Babies Mean War

Wait!  Babies are beautiful, miraculous little angels — what on earth could be warlike about having a baby?  What could be savage about such a loving act?

I myself go absolutely weak-kneed over small children, and have enjoyed nothing more in my own life than being a parent, so I'm not speaking here from any personal distaste.  Nevertheless, I think it's important to consider all the implications of reproduction as carefully as we can, because it's such an important area of our lives from an evolutionary point of view. 

Reproductive competition in nature

Reproduction throughout the natural world is necessarily one of the most savage acts of competition there can be.  Nature has often been observed to be "red in tooth and claw" — as John Stuart Mill put it:

If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals.   (1874)

People often think of competition in nature as occurring most often between members of different species, as is the case with predators and their prey, but some of the fiercest competition actually occurs between members of the same species, and even between offspring of the same parent.  Such battles, deadly as they are for individuals, are so advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint that they're often a key feature of reproductive strategy. 

Elm trees, for example, reproduce sexually and scatter a multitude of seeds having a varied genetic makeup onto the forest floor.  As these seeds sprout up into tiny saplings, their closest competition usually comes from the siblings all around them.  The bigger the saplings grow, the more room each one requires, and the fewer can survive.  Over time, their competition looks like a classic tournament, although the rounds are rather vague.  In each round, more and more competitors are eliminated (killed off)  by siblings who have a slightly better location or slightly better adapted set of genes for the particular environment.  Ultimately, many of the later-round winners will find themselves in competition with the parent tree. 

This strategy is hard on saplings, but tremendously effective for elms, because it allows them to fine-tune their genetics rapidly to the conditions in which they find themselves. 

In a more general sense, whenever resources are plentiful, the exponential nature of reproduction confers a huge advantage on members of a species who reproduce more rapidly than their fellows.  On the other hand, if they can't control this rapid reproduction with its large associated costs, they die off correspondingly rapidly when resources become scarce.  The ideal strategy, then, would seem to be one where your reproductive rate varied depending on resource availability, and this is indeed what we often encounter. 

Human reproductive competition: Malthus and politics

In 1798, 60 years before Darwin's Origin of Species appeared, Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population.  His thesis was exceedingly simple in its essence:

I think I may fairly make two postulata: First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.  Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. [...] Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.  Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.  [...] This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.  This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

Malthus has been much vilified for the implications of these observations, which appear to be verifiably accurate not only for almost all of human history and prehistory, but also for a great many other species in nature. 

In particular the political conclusions that he drew regarding the Poor Laws in England have caused him to be regarded by generations of progressives as a heartless upper-class proponent of reproductive control over the poor for the benefit of the elite.  You can still find him portrayed in this light by many academics even today, because his conclusions are otherwise so uncomfortable.  Before you accept that assessment, though, do read the essay for yourself (it's available in several places online). 

Actually, Malthus was trying to come up with a workable way to better the lot of the poor.  He explicitly disagreed with Adam Smith that a rise in national wealth would necessarily benefit them, and clearly understood the forces of greed arrayed against them, noting that "farmers and capitalists are growing rich from the real cheapness of labour."  He recognized that capitalism thrived on a cheap market for labor — that it was very much in the interests of the upper classes to have a large and desperate poor population at its disposal.  He didn't mention that the same is even more important when it comes to recruiting soldiers to fight your wars.

In vilifying Malthus from the moment he first published his essay, the Left has effectively been trying to shoot the messenger of bad tidings, because it would be so much nicer if social solutions could be simple.  The experience of Marxism over the past century, however, testifies to how hard utopian visions actually are to realize.  As 20th-century Russian peasants used to joke, "Under capitalism, man exploited his fellow man, but under communism, it's the other way around." 

As for the Right, a few of its dimmer members seized on Malthus as they seized on Social Darwinism later to justify exploiting others.  Such people periodically propose ideas for restricting reproduction on a class basis so as to make the poor less of a nuisance. 

The conservative elite, on the other hand, has consistently championed everyone's right (and duty!)  to breed, provided only that the state is strong enough to prevent revolution by those who are starving as a result.  This has been explicit or implicit public policy virtually everywhere in the world for centuries, and has produced a vast pool of cheap labor that continues to starve and suffer outrageous rates of infant mortality just as was the case in Malthus' time.  This is sadly true even in the United States today, where resources are comparatively plentiful.  If you don't believe me, read Barbara Ehrenreich's chilling Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America as just one small example.  Who cares, let them eat cake, mutters the Right. 

If we're being intellectually honest, any attempt to address the very real social problems we face today and the terrifyingly real threat of catastrophic collapse that's on the horizon in this century, we must acknowledge the accuracy of Malthus' simple observations and take them into account.

Human reproductive competition: cycles of war

In 2003, Stephen A. LeBlanc, a Harvard archaeologist, published Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful Noble Savage, in which he argued that war, far from being an aberration or a maladaptive pathology introduced by modern societies, has actually formed an integral part of human reproductive strategies since well before we were human.  In support of this idea, he adduced a large body of evolutionary, anthropological, archeological and historical evidence.  Even though we don't look as pretty as we'd like in this picture, I think he's probably right. 

To be clear, LeBlanc does not find evidence that we're genetically programmed to be aggressively warlike — if anything, we seem quite averse to war when it's not necessary. 

What he does observe is that Malthus had it right — in virtually every known environment, even including the inhospitable Arctic where the eskimos live, we humans always reproduce at such a rate that we exceed the carrying capacity of the ecology we inhabit. 

He shows how similar our patterns of warfare are to those of mountain chimpanzees, and argues convincingly that for the vast majority of our prehistory, we probably lived in neighboring bands just as the chimps do, and probably killed each other in roughly the same proportions — from 5% to 30% of the population typically dying in warfare. 

