Our ability to exert conscious control over our family sizes is unique – and can be transformational, says Christopher Wills.
In 1968, husband and wife biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a terrifying look at coming ecology-driven disasters. Our population growth, they said, had to be slowed or reversed, or else catastrophe would ensue.
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| Elaine Knox |
The world’s population has more than doubled since that time, to over 8 billion people, and the disasters are still looming. But now, a new factor has entered the picture, one that has never been seen before in the entire history of life on our planet.
Italy’s population has shrunk by around a million since 2014. Japan’s has fallen by about 5 million since 2010. No species of organism has ever willingly shrunk its population before. Biologically, it is utterly paradoxical.
The answer to this seeming contradiction involves both our cultures and our biology. We have distinctly clever brains, shaped by the unique evolutionary path that we have taken. We are now the only species that has ever gained the ability to exert conscious control over our family sizes.
All others, as Charles Darwin was the first to realise, are locked in the iron grip of the imperative to out-reproduce their competitors. Indeed, if an ability to be hesitant about the consequences of unchecked reproduction were to evolve in any other organism, that species would immediately be driven to extinction by its gleeful predators and parasites.
Our brains, aided by the knowledge that we have accumulated and the cultures we have created, have shaped our recent history in a way closed to all other species. In the fraught world of my childhood, we kids were feasted on by a roistering crowd of dangerous bacteria and viruses. My little friends and I got mumps, measles, chickenpox and diphtheria, though we managed to dodge polio. Now, many children live in a comparatively safer world. It is shaped by our growing ability to define, like no other species before us, our place on the planet – and by our capacity to understand the consequences of what we have done.
Human societies are expressing these unique abilities to different degrees. Nonetheless, some have changed at a rate never achieved by any other species. During my own lifetime, many societies’ attitudes towards large families have shifted from unrestrained adoration to awkward discomfort.
Population decreases are freaking out traditional economists, who trumpet the supposedly terrifying fiscal consequence of shrinking pools of workers, and populations of retirees that are exploding. But another fascinating feature of this emerging story is that the countries that might seem most likely to be damaged by population shrinkage are the very ones that are best equipped to overcome its effects.
When our populations shrink, as is happening most dramatically in Japan, we are given some much-needed breathing room. This lets us fix any economic threats by small tweaks of the tax code to take care of the growing ranks of older people. There is plenty of room for such changes in both Japan and Italy. In part because their rate of growth has slowed, both countries are near the world’s top in median per capita wealth. This means that both nations are rich, and this bounty is quite equitably distributed. That will help these societies, not to decline into some state of grimly inevitable genteel poverty, but to continue and to accelerate positive societal trends.
For the first time in Earth’s history, one of its species has evolved the capacity to move beyond the raw imperatives of evolution. And this ability, which might once have led to our extinction, is opening up new and wonderful ways for us to come into balance with our planet.
Christopher Wills is a biologist and author of Why Ecosystems Matter.