Paul Ehrlich's death last month is a reminder of how careless extrapolations from one field of knowledge to another can still pass for “science” with devastating consequences. Ehrlich, an entomologist with genuine scientific expertise concerning butterflies, parasitic mites and insects around the Berin Sea and in the Canadian arctic, ventured in his 1968 The Population Bomb book into the field of human demography. He speculated that overpopulation brings disasters such as famine and high death rates. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, the book turned out to be influential as if it was “scientific.”
Ehrlich got the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the U.N. Sasakawa Environment Prize, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Crafoord Prize. Academics, such as Donald Kennedy, who became both president of Stanford (where Ehrlich taught for 50 years) and later editor of Science magazine, endorsed the 1968 book’s content. Organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank advocated slowing world population growth during the 1960s and 1970s.
By the early 1980s, the U.N. Population Fund awarded prizes to Indira Gandhi, who forcibly sterilized men in 1975 with World Bank financing, and to Qian Xinzhong, then head of China’s One Child Policy. In 1993, Ehrlich and John Holdren co-authored a textbook, including detailed options for “Involuntary Fertility Control,” and received the Volvo Environment Prize for laying “the foundations of our understanding of how the dynamics of population growth … interact in the context of environmental problems.” Mr. Holdren became both a professor of environmental policy at Harvard, and President Barack Obama’s science adviser.
As noted, Mr. Ehrlich was an entomologist whose scientific accomplishments concerned butterflies and insects. His speculations about humanity were extrapolations of findings in the insect world.
There is nothing wrong with being an outsider to a new field of study and write about it. But the writer should then offer scientific grounds to extrapolate from modelling society of insects to modelling human societies. Ehrlich never did. Even Thomas Malthus, the first to raise the spectre of “overpopulation,” famines and other disasters (note: world population late 18- early 19th century was 1 billion - we are now at 8 billion and counting), wrote that well-designed laws, politics and changing customs can bring about technologies that would prevent humans from behaving like rabbits, followed by lower standards of living.
True, there had been famines during the 20th century. There was the Stalin engineered one in Ukraine during 1932-33, Cambodia’s by the Khmer Rouge; Ethiopia’s Derg; North Korea’s rulers. However, disastrous ideologies and political experiments leading to famines do not exist in the world of insects. Still, to give some credit to Ehrlich and his followers, recall that extrapolations from insect and animal worlds related to overpopulation were influential during the 1960s.
Six years before Ehrlich’s book, John B. Calhoun's summarized his laboratory experiments with rats in 1962 in “Population Density and Social Pathology,” in the Scientific American. He conducted the research at the National Institute for Mental Health, where he worked for 30 years. He isolated rats, fed them and protected them from disease and predators. The rats bred rapidly, but Calhoun did not increase the rats’ living space, whose enclosures he called "utopias." The rats became violent, committed cannibalism and infanticide. The males became either hypersexual, pansexual or homosexual. Fertility declined and the rat population tended toward extinction. When Calhoun introduced the few surviving rats into the “wild,” they remained asexual, isolated – “socially autistic,” and soon died out.
The experiments' lessons were applied for cases of crowding, in chicken farms, for humans in prisons, and also for shedding light on urban violence and environmental decline. However, most followers – whom Calhoun criticized for oversimplifying his views - attributed the pathologies to inability to suffer decreasing density and subsequent escape. “Density” was easily measurable, and the correlation with pathologies of urban and prison lives appeared scientific, objective, simple to solve - and the tough-to-deal political/welfare angle left out.
And yet, people have options rats do not: They can prevent both getting into such “utopian” enclosures of free food, subsidized lodgings for generations and avoiding congestions. Prevention distinguishes humans from rats. However, this depends on examining broader political, regulatory and legal issues to grasp human pathologies, rather than focusing on simplistic correlation with "densities" - of which the Covid hysteria was an example too.
One timely research, though published in 2008, makes this point sharp and clear. In his "Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon as a Space of Exception," Sari Hanafi, former president of the International Sociological Association, examined how a combination of welfare and rigid restrictions on moving turned "the refugee camps [into] a space of radicalism and a space that contributes to perpetuating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict rather than resolving it."
He looked in minute detail into the violence that erupted in the Lebanese camps, and concluded that for 60 years, "the space of the refugee camps in Lebanon was treated as an experimental laboratory for control and surveillance." He blamed countries hosting these camps, UNRWA and Islamist groups for preventing people in the camps from moving out. He titled his concluding section: "Camps as Laboratories." Indeed, the UN mandated the UNRWA camps-experiment in 1948 to last just two years and assist in the resettlement of a few hundred thousand people.
The camps still exist almost 80 years after their creation, with millions of descendants living in increasingly crowded camps rather than allowed to settle within Egypt (that controlled Gaza until 1967), Jordan (that controlled the West Bank until 1967), Syria and Lebanon. The camps have been permeated by violence, and increasingly glorified "martyrdom" – which is a political jargon for “youth infanticide,” assisted by the Palestinian Authority’s compensation for martyrs’ families.
It appears that when politics subject people to politically motivated "laboratory experiments," confining them to utopia-promising enclosures, they display symptoms similar to rats in Calhoun's experiments. The problems are neither "overpopulation" nor “density,” nor anything related to worlds of rats and butterflies. The pathology is a consequence of political decisions, outcome of the lethal combination of welfare for generations and prohibitions to escape.
Extrapolating insights from laboratory experiments with insects and rats to humans thus mislead – except when governments and international institutions create laboratory conditions, immobilizing people, who then lapse into inhumane, radicalized behaviors, that take generations to remedy.
