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"FIRE NOXIOUS GASES, ACID AND HEAVY METALS & METALOIDS in your backyard"

Groundwater extraction, climate change and drought have massive implications for the groundwater dependent ecosystems found throughout the Otway Ranges. One impact with serious outcomes is the creation of Actual Acid Sulfate Soil sites. They can ruin farmland, swamps, rivers and streams through elevated acid load, production of
numerous toxins, heavy metals and noxious gases. Add fire to the mix and the problems are multiplied. The Otway Ranges and coastline have numerous Potential Acid sulfate Soil sites. Malcolm Gardiner. Vice President, LAWROC Landcare Group.

Prof. Richard Bush and associate Phil Hirst, have studied what can happen when one of the Otway Ranges
Potential Acid Sulfate Soil sites dries out and then catches fire. Come along and listen to Professor Bush present
their findings on the Big Swamp, Yeodene.

7:30 to 8 PM COPAC Civic Hall COLAC, Wednesday 14th May 2014.

Professor Richard Bush is a founding member and director of the Southern Cross University’s Geoscience Faculty. He is a Professor and Director of Higher Degree Research Training and from an international perspective cannot come more qualified to talk about Inland Acid Sulfate Soils. His research interests are soil science and soil water interactions in agricultural and urban landscapes.

Abstract of the Professor’s presentation.

New data from the Barwon River catchment in the Otway Ranges will be presented for the first time by Professor Bush and his team. This presentation will show drainage and wildfire can trigger severe acid sulfate degradation.

Immense challenges for current thinking on catchment management, water extraction and the conservation of landscapes will be demonstrated, including practical ideas on remediation and implications of the damage already done.

The findings of this work will be immensely interesting to regional communities and natural resource managers.

As President and on behalf of the LAWROC Landcare Group I cordially invite you to attend this rather auspicious occasion.

Patricia Jukes. President, LAWROC Landcare Group.

Watch Iceland’s president explain just how they got their country down to 2% unemployment and kick-started their economy.

The first step? Let private banks fail. Hmmm…

President Grimsson scrapped the same economic dogma that was imposed upon Australia by former Liberal prime Minister John Howard and, prior to that, the late former NSW Premier Neville Wran after 1996 and Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett in the 1990s. Subsequently, Wran's 'Labor' mates, Bob Carr, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh imposed more of the same.

Hi Dennis,

Hope you finalise this painful decision! :-)

Here's where to buy them: S.M. Newman, Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013, chapters 3 and 4. Available on kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/Demography-Territory-Law-animal-populations-ebook/dp/B00ALE8YSA/ or as paperback here: http://www.amazon.com/Demography-Territory-amp-Law-Populations/dp/1291170928/. (Apologies for repetition of these links).

I'm really impressed that you have taken this much in in the first place. That's because it is actually quite rare for someone to seek to know more of an idea that has not been heavily promoted in the mainstream. Very few people actually seem willing to, let alone capable, of considering alternative views. One only realises this when one tries to get a peer review or sell a book of a new theory. It is really quite interesting to see how much people tend to seek confirmation of their opinions rather than to actually answer questions. And opinions are so often formed based on very slight info from people looked up to or attached to prestigious institutions. Of course you may not agree with my opinions but we can then have a proper discussion.

It might help you to look at a couple of reviews, which I should publish as an article on candobetter, but will just cut and paste here.

Two Reviews of S. M Newman, Demography, Territory and Law: Rules of Animal and Human Populations, (Countershock Press, 2013)

Joseph Wayne Smith
Discipline of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
School of Paediatrics and Reproductive Health
University of Adelaide

This book by evolutionary sociologist Sheila Newman, is book one of four books developing an evolutionary and ecological sociological study of the biological basis of politics, economy and demography. It is a broad-ranging multidisciplinary approach to the study of human society which sociology has long ago abandoned for a descent into jargon, word games and empirically unsubstantiated theory. Not so for Newman who believes and demonstrates that sociology can be scientific, but only if it abandons its isolationist Durkheimian commitment to seeing social facts as sui generis.

