Science: Standing Room Only

When scientists are feeling a heavy sense of their social responsibility, they prefer to dust their hands of the atom bomb: its threatened misuse they regard as a purely political matter and out of their control. But science willingly accepts responsibility for another “chain reaction”: the frightening, snowballing increase of the human population has been brought about by science’s contribution to human health and fertility.

This week, feeling its venerable age and authority, the American Association for the Advancement of Science will celebrate its centenary in Washington. Unlike the speakers at most scientific gatherings, who remain coolly detached from human problems, the scientists at this week’s convention are worried about the ways that science affects the future of mankind.

One of their worries is overpopulation. Man apparently cannot go on multiplying —and eating up the planet he lives on. This recurrent theme is emphasized by Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society and author of the recently published shocker, Our Plundered Planet. “Within only three centuries,” says Osborn, “the population of the earth has increased five times … It is now increasing at a net rate that, if continued, would double the earth’s population again in another 70 years . . . But now, with isolated and inconsequential exceptions, there are no fresh lands anywhere . . . Many of the fertile areas of the earth are today deteriorating through misuse, so that even the earth’s present rate of productivity is not assured . . . Pushed to it, we are endeavoring … to develop new means of sustaining human life. [But] if man continues his unthinking exploitation … it will take more than a research chemist to insure survival.”

Ultimate Choice. None of the speakers believes that mankind’s future can be assured by merely lecturing farmers on how to be kind to topsoil. Warren S. Thompson, of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, argues that the human race must eventually control its own numbers, or be controlled—by hunger, war and pestilence.

“Since the middle of the 18th Century,” says Thompson, “the population of Occidental lands has undergone a growth in numbers and a change in distribution which … is unprecedented. These revolutionary changes . . . are for the most part by-products … of scientific knowledge . . . Because they are by-products they have received little attention, and almost no effort has been made to control or guide them in the interest of the group.”

The greatest present danger from science-induced increase in population is in the Orient. “. . . Relatively inexpensive health services [have reduced] death from epidemic diseases, even though the level of living . . . rose very little.”

Dead End. Thompson believes that the increase in eastern populations will “come on so fast that it will consume practically all the increase in production . . . Indeed, may it not lead to more devastating famines and a higher death rate as population increases?”

Some western nations may find their “numbers too small to … compete economically and militarily with neighbors who are growing at a more rapid rate . . . too small to maintain their national culture in a world which under the influence of science is becoming one world …”

What should science do about it? This week’s speakers agree that the twin problems of shrinking resources and expanding population cannot be ignored. Concerted action will be needed to keep the world producing, even at the present level. And why has this not been done already? Mostly, the scientists think, because science has not worried much about the consequences of its own progress—and because the human race has not thought very scientifically about the consequences of its own runaway increase.