself that she could benefit from being Financial Director in her husband’s company to top-up her earnings and self-esteem whenever she wished). Unless you are very high-end financially, like these prominent eugenicist Pronatalists, you may wonder how far the rebate of the Standard Rate taxation (20%, and after personal allowance) of an ordinary husband’s salary – the rebate she seems to be hinting – will go towards those childcare costs. And whether that will do much to reversing 50-60 year-old trends in the UK and, successively, every single other country in the world. Mrs Cates might like to ponder on why her sisters worldwide are choosing to have fewer babies, and not just people who look like her.

It's undeniable that economics and relative taxation/subsidy does have some effect on personal choices, but that’s probably a smaller consideration vs the personal choice element. If you want to see a worked example of a policy of her government working in absolutely the opposite way to baby-booming Mrs Cates’ wishes, here’s a some food for thought. The base data for her, and me, is Birthsin England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) – that’s everything, including useful definitions like age-specific fertility rates. The real fun bit is to go to Section 5, Figure 4, where you can see ‘austerity in action’. If you click on pause/play you can click through every year from 2001 to 2021 and see the dark blue (>2 children per woman) areas join up into a chubby bracelet stretching from Lands End to The Wash throughout the child-friendly Labour years, but scarcely beyond. Watch birth rates plummeting from the beginning of Conservative austerity showing up in the 2013 figures. Cates points out that rates “dropped dramatically over the past ten years” but doesn’t point out that the obvious fact that 2011 was at the end of a long boom period in the UK and with a large contribution from immigrant families and their choices. Not a good baseline. Neither is Singapore, a favourite nation of some of her Conservative colleagues, where the TFR is 1.2births/woman (2022 figures). My estimate of worldwide average trending to 1.6 when everyone is fully integrated into the world economy looks quite reasonable. With a standardised mean age of mother at childbirth at 30.7 years in 2020 in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics) and an average age of mothers giving birth to their first child in England and Wales at 29.1 years, my estimate of 3 generations per 100 years also seems OK. That underlies my estimate of extinction-due-to-lack-of-interest in about three thousand years.

Mrs Cates has her work cut out, but she can do a bit of good by adopting some of those child and mother friendly policies of 2001-2010.

NB, this week also marks the anniversary (10^th June), in 1956, of the first licensing of the progesterone-only hormonal ‘pill’ for menstrual disorders. The rest followed.

Picture credits: The Sun and Getty (linked)

We Forgot the Begat

 

World Population: 5 scenarios

As a follow up to my post last week about the De-Darwinization of the human race due to the development of contraception (but with a brief nod to music at the base), further confirmation this week of my “End-of-the-World-in-5,400CE” prediction.

My projection of population in that article (and in the AMiTe paper on ‘how we’ll really meet E.T.’) was based on human population peaking at 10bn by 2100, then halving every hundred years. This 10bn is now looking like an over-estimate. A new study for the Club of Rome was published this week https://www.earth4all.life/news/global-population-could-peak-below-9-billion-in-2050s suggests the global population could peak just below 9 billion people in 2050 then start falling. With a ‘Giant Leap’ in investment in economic development, education and health then global population could peak even lower and earlier.

So, how about the halving? The second "more optimistic scenario" – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – the report estimates human numbers would hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by about a third to about 6 billion in 2100.

This fall of 29.5% in 60 years is very close to my estimate of halving in 100yrs (in fact, it’s equivalent to 44% fall per 100 years, just exponential mathematics). And why would it stop? People tend to revolt from the idea that very low birth rates might become embedded and get dewy-eyed with visions of Little House on the Prairie, but can’t explain why the trend, already a reality in developed countries, would significantly alter. It’s OK, people/societies will be just as happy/unhappy and probably as obsessed and inward looking as they are now.