The subtitles of the other forthcoming volumes in Newman’s master work are: Volume 2: Land Tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain; Volume 3: Land Tenure and the Origins of Modern Democracy in France; Volume 4: After Napoleon: Incorporation of Land and People. The collected works promises to be, judged by the outstanding merits of the present volume under review, one of the most important contributions to sociology in recent times. Newman systematically applies insights from a wide range of sciences. Further, and refreshingly, she is a French speaker as well as other Latin-based languages, and she has studied the history and philology of Roman language, all giving her access to debates outside of the Anglosphere.

The principal thesis of The Rules of Animal and Human Populations is that both human and animal societies have distinct patterns of dispersal. These patterns affect the size of populations, and in humans, the very nature of economic and political systems. Thus, different land-use, planning and inheritance systems have different outcomes, with some systems resulting in sustainable steady-state economies, while others are geared to exponential growth, the ultimate price of which is collapse. Peeping ahead, clan-based communities, in the Pacific and New Guinea for example, where traditional land-use and inheritance systems are retained, people retain control over natural resources and do not commodify the land by buying and selling it. People strive to prevent, as best they can, natural resources from being alienated and destroyed. This contrasts with the fossil-fuel intensive Anglophone countries where almost everything which can be commodified, has been. These countries are facing a multi-dimensional environmental crisis that is likely to result in social breakdown and dislocation. When collapse does occur societies’ property ownership returns to family connections with the land, and over time the family and clan system re-emerges. Newman hopes that people in the rapidly growing Anglophone societies may be able to regain these organic systems of social organisation as protection against the onslaught of global capitalism.

Newman argues that these seemingly unstoppable forces of population and economic growth which are leading Anglophone countries like the United States, Australia, Britain and Canada to overshoot, do not exist in the Western continental European systems. Europe’s population is already too big and is causing environmental destruction, but natural attrition is downsizing the population to more sustainable levels. Writers like “Spengler”, David P. Goldman, in books with melodramatic titles such as It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You, (RVP, New York, 2011), raise an alarm about such a decrease in population, but ecologically it is really just the population returning to more sustainable levels. By contrast, countries such as Australia, through undemocratically imposed immigration, largely produced by the lobbying muscle of powerful ethnic and business groups (especially the housing/real estate lobby), are set to push their populations to completely unsustainable levels, paying no respect to environmental and resources crises such as peak oil. Part of the problem with Australia’s runaway growth in population, Newman points out, is that people, as in other Anglophone countries, have little democratic power to defend communities from the assault of the forces of the market, by contrast to continental Europe where the state controls most of the land-use.
Anglophone countries have political and business elites dogmatically committed to unending economic growth and “progress.” Progress has become a secular religion for them. In chapter 1 Newman subjects this religion of progress to a penetrating critique. Progress requires vast quantities of materials and energy, in the form of fossil fuels. What happens in complex computer societies if there is no longer abundant fossil fuel? Is freedom, democracy and “progress” in such complex societies a product of relatively cheap fossil fuel, and will these institutions disappear in the coming age of scarcity? Her answer is “yes”, for democracy in the sense of full participation in decisions is more likely in small communities not based on techno-industrialism. She sees “peak oil” and the rapid depletion of other resources needed for techno-industrial societies to grow, as major forces terminating their lives.

If economists have been wrong about the ideology of progress, what else have they been wrong about? Chapter 2 of Rules of Animal and Human Populations discusses myths of fertility and mortality that have dominated contemporary anthropology, especially the idea that hunter-gatherer societies, supposedly lacking mechanical contraception, only maintain stable populations through Malthusian forces and violence, producing high mortality. Newman goes to considerable lengths in this chapter to show that modern anthropology has forgotten a massive body of evidence about “pre-transitional” societies, such as the Kunimaipa people in the highlands of Papua New guinea, who maintain stable populations through a variety of strategies such as breastfeeding for four or five years, abortion, infanticide and post-partum taboos. Other societies have used equally as innovative strategies to prevent women being sexually active during a large part of their adult life, including norms of premarital virginity, incest avoidance and other restrictions. For example, brothers traditionally shared one wife in Tibet leaving 30 percent of women without an opportunity for marriage. Surprisingly enough, even Malthus documented cases of stable populations in continental Europe at the end of the 18th century, such as the Swiss parish of Leyzin. There are, though, other important factors including incest avoidance and the Westermarck effect which Newman discusses in depth.

