Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist
Not education, but urbanization
causes infertility

    1.0        Exponential growth ends when a species attains high densities

    At the start of the 19th Century, Malthus observed that human population tends to multiply exponentially
    whereas the supply of food progresses at an arithmetic pace. He predicted that the point at which we
    reach starvation is only a matter of time. Darwin was soon to convert Malthus’s theory into a universal law:

    “ Every being... must suffer destruction during some period of its life... otherwise,
       on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so
       inordinately great that no country could support the product... It is the doctrine
       of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable
       kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no
       prudential restraint from marriage… There is no exception to the rule that every
       organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the
       earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair… we may
       confidently assert, that all plants and animals are tending to increase at a
       geometrical ratio, that all would most rapidly stock every station in which they
       could any how exist, and that the geometrical tendency to increase must be
       checked by destruction at some period of life.” [1]

    These perceptions have become ingrained in the minds of most people who, like Darwin, mistakenly
    believe that Mother Nature controls demographics through death-end mechanisms. Most people have
    been brainwashed to believe that if the tigress produces too many cubs and population exceeds the
    carrying capacity, The God of Starvation will punish the sons for the sins of their fathers.

    Contemporary Malthusians perpetuate the Darwinian wisdom that unless we do something quickly –
    short of killing people – humans will soon spill over into outer space:

    “ As Malthus... and Darwin... understood, in the absence of limitations on
       resources, i.e., space and food, populations will grow exponentially.” [2]

    Brown sounds the alarms and urges decision-makers to attain population stability through family
    planning before it’s too late:

    “ Slowing world population growth means that all women who want to plan
       their families should have access to the family planning services they need.
       Unfortunately, at present 201 million couples cannot obtain the services they
       need to limit the size of their families. Filling the family planning gap may be
       the most urgent item on the global agenda.” [3]

    McMichael proposes a one-child per couple limit. [4] Hopfenberg and Pimentel suggest producing less
    food. [5] And so on.

    These predictions, summary conclusions, and recommendations are a bit disconcerting in light of the
    contradicting facts. On the one hand, we have the exceptional case of the Neanderthals. Despite having
    abundant food they never managed to cover the Earth as Darwin predicted. In fact, their entire empire
    from the start of their species perhaps 500,000 years ago to when they finally succumbed 30,000 years
    ago, barely got beyond Europe (Fig. 1). If there is no exception to Darwin’s exponential ‘rule’, what
    stopped Neanderthal from ‘stocking every station in which they could exist?’ It is to note that the
    Neanderthal were the top predators in their region, had ample sources of food at their disposal (as
    indicated by the subsequent expansion of Man), and were already in remission 10,000 years before their
    final demise. Another example is the famous T-Rex, who with his partner Triceratops never made it past
    the U.S. and Canada (Fig. 2). The paleontologist may argue that an asteroid stopped the dinos from
    expanding further, but then he misses the point. The point is that not a single species that ever existed on
    Earth has complied with Darwin's 'prediction.' So maybe it's time to question whether there is something
    wrong with his 'law.'

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rural life
urban life

    It is pertinent to note that food is not a factor limiting Man's demographic expansion. Cohen [6] and   
    Meyer [7] mention existing technologies that allow us to produce much more of it than is currently
    available. Whereas hunter-gatherers and agrarian societies were at the mercy of the elements,
    contemporary famines and malnutrition are the result of pricing and distribution policies. [8]  If we now
    consider that we have for the most part conquered contagious diseases and are living longer, what is it
    that prevents us from expanding exponentially? Why did Darwin’s prediction fail to come true? In other
    words, why is it that although food is and can be made readily available in greater quantities than we can
    consume, the world population is not expanding at a faster rate? Better yet, why is the human population
    growth rate actually falling? Are we deliberately depriving people of food?

    The savvy demographer has a ready answer. The slowdown in growth has nothing to do with Malthus
    and Darwin being wrong. The decrease in fertility and birth rates is the result of successful international
    projects. [9] [10] If the average woman has fewer children today it is because policy-makers proactively
    suppressed them, in extreme cases through compulsion [11] or without the consent of the sterilized
    women. [12]  In most cases, women practice voluntary control through an entire host of methods               
    (e.g., IUDs, abstention, rhythm method, condoms, etc.). Indeed, most people casually associate a  
    negative trend in fertility with a positive trend in education:

    “ Literacy among women is associated with low fertility, low infant mortality
       and better health of children.” [13]

    “ Fertility is a function of education (primarily of the woman) and income,
       i.e. the less poor you are, and more educated you are, the less children you
       have, and less the population growth rate of your community.” [14]

    I believe that demographers routinely draw the wrong conclusions from raw data. A famous joke has it
    that whether you drink wine with water, bourbon with water, or vodka with water you get drunk.
    Therefore, since water is the common denominator, we should conclude that water makes you drunk. The
    demographers apply this logic when they conclude that the numbers show a correlation between fertility
    and education and, more stunningly, an inverse relation between fertility and wealth. Unfortunately, they
    disseminate their findings as truth and people swallow it lock, stock, and barrel because the conclusion
    emanates from authority.

