From: Donald Nield (d.nield@auckland.ac.nz)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 15:51:56 EST
Denyse O'Leary wrote:
> All who are following this thread, please see a
> very interesting article in the New Criterion,
> "Friends of Humanity?" by Roger Kimball.
>
> In general, it is a discussion of flaky early
> 19th century utopianism, but search on Kimball's
> take on Malthus, who was such an important
> influence on Darwin.
>
> Kimball thinks that Malthus's primary intention
> was to counteract utopianism. He implies that
> Malthus's faulty math -- which became a rallying
> point -- was actually a side issue.
>
> Kimball makes some interesting points; for
> example, when Malthus writes about the
> arithmetic progression of food sources and the
> geometric progression of populations, he seems
> not to see that all food sources ARE populations
> of organisms. Thus, his argument is incoherent,
> unless he seriously means that humans increase
> geometrically and all other life forms increase
> arithmetically -- but that is contradicted by
> simple observations and is obvious to anyone.
>
>
>
> Denyse
It appears to me that the argument of Malthus is not invalidated by the
fact that food sources are populations of organisms. If the geometrical
growth rate of the prey is considerably less than the geometrical growth
rate of the predator, then for practical purposes the growth of the prey
can be approximated by a linear growth function.
Don
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