Newman advances a new theory about how incest avoidance and the Westermarck effect impact upon patterns of human settlement and population growth. Incest avoidance, the avoidance of inbreeding, is not limited to humans but occurs in many other organisms including cockroaches. Second, the Westermarck effect, first observed by 19th century Finnish sociologist Edvard Westermarck (1862-1939), is that incest avoidance also applies to people raised together independent of whether or not they are genetically related. The effect has been confirmed many times. Newman argues that contrary to received sociology, incest avoidance and the Westermarck effect are probably indistinctive norms in humans, a product of genetic algorithms underpinning human social organisation. Inbreeding avoidance occurs in many other species, including plants, suggesting that a mechanism such as hormones may be the generative mechanism rather than conscious calculations. In short; “hormones will deliver more or less fertility according to the availability of living space. Space (territory) required per individual will be affected by density and reliability of food distribution, and all of this will be mediated by some degree of incest avoidance/Westermarck effect, which is also related to social dominance.” (p.83)

Incest avoidance and the Westermarck effect have the impact of avoiding the genetic ills of inbreeding, producing fewer homozygous defective genes, but beyond this, incest avoidance regulates population size and density so that animals would have more territory than if numbers were greater without restrictions on inbreeding. For humans, Newman argues, population dispersal and spatial organisation are a function of incest avoidance. Conventional sociology holds that incest avoidance is achieved by modes of population dispersal, but Newman proposes that incest avoidance itself causes dispersal. The same algorithms of population spacing found in other species are hypothesized to occur in humans and these algorithms are adjusted to hormonal responses to sensory feedback from the environment. Anglophone countries have been severely disorganised by runaway capitalist development which has broken relationships with the land which have traditionally been used to navigate incest avoidance and the Westermarck effect, leading to a “chaotic soup.” Disrupted societies, be they of men or mice, have a tendency for unstoppable population growth and the overshoot of ecological resources.

Many collapseologist theorists have agreed with writers such as Jared Diamond in Collapse in seeing Easter Island (Rapanui) as a paradigm case of a society overshooting its ecological limits. However, Newman in the final chapter of her book sets out to show that this story is incorrect. In a fascinating critique she points out that there is no evidence that the Easter Islanders ever achieved population levels of 10,000 or even 5,000, and that demographic decline is poorly documented. Further, these people lasted 900 years before the collapse, which suspiciously enough occurred just before the arrival of Europeans. She notes that European trade wars over South American and other colonies had been occurring for more than a century, so it is implausible to suppose that Easter Island was in splendid isolation up to 1722. It is a more parsimonious explanation to posit that European contact led to Easter Island’s destruction, and there are in fact documents indicating that Europeans enslaved the people of Easter Island (see Benny Peiser, Energy and Environment, vol. 16, 2005, pp. 513-539). The population of Easter Island may never have exceeded 2,000 – 3,000 people.

In conclusion, Rules of Animal and Human Populations is a contribution to sociology of Weberian dimensions, combining innovative hypotheses, critical thinking of the highest calibre and a firm commitment to seek facts rather than be bound by politically correct dogmas. It is scholarship at its best which is now being frequently done outside the intellectually stifling confines of the modern university.

