What Nature Does Best!

I've been subscribing to The New Yorker for years for a variety of reasons, and my latest rant / wonkout is based on an article by Gideon Lewis-Krause in the February 24, 2025 issue called "The End of Children."  (LINK)

It's about the current seemingly universal worries about the current world-wide demographic decline, which is very real.  Basically, almost every country is in the minus growth for population: fewer babies are born than can replace the population as a whole, and a lot of people are freaking out about that. Especially male white conservatives in the Western Industrial Nations seem obssessed with "The Great Replacement Theory":  that this is a nefarious plot to get rid of white people and replace them with black / brown / Asian / Native people.  

But, even if there is such a thing going on, then why is South Korea and Japan's replacement rate worse than ours? And in almost every country, even with added incentives, there's a steady drop in childbearing. So why?  What is going on?  Who is doing this?  Is it sheer modern selfishness (we've all heard the latest gender war where "selfish childless cat ladies" refuse to procreate in a society that needs them to have more children), or is something else going on?  

Well, while I'm waiting for someone to reveal the eugenicist who is in charge of the GRT and how they've kept it secret for so long, I will tell you what shouldn't be a secret to anyone: the biggest eugenicist of all is Mother Nature.  One of the things Nature as always excelled at is Demographic Apocalypse, and she's got all the best tools for mass murder.  

First of all, some statistics: 

CLIMATE IN HISTORY 

Yes, Virginia, things change.  

100,000-18,000 BCE - Last Glacial Maximum (i.e, end of the major Ice Ages)

68,000 BCE - World population cut to around 12,000 people probably due to the Toba Catastrophe, a super-volcanic eruption in Sumatra, Indonesia. (Sumatran volcanoes are dangerous:  we'll run into them again in 1816, when Mt. Tambora exploded and caused a year without a summer.)

Caldera of Mount Tambora

12,700-10,800 BCE - Late Glacial Interstadial, which is a fancy term for a BIG warm up. 

10,800-9,600 BCE - The Younger Dryas; a sudden huge plunge in temperature, along with another major die-off of humans 

7000-3000 BCE - Holocene Climatic Optimum.  A time of wonderful weather, and the Neolithic / Agricultural Revolution and the rise of a few major civilizations. (We'll get into more of that later.)

535-537 CE - Major global climatic catastrophe. No one is sure whether it was a small asteroid / meteorite / volcanic explosion, but historians like the Byzantine Procopius noted that the sun's light was dimmed like the moon, and Chinese scholars described eerie, colorless skies, unseasonable snowfall and mass starvation. There were world-wide famines. It launched the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536-560 CE. The weakened populations were further ravaged by the Plague of Justinian (yersinia pestis, i.e., bubonic plague), a deadly pandemic that swept through the Byzantine Empire and beyond. 

950-1200 CE - Medieval Warm Period (Climatic Optimum).  Wonderful weather, that led to exceptional crops, Viking explorations, the colonization of Greenland, vineyards in England, and Cathedral building all over Europe, as well as the 1st-4th Crusades, the Mongol Invasions and other fun events.  NOTE:  Increased food production and increased wealth often leads to increased war.  We are a quarrelsome lot.  

1200-1300 CE -  Cool Down including another probable volcanic eruption(s) from 1257-58 with heavy rains and extreme famine.

1300-1470 - wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production.  

1470-1560 - Warm Spell (The Renaissance and The Reformation in Europe) 

1590-1850 - the Little Ice Age (including 1816's Tambora explosion redux)

1850 to now -  continuing warm up, much of which was launched and is fueled by the Industrial Revolution.  And for quite a while, we have been in a period of wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production that shows no signs of letting up.

***

One thing I found fascinating in Mr. Lewis-Kraus' article was where he said, with what to me is a faint whiff of distress, 

"In about 1805, we crossed the threshold of a billion people. That had taken the entirety of human history. Our next billion took just a hundred and twenty-three years."

Meanwhile, our population has climbed from 2 billion in 1925 to over 8 billion of us on this planet today. That's 6 billion people in100 years. I don't consider that demographic collapse in any way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, during that "entirety of human history," humans saw tremendous civilizations of great sophistication, urbanization, with great cuisines, irrigation, flush toilets, waterwheels and windmills, seafaring ships, barges, canoes, massive food production, art, music, dance, sculpture, ceremonies, religions, and fireworks. Also, wars, weapons, gunpowder, and genocide. From ancient empires like China, Egypt, the Mesopotamian and Indus civilizations, as well as ones we're only now discovering underneath the jungles of Amazonia, Indonesia, etc., and on to Classical and Late Antiquity, the Renaissance, the "Age of Enlightenment" - it's pretty amazing (and sometimes horrifying) what you can do with "only" a billion people on the planet.

And on a purely irrelevant, personal matter, I think most people looked better in clothing like this:

 

(Vermeer) or this:

 

(Rembrandt)

than today's casual culture:

So, what are we so afraid of with a demographic decline? Losing all our cheap goods, cell phones, entertainment, transportation, food, and instant gratification? Probably.

Well, as I said before, we struggle to build up civilizations, and Mother Nature slaps us down with regularity.  

Around 66,000,000 BCE, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event caused the mass extinction of three-fourths of all the plant and animal species on earth.  Scientists believe it was a massive asteroid - 6-9 miles wide which slammed into the earth in the Yucatan, creating the Chicxulub crater.  

Meanwhile, there's 2024 YR4, an asteroid about as big as a football field, which is lined up to swing by, visit, or crash into earth around 2032. There's a supervolcano in Yellowstone, and there's always Mount Tambora, Mount Vesuvius, and a whole lot of Iceland, which are all still smoking.  We still haven't figured out a way to undecline our demographic from something like that.  

***

But Mother Nature has another dirty secret up her sleeve:  and it's in our own biology.  Back in June of 1972, Dr. John Calhoun watched as a four year utopian experiment ended in total demographic collapse:  the Universe 25 Experiment.  

He had set up a world in which four mouse couples were given a "veritable rodent Garden of Eden - with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space.

As population density began to peak, population growth abruptly and dramatically slowed. Animals became increasingly violent, developed abnormal sexual behaviors, and began neglecting or even attacking their own pups. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out.  (LINK)

BTW, Richard Adams, in Watership Down, pointed out that among rabbits, does can and do absorb embryos when hard times come, when there’s insufficient food, or in cases of overcrowding.  Mother Nature, culling the herd from within.  And we are mammals. 

Sounds to me like we're already in Universe 25...