Why do we need more people here on planet earth?

I’d prefer that women (couples) limit themselves to 2 or fewer children to allow for ZPG (zero population growth. Particularly in the developed countries with low child mortality.

Some of us are aware, some will stay in the dark and continue to procreate so they can get a paycheck and waste their potential on babysitting. I would be in favor of a 2 kid limit. No kids if you have not completed high school would be refreshing as well.

@Dr_Lawrence Excuse me???!!! Women? You would prefer that “women” limit themselves to two or fewer children???!!! Just because you put “couples” in parentheses doesn’t excuse the initial statement. In this regard, it absolutely takes two to tango.

Population classically grows exponentially until it meets environmental resistance. As soon as the planet is unable to sustain the number of humans on it, the population levels will adjust. That may well happen sooner than some expect.

Actually, some countries have aging populations and would actually benefit by increasing their population. Canada is one of these countries. Provincial governments are making daycare more affordable and are giving bonuses and tax credits to large families. In Canada underpopulation is actually a big concern. This is because of the baby boomers starting to retire, as well as the rise of the feminist movement. It is a major economic concern.

I learned this in my social geography class last year by the way.

Maybe Canada should let some Americans in. We tend to breed a lot here. Well, not me.

@tinyfaery there is an immigrant worker program that let’s foreigners work in Canada for a while and then later on they have the option of bringing their families over. I think it applies more to jobs in the primary sector though (agriculture, mining, fishing, etc…).

When discussing population growth it also seems necessary, at least to me, to discuss the distribution of resources, with those resources including money, labor, education, medical care, technology, agricultural resources, etc. among many others.

Hell. Maybe even I’d have some kids if I could move to Canada.

According to the 2000 Census, about half of the population in the US was between the ages 20–59. About 30% are 19 and under and the remainng 20% are 60+. It will be interesting to see what the 2010 census shows.

With the number of people we have that are getting older and retiring, we need to have people that will be able to replace them in their careers and help care for them as they get sick. I can understand why some people want to limit the number of children each couple has, I think we have to remember that there seems to be a growing number of people that do not want to have children.

@lillycoyote It just recognizes that women, not men have or should have the say on whether they want to get pregnant. I worded it that way out of respect for women and in a manner consistent with my strong pro-feminist attitudes and behaviour. How did this backfire on me?

I’m in favour it. Not only child limits per family, but also if you can’t afford to have one, then don’t – it’s unfair to expect strangers to pay for your kids.

Was I being a chauvinist pig as @lillycoyote sort of alleged?

@Dr_Lawrence I didn’t think. Honestly, women can have children by themself (IVF with a sperm donor), so I just saw it as stating that each woman should be limited (since men can’t have a child on their own). I don’t agree with the limit, but I didn’t see it as you being a pig.

No, that is why there is so much money put in space exploration!

The limit is based strictly on the mathematics of zero population growth. I would hope responsible people would voluntarily try to avoid contributing to rapid population growth. I don’t feel comfortable imposing limits on others. The limits of what the planet can endure only seems to hit home to us when we are older and our reproduction decisions have already been made.

We need more loving, responsible, activist people on earth, not just more bodies.

We don’t but the only way to stop it is to reduce poverty and offer planet-wide high quality education. Take India as an example. Middle class people in the booming IT cities got 2 kids.

Nature is eugenics. There’s your population control & an unstoppable force. The desire being survival. You can only precipitate the process, as the Nazi’s ventured to do under the influence of Darwin & Galton’s dogma.

@meatheadbox Actually, you can’t. Eugenics doesn’t work, but Darwin and Galton and Sanger and Hitler didn’t understand that.

dpworkin, Care to annotate, how/why? Are you saying nature isn’t eugenics, or are you saying you can’t facilitate the process? or both? Nazi’s euthanasia program killed off over 200,000 people, who all had abnormalities. This included wounded soldiers. The program would of perdured & intensified if it wasn’t for their comeuppance. Evolution does this by itself, just takes longer, unless I’m misinformed over the whole evolution theory or there has been studies to say otherwise?

Genetic engineering with modern techniques has a much greater chance of being effective but even the large-scale efforts of the Nazis had no discernible effect on the gene pool, because some of the traits they were trying to extinguish weren’t really traits, and some were so complexly polygenic that the traits weren’t affected by the manipulation.

Eugenics aimed at one monogenetic or well understood single disease might be effective, but the current state of bioethics prevents us from attempting it.

I have, hence, why I made my commentary. It has worked & is still working…At least link me otherwise? Double checked the numbers though, it was 400,000 who were killed off from one program and over 200,000 in the a4 one, plus the six million Jews of course, but they just used eugenics as an excuse when killing Jews, fore Jews had no abnormalities and were prominent people in Germany.

Huh?

It’s also completely ineffective against heterozygous recessive conditions.

Oh, so you were referring that eugenics doesn’t work when people practice it, but I said that nature is eugenics.

I guess it’s arguable that evolutionary forces are sometimes eugenic in effect, but they are really quite blind, and have such an effect only by accident. As an example, you would think that sickle cell anemia would be maladaptive, so why does it persist (there is a very good answer) and why does homosexuality persist? If nature were eugenic, surely there would be no homosexuals.

Good points, I don’t know why.

Sickle-cell is a heterozygous recessive condition, and carriers of the single allele happen to be protected against malaria, so sickling, if you look at a map. is almost exclusively found in people whose ancestors came from malarial regions: in other words the malaria protection trumped the extinction of the disease. As for homosexuality, it it still entirely unclear why such an intuitively maladaptive trait (no progeny) would not extinguish.

Population control? Times when one sex’s births outnumber another’s?