Review by Dr Peter Pirie, Professor Retired at University of Hawaii at Manoa:

This is an original, enjoyable and thought-provoking book which additionally, has the admirable virtue of quoting one of my works at some length. The paper cited was "Untangling the Myths and Realities of Fertility and Mortality in the Pacific Islands",(1997). "The Rules of Animal and Human Populations" examines the rules, workings and effects of economic, political and social systems as they have developed in modern societies as compared with the same systems as they applied to traditional societies. The Pacific Islands, because of their small dimensions, relatively recent human settlement and varied histories of colonialism are particularly useful as examples of the transitions. Newman's interest in my work lay in the instances I described in which Pacific Island populations did not conform to the theory of demographic transition.

For instance I suggested that the surge in fertility that followed the introduction of effective public health in most colonial territories was not, as was then commonly described, a return to "traditional" levels that had been disturbed by the introduction of alien diseases following their "discovery" and colonization by European powers. It was instead a destabilization that could lead to unsustainable population densities and poverty if not checked by limiting birth numbers or permitted emigration. In the absence of the vast majority of communicable diseases that could have depressed population densities, traditional societies on the Pacific islands employed an ingenious variety of ways of limiting human reproduction in the interests of keeping population densities in comfortable relationship with local resources. Among these stratagems were gender separation, customs which delayed marriage such as bride-price, prolonged lactation, post-partum taboos and temporary separations, attempted contraception, abortion and infanticide, deprecation of sexual interest, acceptance of homosexuality, and the encouragement of celibacy. All of these have been observed in recent times in isolated or less impacted populations such as remote atolls and in parts of New Guinea but also recorded in descendant cultures where contact has been more prolonged so that these practices may have been abandoned (or suppressed).

What I did not include in my primarily demographic account, because the anthropologists on whose work I depended never mentioned them, were incest avoidance" and the Westermarck Effect. The examination of these two is a major contribution of Newman's book. The way in which incest avoidance and and the Westermarck effect limit mating in proximate populations and therefore on the distribution and density of populations is particularly important in the Pacific Islands which characteristically are of small area and were populated recently compared to other regions and originally by small bands surmounting marine distances. In the future, demographers, sociologists, population geographers and particularly, anthropologists, will be unable to ignore these two forces, and need to be grateful to Sheila Newman for bringing them to our attention.

S. M Newman, Demography, Territory and Law: Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, Lulu.com, 2013 (paperback). Kindle and paperback version available from www.amazon.com. Order by mail from PO Box 1173, Frankston, VIC, Australia, 3199 or write to astridnova[AT]gmail.com