    I have a personal anecdote that exemplifies why fertility has little to do with the level of schooling that
    women receive. While living in Colombia, I met a lady who was a servant in a household. She was an
    uneducated woman who came from the countryside. She told me that her father had relations with several
    women in her village, the legal wife and four or five others on the side. Each of these women had from 10
    to 15 children from this man. She told me that she was one of 15 children from the legitimate wife and
    laughed that the entire village looked like her. This woman had come to the big city, Bogota, to look for
    work. She had been married for 7 years and had only one child. I asked her when she was going to catch
    up to the glory of her mother and step mothers. She instantly said, ‘Nooooooooo. I’ll never have any more
    kids, God willing!’ I asked her why. She said that she barely had time and money to take care of her son. In
    fact, sometimes she would ask her boss if she could bring the boy to work with her because she had no
    one to take care of him. She would take those opportunities to feed the boy on the side while doing the
    cooking. At the time of our chat, she was also in the process of separating from her husband.

    The lesson is that this woman had not learned family planning at school and in fact was quite uneducated
    in a formal sense. She surely did not take any family planning courses. She learned it the hard way, the
    way a tigress learns it in the wild: intuitively. She acquired a healthy level of street smartness, realizing
    that city life did not afford the luxury of having children. I learned then that it is not really education that
    affects fertility. It is the migration from the country to the city. Once a woman is in a high density region,
    she stops having children. It is the type of life that women have to live in the city that forces them to
    postpone children, sometimes indefinitely. City life requires and/or induces most women to either work or
    go to school. The economic constraints for most women are such that there is no room in their lives for
    babies. Demographers have wrongly concluded that it is education and higher incomes which has
    stopped the birth rate. They reason that urban women are better educated than country girls and credit
    family education programs in underdeveloped nations for the success when it is really urbanization that
    forces infertility upon women.

    What has happened in the last 40 or 50 years around the world is that people have moved from the
    country to the cities:

    “ Aside from the growth of population itself, urbanization is the dominant
       demographic trend of our time. In 1900, 150 million people lived in cities. By
       2000, it was 2.9 billion people, a 19-fold increase. By 2007 more than half of
       us will live in cities—making us, for the first time, an urban species.” [15]

    “ The 2005 Revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects report described
       the 20th century as witnessing 'the rapid urbanization of the world’s population',
       as the global proportion of urban population rose dramatically from 13% (220
       million) in 1900, to 29% (732 million) in 1950, to 49% (3.2 billion) in 2005. The
       same report projected that the figure is likely to rise to 60% (4.9 billion) by 2030.” [16]

    Are you a policy maker? Do you want to stop population growth today? Then follow my advice. Just
    relocate every woman in the world, ignorant or intelligent, to cosmopolitan areas. The lifestyle simply
    makes it impossible to have children for the average woman. You simply cannot have 10 children in a two-
    bedroom apartment nor do you have time or money for them. It doesn’t matter how educated the woman
    is or whether she lives in China, Oman, Colombia or the U.S. Place her in a crowded city and your
    exponential population problems are over. Of course, I will support my conclusions with more than just an
    anecdote.  

Fig. 1   The Neanderthal Empire (300 to 30 kya)
Red dots indicate verified or suspected settlements. (It is likely that they also inhabited Northern
Africa along the Mediterranean Sea and farther east -- not shown.)

Essentially, the Neanderthals never got past Europe and the Middle East. This is very strange in
light of Darwin's prediction that, in the presence of abundant food, a species will overflow the planet.

Fig. 2

The T-Rex Empire (67 to 65 mya)
The Western Interior Seaway
receded during the last 20 million
years of the Cretaceous. Dots
indicate sites where T-Rex fossils
have been found. I use dotted lines
to enclose hypothetical regions
where T-Rexes and Triceratopses
probably lived. (A slightly more
primitive version of T-Rex known
as Tarbosaurus bataar has also
been found in Mongolia.)