You would think that it might be more adaptive from an evolutionary point of view to limit our own reproduction to a rate that could be supported by our environment.  That would certainly make for healthier and happier bands of people, but as LeBlanc explains, we're usually playing a zero-sum game that doesn't allow us that luxury. 

For example, consider what would happen if two bands of humans (or mountain chimpanzees)  lived next to one another, and one band reproduced only at a rate sustainable by its habitat while the other grew rapidly beyond what its habitat could sustain.  Does the second, profligate band then die off and the first, balanced band prosper?  No, the prosperous band finds itself unexpectedly attacked by a much larger band of desperately hungry individuals, and is quickly annihilated. 

At this level of conflict, massacre and genocide are common — only females are absorbed by victorious bands, and if times are too hard they also may be killed.  Cannibalism in this context seems less a grotesque cultural practice than a simple necessity, a logical consequence of why the war is being fought in the first place — to avoid starvation.

As our military technology has improved and we've organized ourselves into large states, our wars have become far more savage and intense, but also less frequent, and they almost always kill a much smaller percentage of the population than is the case among hunter-gatherers or less organized farming tribes. 

As a result, world population has increased to the point where in many respects we've already exceeded the carrying capacity of the entire world.  We've become used over the last century to have technology pull our fat from the fire by increasing the environment's carrying capacity, but we're beginning to see environmental damage overtaking our ability to squeeze more food out of the earth. 

The possibility of catastrophe

What's even more alarming is that we've also set up a situation where war can be catastrophic as it hasn't been since ancient times — and I'm not even talking about the real possibility of nuclear destruction. 

One of the patterns that we see in almost all great early agricultural civilizations — Sumer, Egypt, the Harrapan civilization of the Indus valley, Minoan Crete, the Mayans and many others — is that a high level of social organization made it possible to support a large population on a limited amount of fertile land.  For a while, technical innovations kept offsetting the steady deterioration of the land's productivity that resulted from over-cultivation, but the innovations in turn resulted in greater reliance on complex social organization. 

Then, at some point, a minor invasion, a natural disaster, or just a decade or two of less favorable weather upset what had become a delicate balance at the high edge of productivity, and suddenly a significant proportion of the population was starving and desperate.  If the state's armies couldn't rapidly suppress the resulting revolt, and serious civil disruption occurred, all the complex social organization devoted to feeding people came crashing to a halt, and suddenly practically everyone was starving.  At that point, the whole civilization simply collapsed, generally never to recover. 

This level of catastrophe was something far different than what small warring bands might experience, because they were constantly at war and as a result their environment necessarily had a good deal of elasticity built into it in the form of "no-man's-land" buffer zones.  One small band might massacre another, but all the bands in a larger area were unlikely to experience catastrophic population loss together. 

Western civilization as a whole is getting closer and closer to finding itself balancing at the upper edge of its carrying capacity and is therefore becoming vulnerable to a major implosion.  How many of us could find food if all the grocery stores were suddenly empty?  What would we do? 

The politics of population control

Population control and politics just don't mix.  Malthus recognized this, and it informed his pessimism about coping with poverty. 

China is the only major nation I know of that has seriously attempted to restrict people's right to have children, and it hasn't met with a lot of success, in part because high fertility has been a necessary feature of survival among the Chinese for thousands of years. 

Most of Italy, by contrast, home of the Catholic Church which forbids the use of birth control, has nonetheless enjoyed a stable or negative birth rate for more than a century, as brilliantly discussed by Elizabeth Krause in her recent book, A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy.  This example should give us hope that population stability is not, after all, impossible to achieve in a civilized way. 

However, we live today on a world stage that greatly resembles the microcosm of the two bands of chimps or humans I mentioned above.  It's all very well for one band to maintain a stable population, but if its neighbor is profligate, grows desperate and begins to starve, the stable group will have to go to war or be destroyed. 

It is essential to our long-term survival as a civilization, and probably (given our possession of nuclear weapons)  to our survival as a species and a world, that humans find a worldwide solution to population growth. 

The trouble is, any such plan must not be vulnerable to cheating, since any solution that permits cheating will end up strongly selecting for cheaters.  That requirement alone (never mind the political impossibility of convincing people who haven't experienced a catastrophe to consider limiting population growth)  makes it hard to imagine how such a solution could be implemented. 

Short of limiting reproduction, our best hope for several more centuries of existence probably resides in the plagues that biologists fear could take advantage of our newfound globalization and population densities to kill millions, or even billions of people in years to come.  Even AIDS, which is a dreadful but relatively slow scourge, has significantly altered the demographic projections for this century. 

What does all this mean for me?

The first reaction of a responsible person reading the somewhat discouraging information above might be to conclude one or both of the following:

• I don't want to bring children into a world like that. 
• I shouldn't have children because I'd just be contributing to the problem. 

Nonetheless, neither of these reasonable responses stands up to closer examination.  We will all certainly die, and neither you nor your children nor their children after them will necessarily face any worse odds or harsher conditions than our ancestors survived for countless generations, and who knows what their joys and triumphs might be?  There are many good reasons not to have children, but fear for their potential quality of life is probably not one. 

Worse, holding back because you don't want to exacerbate the population problem paradoxically would have exactly the opposite effect than you intend:  When people who feel scruples have no children, people who don't feel scruples become more numerous while people with scruples become rarer, and the situation gets worse much more rapidly. 

A better strategy, if you do feel like having children, is to have only one or two and raise them to have scruples themselves — teach them how to make good decisions and be successful, so they'll go out in the world and work to solve these difficult problems, and have children themselves who'll keep working on such problems, because it's probably going to take a lot of work for a long time.