Hi Denis, This is my field of scientific research and writing. I will respond to two points: reproductive strategies and the 'purpose' of incest avoidance/Westermarck Effect. 1. R TYPE AND K TYPES You raise the 'r'-type and 'k'-types of reproductive 'strategy'. One recent exponent of this is Craig Dilworth, in Too Smart for our Own Good: the ecological predicament of humankind, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010, a book which I have read pretty thoroughly. Dilworth gives little thought to the impact of gender divisions and no thought at all to the impact of incest avoidance or the Westermarck Effect in reducing fertility opportunities, although these are dynamic explanations that I will later pursue, for the phenomenon of territoriality as a limiting factor, which is important to his thesis. Although he notes the presence of some internal checks (such as aging) to population growth, Dilworth thinks that the main checks are external. Dilworth perceives that humans are behaving like r-selected species, maximizing numbers of offspring over their survival rather than having a smaller number of offspring but carefully nurturing each to increase their survival. His primary thesis is that human societies have continually developed new technology that overcomes these checks. If we keep this up we will overshoot all resources and then risk extinction. Dilworth does not acknowledge that not all human populations are behaving in an r-selection way; his approach is global. His explanations above do not acknowledge that some agricultural societies as well as hunter-gatherer ones were able to maintain population stability, and so they fail to explain how they might have achieved this. He does not provide an interspecies theory, nor does he take into account the impact of different transport technologies in providing more fertility opportunities. Pyrie and the other authors – even Malthus – who I mention in my chapter about Incest Avoidance and the Westermarck Effect and the Pacific Islander rule, show that there have been steady state agricultural societies as well as hunter-gatherer ones.  Although I agree that the rise of agriculture accompanied rapidly increasing population growth 10,000 years ago, I argue in Book 2 of this series that climatic factors and land-loss may have caused an increase in human fertility opportunities, resulting in population pressures, and a widespread resort to agriculture to offset this situation. 2. INCEST AVOIDANCE AND THE WESTERMARK EFFECT: On this question, please refer to my book for details: Biological function of incest taboo What is the biological function of the almost universal taboo, also known as ‘incest avoidance’? Most people think that they know, and that statement includes psychiatrists, zoologists and sociologists.  The usual explanation is that the incest taboo is a social response to the costs of incest. It is inferred by sociologists that societies noticed that incestuous relations gave rise to unhealthy children.  Although it is true that close inbreeding increases the risk of inherited diseases, fault may be found with this explanation in that many other creatures practice incest avoidance as assiduously as humans. Examples include tiny and presumably unscientific organisms, such as cockroaches, which we would not expect to make conscious decisions on the grounds of observation.  But, perhaps we underestimate cockroaches.   Also against the culturally mediated genetic diversity impulse explanation is the application of incest taboos to ‘in-laws’, in a more or less symmetrical fashion to true incest avoidance.  By breeding with in-laws (who are not blood related) the gene-pool would increase, but this opportunity is avoided and further dispersal remains necessary to find mates.  In fact in-laws are in a sense indirectly blood-related by marriage, and potential producers of directly blood-related offspring. Denis, you say that 'the Westermarck effect and aversion to incest, these are to avoid the problem of deleterious recessive genes being expressed and unfit children." This is a teleological kind of argument. It would be more correct to say, that incest avoidance has the effect of avoiding ... unfit children. (In fact endogamy vs exogamy has payoff at both ends genetically speaking. The extent of risk may well be exaggerated in many cases, although it is very high in some cases, e.g. in the presence of Huntingtons Chorea. And Kaplan et al 2009 (Kaplan, H., Gurven, M., Winking, J. 2009, “An Evolutionary Theory of Human Lifespan: Embodied Capital and the Human Adaptive Complex,”. For: Handbook of Theories of Aging. (Editors: Bengtson, V., Silverstein, M., Putney, N., Gans, D). Springer. Pp. 39-66. Also available at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/kaplanetal_ch3.pdf) show that remaining within an endogamous unit, like a small tribe, in the same place, probably massively benefits physiological immunity.) My theory shows that incest avoidance and the Westermarck Effect have another effect, which is population spacing over time and place. This adds up to adjustments to reproductive opportunity rate in line with local environment feedback. As such it is really important and, completely new. As Prof Pyrie (University of Hawaii at Manoa) writes in a review of my work, "What I did not include in my primarily demographic account, because the anthropologists on whose work I depended never mentioned them, were incest avoidance" and the Westermarck Effect. The examination of these two is a major contribution of Newman's book. The way in which incest avoidance and and the Westermarck effect limit mating in proximate populations and therefore on the distribution and density of populations is particularly important in the Pacific Islands which characteristically are of small area and were populated recently compared to other regions and originally by small bands surmounting marine distances. In the future, demographers, sociologists, population geographers and particularly, anthropologists, will be unable to ignore these two forces, and need to be grateful to Sheila Newman for bringing them to our attention." You also say, "Animals which restrain reproduction do so because it is in the long term, more beneficial for the survival and competition of that group. To us, it looks like restraint, but it is by virtue of being selected by evolution, the current most successful reproductive strategy for that group that has been tried." Yes, I would agree that this reproductive pattern, which is present in animals and plant and possibly even in the cells that form our organs to a certain size, has evolved because it is functional. However it manifests as a depression of attraction and hormonal production in the presence of members of species whom we grew up with. I'm not sure if you were also saying that over time populations grow slowly overall. Recent global human population growth relates to massive fossil fuel availability x technology x labour available x fertility opportunity, as I am sure you realise. Prior to that, from about the last big glacial period, there was overall human population growth in some quarters, although punctuated by some very big plagues (Justinian's, bubonic). The picture is of a number of human populations that found niches, and some, but not all, due (probably to climate events) leading to immigration events including invasion and colonisation, had to find ways to survive in greater numbers and then dense populations were fostered by ruling castes under new politico-economic systems. The global aggregate was composed of very different local growth rates. What rules can we infer from this - that's another book. It does look like we are in for a big crash, from a number of sources, including decline in fossil fuel resources and materials. We should also note that, with the expansion of human numbers, there has been a decline in other non-human populations, with the exception of those which successfully parasite humans and those which humans raise as livestock or plants.

