When the concept of probability for population growth is applied to kangaroos; and when the Australian government says that ‘a kangaroo population can increase fourfold in five years if it has continuous access to plentiful food and water’, then nobody says it is not a concept that makes sense.
That's because it is conditional upon sufficient access to plentiful food and water.
In order for 6billion humans to survive, they need to acquire about 12-18billion litres of water per day. Maybe a third of this will be in food. So 8-12billion litres of actual water needs to be drawn.
So, without crossing an ocean (since ocean crossing technology is a long way off being invented yet) from Africa we need to find a way to fit all those people. And then we need to worry about other water related issues: Sanitation. Without sewer systems we have a major disease problem to overcome if we're going to hit the 6 billion mark.
And then comes food. At say 3,000 calories a day, we're going to need a system that can support acquiring 18,000,000,000,000 calories every day.
We'll need a system of logistics to transport the water and the food, unless it's every man for himself in which case we'll have a constant source of tension and war as people fight for the optimum locations to acquire those resources. Again, this is going to significantly dent our numbers until cooperation kicks in, and then we've got the logistics problem again.
And it's not just sanitation, other diseases need to be taken into consideration. A black death like plague carried by fleas or flies with 6 billion people with no concept of what's going on is going to lose billions within years.
And all this assumes that humans don't engage in massive amounts of lethal combat for sexual prizes. Which the Bible clearly shows they do. As do other archaeological and sociological studies. Some people think that the 20th Century has been surprising in the small number of war related deaths there were. Compared with hunter-gatherer dynamics it was orders of magnitudes more peaceful.
Steven Pinker on the myth of violence
As Mr Pinker argues: if the number of deaths due to warfare in the 20th Century were to accurately reflect hunter-gatherer rates of warfare deaths, we'd be looking at 2billion dying in the whole of the 20th Century!!
So really, until agriculture it was highly improbable that humanity could begin to increase its numbers faster than it was losing them. And even then the maximum sustainable population even with optimum politics and logistics was lower than it is today. We still needed the Agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Green Revolution to occur before we could reasonably anticipate with any degree of likeliness, to reach 6 billion population size.
So, as the Australian government notes: First kangaroos need access to sufficient resources THEN they can increase in their numbers.
That occurs in human populations. They grow to their maximum possible size until an increased access to sufficient resources occurs whereby the maximum sustainable population size increases, and the population very quickly chases up to that size.
But this process is slow (See: the evidence), so even though there are 'rapid bursts', like the hare vs the tortoise - it can still be slow overall.
what is the probability that the population would have reached 6 billion persons in each of the three seasons of 14 thousand years immediately prior to the last 7 thousand years,
At the start of each season you can take a look at the population. How large is it? How widespread? Does writing exist? What kind of tools are being employed? And make some reasonable guesses about how much progress is needed. Now you could pick a sufficiently large number so that making such a prediction is impossible - could anyone have anticipated based on the evidence we presently have that 50,000 years ago we would have invented GM food and vaccines?
Not really. And I wouldn't be surprised if at that scale it was impossible to tell the difference between the chances of it occurring 50,000 years ago and the chances of it occurring within 50,000 years, 100,000 years ago.
But if you are just trying to make that point, by finding a suitably large number...then it's going to fail.
When we get to 7 thousand years ago and we see intensive agriculture starting, monocrops, irrigation, dedicated labour classes and so on. We see a occasional bits of proto-writing and as a result we see our first example of cities.
And with writing came the preservation of ideas. And this is possibly why the Near Eastern religions put the age of the world approximately here. They took the beginning of 'civilization' as the beginning of time. An easy mistake to make under the circumstances.
But if it's applied to Human population growth, with total risk of damage to the reputation of the natural selection theory for the origin of the Human body,
then is that not too much coincidence that all of a sudden it doesn't make sense?
You didn't say the same thing as the Australian government purportedly did. I think you assumed that scattered hunter gatherers were just as likely to discover genetics within 10,000 years as agricultural city dwellers are.
But as we can see from present day hunter-gatherer tribes...they are still in very early infancy as far as population size goes. And this is because the earth simply cannot support 50,000,000 hunter gatherer tribes.
But if our hunter gatherer tribes were to have
continuous access
plentiful food and water THEN we might predict a massive population boom to get the world population to whatever number we care to dictate.
But they don't have continuous access to such resources. So asking what the probability of a group of people without continuous access to plentiful food and water reaching 6billion is not comparable to what the Australian Government said.
Having said it in a multitude of different ways I'm hoping it sunk in?
No?
Have you ever researched how Darwin came up with Natural Selection? Ever hear about a guy called Malthus?
You should, he said what I just said 200 years ago.
quote:
"Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that in every age and in every State in which man has existed, or does now exist
That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,
That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and,
That the superior power of population it repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice"
And it is this 'repression' as it occurs over long periods of time, to all living organisms - is what Darwin called Natural Selection. Whatever traits assist organisms in overcoming the repression better than their rivals will increase in frequency.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.
Edited by Modulous, : TED embeds are subtle and quick to anger.
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