The most cogent reason for a here-to-stay trend was hinted this week by Elon Musk and his pals, re Artificial Intelligence, GPT etc in Pause Giant AI Experiments: AnOpen Letter - Future of Life Institute. The key question re human futures (and decisions on family size) was, for me, not all the tosh about A.I. being inimical or running amok. Much more significant was the socio-economic question of “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?“  This will entrench the worries of parents, on top of the global turbulence we are seeing now (and the rest…) about whether their kid(s) will find fulfilling roles; the conventional wisdom will become to be conservative on number of progeny.  But water finds its own level, so society will be just as happy/unhappy as ours, self-similar, in-fact.

It makes you yearn for the good old days, when we were “a little bit naïve” The Begat: Finian’sRainbow. How’s that for a bit of Darwin-related music (‘Ratio of increase so high…”)? We performed that at our folk-music session last week, minus dancing.  

Chuck Cooper & cast in FINIANS RAINBOW 2009 Broadway (Harburg & Lane)

Picture credit: Earth4All report (linked article), FiniansonBroadway.com

Birthday Memorial for ‘Holmes of Hanney’, Family Planning pioneer

 

Biography of Holmes, paper of Hanney History Group

I wrote on 17th January 2023, that that would have a good claim to be ‘Un-Darwin-Day’ as the date when the world’s most populous country had entered numerical decline, overturning – in a symbolic way - one of the pillars of Natural Selection: “Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life”. This may seem strange when the world only reached 8 Billion Day on 15^th November 2022. I blogged about that at the time but also that the underlying trend in birth-rate was firmly down, leading to a surprising conclusion.

The reason for the De-Darwinisation of the human race lies of course in the exercise of personal choice, and with the availability of effective contraception. As with any technology, there are always early adopters, usually the rich and well-informed. The most famous or notorious of these was, of course, Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) who enjoyed inflating them as a suggestive party trick. But these were ‘high end’ early technology and not yet ready for the mass market. Enter  Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock with their invention of the vulcanization of rubber (see a short history of the condom) which led to the first ‘American Tips’ being created in about 1858. ‘Full length’ had to wait until 1869.

There is lots to write about this, especially to put into its social context.  Observed effects of population pressure had been commented on well before 1800, most famously by Thomas Malthus. The North American continent provided a significant safety valve but emigration wasn’t for everyone, so pressure grew in intellectual circles to allow the matter to be discussed. A key moment in the Great Britain was the trial of freethinkers Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (1876) for republishing an American treatise by Bostonian doctor Knowlton.

While information was easier to diffuse amongst the upper/middle classes, for the working class word was very hard to get round, and ‘channels to market’ were highly restricted by obscenity prosecutions – and certainly no clinics were available for women to get advice until one was opened by Margaret (Higgins) Sanger in NYC in 1916 (I’m pleased to note that she was born in Corning, N.Y. where I lived for three years in the nineties). No, word had to get around by post. I’m proud that the Oxfordshire village where I live was home to a young chap, James Robins Holmes, who was stirred up by the Bradlaugh/Besant trial, enough to do something about it by creating what we would call today a ‘Social Enterprise’, (he was a minor landlord and apparently a very good one at that). In 1891 he published a booklet ‘True Morality’ promoting the use of what we call family planning for married couples, and including a price list for ‘hygienic requisites’ (which could be washed after use for poor couples). This was “the greatest honour of my life”, which had him prosecuted and fined for ‘obscenity’, and he succeeded in distributing 150,000 copies the booklet in several editions. ‘Goods’ were supplied all over the Empire in little packages, sent from Hanney Post Office.

A splendid fellow, whose 164^th birthday it would be today, 17^th March.

My dog, Polly, paying her respects at J.R. Holmes memorial on his birthday

Picture credits:  Hanney History Group (Sam Green), David Gahan

Un-Darwin Day – today 17th Jan 2023?

 

Small Families, Hou Hai Lake Park Beijing 2018, DG 

It’s less than a month before International Darwin Day – his birthday on 12^th February.  I’ve been asked to give a talk at the Qaudram Institute on 10^th February entitled ‘The EyenigmaVariations: Darwin, DNA and Music’ and am planning a whole series of musical posts around that.