Steven,

Thanks for your contribution. It gives me the opportunity to tell you about my work, which answers some of your questions and raises others. With regard to humans and other species, I have developed a theory that there are a range of genetic algorithms that are mediated via hormones in response to environmental information (about food, water, climate, space and spatial distance from parents, siblings and cousins). You can read about it in Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013 on kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/Demography-Territory-Law-animal-populations-ebook/dp/B00ALE8YSA/ or as paperback here: http://www.amazon.com/Demography-Territory-amp-Law-Populations/dp/1291170928/.

I am familiar with your "Expansion of the Classic Demographic Transition Model", which I discuss in my book.

Dr Salmony, you write in your comment to which I am replying, "Where are the population scientists and ecologists who are ready, willing and able to attest to or refute empirical evidence that human population dynamics is essentially similar to, not different from, the population dynamics of other species; that human population numbers appear as a function of food supply; that more food for human consumption equals more people, less available food to consume equals less people and no food equals no people? No exceptions!"

Here is my response:

1. It is true that the imperative to feed the world is abused as a way of upping population and selling more products as well as food. The class that benefits financially from ever increasing population influences governments to engineer populations upwards, via a variety of means. The classes that benefit from population growth commercially consistently promote it and they own the mass media. They also are the class that sponsors research in our increasingly commercialised and constrained universities, rewarding that which benefits them and leaving in the cold, unfinanced and unpromoted, that which does not, so that it sinks like a stone, along with its author's name, although commercially useful parts may be plagiarised.

It is not clear how conscious this population growth promoting class is of the scientific relationship between certain factors and tuning population growth upwards, but the are certainly aware of the commercial relationships. Conversely, biologists, zoologists and physicists don't tend to look at the impact of commercial relationships, so they don't take these into consideration. Political scientists, sociologists, are capable of studying these things, but those disciplines are very responsive to commercial signals themselves, and tend to be politically,commercially and academically aligned with the focused beneficiaries of population growth. Behavioural psychologists are seen as more empirically based than some social scientists, but they concentrate on individual and species responses to environment rather than ecological interactions and patterns, which turns out to be a problem in studying population. Physical scientists have acculturated to look down on political scientists and so they don't read or promote political science exceptions that would help their own work, even where that social science discovers obvious biological, physical patterns which could be tested by physical and biological scientists and mathematicians. E.O. Wilson advocated 'consilience' but it still hasn't happened.

Study of this subject seems to need scientists who are able to look both at political and biological concepts and indicators, who are not aligned with commercial beneficiaries of population growth, and who are able to work independently. Even if such people exist, it is unlikely that their theories will be read, promoted or discussed, of course.

2. It is true that all animals (including humans, of course) respond to availability of food. They also respond to availability of water, space and to climate. Measuring their response to food alone shows that their response normally causes them to regulate their breeding within comfortable limits. Overshoot is comparatively rare: See Pimentel, D., 1968, March. Population Regulation and Genetic Feedback. Science, Vol.159, p. 1434; Hopfenberg, R. and Pimentel, D. (March 2001) "Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply", 1 Duke University, Durham, NC, USA; 2 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, http://panearth.org/WVPI/Papers/HumanPopulationNumbers.pdf) \l "_edn110"; and Iwamoto (1978) cited by Hopfenberg and Pimentel, 2001. Op. cit. p.4.

They do not, except under certain current circumstances, breed up to the limit just because there is food there. They usually stay under the food limit.

This fact, of which I feel certain you are actually aware, contradicts your statement that "more food for human consumption equals more people, less available food to consume equals less people and no food equals no people? No exceptions" (...). [2]

In view of the empirical research, I think that your statement needs to be posited more complexely, vis:

"No food equals no people;
More or less food, as long as it is enough to sustain life and reproduction, equals a variety of population number outcomes."

Please note as a scientist who is ready, willing and able to attest to or refute empirical evidence regarding this statement that you make that I have examined your and Dr Hopfenberg's, 'Expansion of the Classic Demographic Transition Model' (2011), respectfully in my book, Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of Animal and Human populations. I find that a number of additional factors could be considered towards this model, such as the impact of in and out migration, transport changes, and variations between populations. I also find some exceptions to it, to which you may care to respond at some time. [2]

Some questions:

But, in relation to your statements about food dictating population numbers, why do we have some countries where people 'breed up' although they get very little food and suffer long-term malnutrition (Africa, Brazil, Ethiopia, Britain during the Industrial Revolution), other countries where people breed at a lesser rate but overeat to obesity (Australia, United States, Canada), other countries where people eat well and breed up (Saudi Arabia), and other countries where people don't overeat much and don't breed up and had comparatively low birth rates even before the age of petroleum and modern contraception? (France, Japanese Pacific islands). Note that there are big variations between regions and classes of people within those examples.

What about the immigration factors in these different countries? (Immigration can mean everything from rural to city, interregional movement, intersuburban movement, planned invited foreign migration, through to presence of troops and invasion, colonial occupation etc.)

What about different rates of 'marriage' (i.e. potentially productive unions) and how these different rates come about? Malthus was aware of the importance of this factor and documented many variations.

All these factors vary and produce different norms.

The global tendency is towards overpopulation, unquestionably, but not all components of the globe are overpopulating. If we are to solve this problem of global overpopulation, should we not be looking at the peoples and countries that, despite the presence of abundant food, are able to live comfortably within their means (and which [preferably] do not succumb to obesity?)

I have looked at these questions in Demography, Territory, Law, Rules of Animal and Human Populations and find that there are some other factors that have created the situation we are in, which is one with far more available fertility opportunities than available in nature. High fertility is rewarded in some economic systems, such as those where there are no rules against child labour and parents have no way except via wages to increase a miserable family income.

Modern transport gives the ability to travel far and wide and is a significant factor in creating more fertility opportunities because it brings people in touch who otherwise, in small societies, might never have found mates due to kinship prohibitions. Incentives or necessities to move away from one's local birth place (generally due to commercial or military displacement in the forms of planning impositions, economic changes forcing sales of traditional land) lead to people travelling away from their home regions, towards cities and mulitiple fertility opportunities. A classic example of this is late 19th C and 20th century Ethiopia, where land 'reforms' and 'modernisation' with Mennelik II's embrace of 'development' more or less forced people who for centuries had been settled, with highly circumscribed fertility opportunities, to migrate to the cities. Ethiopia went from 4m people in the 19th century, to 80m in the 20th century.

Very importantly, signals about local environment are obscured by global information about food and resources and, more abstractly, economic outlook. (See Virginia Abernethy's, "Not tonight Sweetheart - No Energy.")

Whether the people of a certain region tend to stay at home in clans and tribes or move away and be exposed to new fertility opportunities rarely, often or usually, is partly dependent on what political system they live in. In a political system that does not tend to uproot people and dispossess them, where people tend to remain linked to family and clan, fertility rates will be less, e.g. France vs Britain, with Britain for a long time the nation more subject to displacement, dispossession and higher fertility opportunities. (the subject of my soon to be published second book in the series, Demography, Territory, Law: Land Tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, which looks at the availability of landless labour in the presence of coal and iron, with diminishing wood, and compares the situation in Britain with France's.)