But (uniting both themes of this blog) today, 17^th January 2023, has a good claim to be ‘Un-Darwin-Day’. Natural Selection as defined by Darwin (his words) requires “Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection…” Today marks continued confirmation that “Ratio of Increase so high…” is functionally over in this phase of our species - with the expected news of numerical fall in that byword for population enormity, China.  All countries will follow, in time. Take a look at the chart of  births per 1,000 people since the one-child policy ended in 2016: down, down, down. This is a social phenomenon, not a legal one, which is why everywhere else will follow. In fact, my ‘no-worries’ projection of the (temporary)extinction date of the human race, 5,400 C.E. (A.D.) assumes an increase of China’s current TFR (total fertility rate) of 1.45 to a world average of 1.6 (the current average for OECD countries). But, no worries! Still thousands of years of culture to go and maybe some big adventures.

Darwin of course anticipated that the human race had departed from fully Natural Selection, whatever its explanatory powers for how we’d got here (including his charming explanation of different skin colourations via the part which sexual selection plays in many species, itself an adaptive trait). The main force was another adaptive trait: that of caring for weaker members of society - the protective urge which he had observed in other social animals. A far cry from the winner-takes-all mentality that lesser minds took as a lesson from the simple mathematical ‘Special Theory’ of Natural Selection - a nicer ‘General Theory’.

And maybe we’ll need fewer humans, even in the cultural spaces we hope will be our preserve after the ‘end of work’. Here’s a scary story (same date, 17^th Jan 2023) that could narrow the evolutionary niche of song-writers, composers etc, and the rest of us.

I’ll write further about Un-Darwin-Day with other candidate dates, and reasons to celebrate it, on a later occasion!

Picture credit: DG, at a popular park in Beijing for family outings, business trip 2018 (Semiconductor equipment business).

Observing the AMiTe Point: busiest point in the (Local) Universe?

 

"The Most Exclusive Address in the Local Group", right hand edge of M31 core

At the date of posting, 1^st December 2022, the Northern Sky is a fine sight (no street-lights in our village). The waxing Moon has proceeded along the ecliptic from Saturn, is now passing Jupiter and, via the two bright stars of Aries, is on its way to join Mars for Opposition on 7^th December (‘Opposition’, for planets further away from the Sun than us is, just like the full of the Moon, getting in line with us and the Sun). When the Moon’s light is out of the way, then it’s a good time to look up and locate the point in space with the highest likelihood, selon-moi, of the presence of Alien civilisations in the known universe.

This blog, with its starry header, indulges my twin fascinations for the origin of life, human‘n’all (via the celebration of music related to Charles Darwin and DNA including my own composition, performed at both Oxford/Cambridge Universities), with a possible far future for humans, which is at least an entertaining one.

On ‘8-Billion Day’ (15^th November 2022), I posted an article suggesting a very unorthodox view of future population first published in my ‘AMiTe Paper') – or see the separate page in this blog. This came out of my lockdown musing of ‘how to meet the Aliens’ and neatly gets the humans out of the picture for a few million years. (Don’t worry: “We Shall Return!”)

The AMiTe paper is all about how, practically, with currently envisaged technology, an engineer from any technical (sorry! no super-dolphins!) civilisation, with our level of vanity - might try to crack the problem. A difficulty, of course, is for everyone in the galaxy to agree to meet at the same place when you can’t talk to them first (the ‘Schelling Point’ problem). The answer, funnily enough, and ‘proving Brian Cox wrong’ (in a way), is almost certainly for robotic ships to meet outside the galaxy (Martin Rees should approve, leaving it to the robots).

Just above Aries (see map) is the long line of bright stars connecting the Square of Pegasus with Perseus and his bright ‘Sword Handle’ double-cluster, the three middle stars being ‘Andromeda’. You may well have observed the farthest-you-can-see-with-the-naked-eye Andromeda galaxy, at 2.54 Million light years distance and 2.54 Million years ago. You go up from the central star Mirach (‘Girdle’), do a little shimmy to the right and the cloudy smudge is it. Or rather, it’s the bright central part of a monster galaxy of a trillion stars. The lovely spiral stuff covers a much bigger extent – about 6 full-moons in breadth – but is just beyond the grasp of eyes which also have to cope with the daylight Sun. It's our Milky Way’s biggg sister (we’re the middle-weight of three). Just in line with the right hand edge of the smudge (to our line of sight) is the most exclusive address in the Local Group – the mid-point of the two galaxies, the AMiTe point, Andromeda/Milky-Way Treffpunkt (‘meeting point’, see the paper for why). The beautiful thing is that every intelligent race in the trillion stars of Andromeda and the four hundred billion of our own spiral knows where it is…

I will write again on 16^th December, Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday, (which I hope he’d have appreciated) of a grand but tenuous ‘intergalactic bridge’…

Eight Billion on 15th November, extinct by 5,400C.E.?

 

"Just your friends making reasonable choices"

The UN has named Tuesday as ‘Eight Billion Day’, see: 8 Billion Day 15 Nov 2022 - Population Matters. Clearly this is the forcing function for all our environmental problems (proportional to ‘N’) and a good many of our wars.

The best response to 8bn is to spread a pointed message: “if you don’t like your first two children, have a third”, and have smart, humane tax and migration policies. But I’ll save practical suggestions for another time (it would include a bollock tax for individuals like Boris Johnson and… *see below!).

Demographers are now seriously considering ‘peak human’ and started to map out various scenarios of decline – but all far enough away not to affect current economics. An exception is Elon Musk* Elon Musk IsTotally Wrong About Population Collapse, who is dead right about the collapse but only worried because it spoils his dream about him being the enabler of humankind’s expansion out of the Solar System (he’s dead wrong about that, see AMiTe page on this blog).

But the collapse, yes. I started thinking about this twenty years ago after many years business in Japan.  With a female friend experiencing professional sexism and ‘expectations’ around marriage, and making some consequent choices, I was interested-but-not-surprised to learn of the very low Total Fertility Rate in Japan and Korea and also noted the low Western Europe rate of 1.6. I did a thought-experiment extrapolation at the time and have been banging on about “the human race dying out in 5,400CE due to lack of interest!” ever since. See the graph above which I published in a scientific paper in Feb 2021 (see AMiTe page for its unusual context and link to the full paper).

TFR = 1.6 might sound impersonal but think of it in the following way. How about where your friendship group of [ten] all pair up, let’s say for life; four couples have 2 kids each (or 3,2,2,1), and one couple just decides not to. Ten parents, eight kids. That’s TFR of 1.6, just by your friends’ choices. Sound familiar? Try your siblings & cousins as a check. Repeat for a few generations. TFR = 1.6 is also the average of OECD countries and 40 countries are at that rate or below.

Those thinking that something will turn to reverse this trend had better sharpen up their arguments; Matt Reynolds deals with it pretty well in the Wired article using France as an example. See also my personal French famille nombreuse discount card below from 1995, another failed government attempt to stimulate breeding. This population collapse is an example of ‘de-Darwinization’ – departure from Natural Selection – a phenomenon implicitly recognised by Charles Darwin and explicitly by Daniel Dennett: see From Bacteriato Bach and Back, eg p148. Darwinian evolution and de-Darwinization neatly link two of the subjects of this blog!

Since bringing a child into the world is now, or is becoming, pretty much a matter of absolute choice, the driving force is individual happiness in a modern (constrained) society rather than Natural Selection.  

But there’s plenty of time before my log graph reaches the ‘last humans’ – over 3,000 more seasons of the Premier League and Strictly Come Dancing. I included the population graph in the AMiTe paper to show that, while there isn’t likely to be time enough for humans to reach the Stars, there’s plenty of time to get the technology right to get the Stars to come to us.

My discount card from 1995 - valid for two children!