NOTES

[1] Source: Newman, S.M., Demography, Territory, Law, the Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013, pp. 79-81. In Pimentel, “Population Regulation and Genetic Feedback,” the author identifies a number of rules.  One is that most species are quite rare, relatively or ‘by whatever criterion they are judged’. This rule helps to construct the idea that huge numbers involved in overshoot by a species are probably rare and do not last for long.  Another is that nearly all animals feed off live material. This observation is important because dead material cannot evolve genetically in response to predation. Pimentel describes field observations and laboratory tests which show that predated populations evolve in response to a particular predator “only if the numbers of the animal are sufficient to exert some selective pressure on the host.”  Using a variety of examples, he observes that the dominant control mechanism operating initially is “competition” (meaning selection), “but genetic feedback became dominant with time and through evolution.”  He observes that “subtle genetic changes” affect the predator, and gives this example:

“For instance, when young pea aphids (Acyrthosiphum pisum) were placed on a common crop variety of alfalfa (Medicago sativa), they produced a mean of 290 offspring in 10 days, whereas the same number of aphids for a similar period on a resistant alfalfa variety produced a mean of only two offspring.  In another example, the mean rate of oviposition (eggs per generation) of the chinch bug (Blissus leucopterus) on a susceptible strain of sorghum (Sorghum vulgare) was about 100, whereas on a resistant strain the mean oviposition was less than one. In both, reproduction in the animals feeding on the resistant plant hosts decreased more than 99 per cent. This reduced reproduction obviously would have dramatic effects on the population dynamics of the feeding animal populations.”

 
In Hopfenberg and Pimentel, "Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply," (Hopfenberg, R. and Pimentel, D. (March 2001) "Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply", 1 Duke University, Durham, NC, USA; 2 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA <<>> the authors cite evidence of other species decreasing their fertility by a variety of means which would suggest a hormonal feedback mechanism from food availability in the environment. 
 

"Some species self-regulate their number to their food resources by maintaining home ranges. Chitty (1995) reported that excess young voles, for example, are forced to leave the home range of their parents... . Possibly more germane is the evidence that a sudden improvement of diet in sheep causes an increased ovulation rate (Schinkel, 1963) and that fasting in mice for relatively short periods of time prior to mating resulted in depression of male libido and reduced conception in females (Christian et al., 1965)."

 
They attest that this simple relationship between food supply and fertility is also seen in hunter-gatherers who do not have massive infrastructure to complicate their interactions with the environment.

Biologists know that population density itself is a major indication of soil and climate fertility. 
Need to consider a different kind of mechanism 
These studies and observations, however, do not identify a mechanism which would limit fertility in order to avoid indefinitely the experience of restricted calories.  If food shortage were required before fertility dropped then clans and herds would be permanently on the verge of starvation.  That kind of stress would not be conducive to genetic survival. 
 
"… Iwamoto (1978) has shown that monkey troop size increases rapidly after artificial provisioning, but the level of consumption efficiency of the troop is always maintained lower than the critical point in both the artificial and natural habitat.  Starvation within the troop simply does not occur if the rate of food availability is held relatively constant."
 
There has to be another mechanism whereby species can adjust collectively to local environmental constraints of their ranges without constantly risking starvation.

[2] My examination is on page 58 of Demography, Territory, Law, op. cit. Your theory coordinates are: Hopfenberg, R., Hopfenberg, E., and Salmony, S., 2011,“The Expansion of the Classic Demographic Transition Model” (Powerpoint file), Global Population Speakout, http://www.panearth.org/.

SyriaNews has published a copy of this comment which I posted beneath the original article. The author, Jay Tharappel, responded:

Please, I'm more than happy to have my article disseminated.

Any visitors able to republish this article are most welcome to do so. A file containing only that part of of a full HTML document, which is necessary to publish the article on a Drupal content-managed web-site such as this, is attached to this article above as 'CounteringSectarianApologetics_7apr14.html', or it can be found here.

In time we aim to re-publish other articles on candobetter including those on the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) as well as SyriaNews. Unlike articles on SyriaNews, it can sometimes be difficult to download articles from SANA, so having the articles considerably closer may be helpful to readers.