Quote:
Originally Posted by charles brough
Yes, that's what happens. It is even worse. Rats and mice over-crowding ends in a dramatic change in behavior. There develops a behavioral breakdown. Gangs of mice invade family warrens, some of the rats become trance like. Other gangs pick on each other and rape. They sink into what has been called "a behavioral sink."
As we crowd each other for diminishing resources, we also are beginning to exhibit behavioral deterioration not only within our societies but also between them and between nations.
charles
the Atheistic Science Institute - home page* * |
I don't necessarily think that your
behavioral sink example is quite right. Perhaps if we were to overpopulate in the realm of 20-22 billion, but not at 10-15 billion that estimates say the planet can support. The gist of the conclusion from the behavioral sink experiment was that individuals can only handle a certain threshold of forced social interaction (such as what happened to the overcrowded rats). The main argument for the
Malthusian overpopulation is not a matter of space, but a matter of how much food and resources could be produced in a given year to sustain a given population. Although food/resource shortages/wars would exhibit all of the characteristics of the behavioral sink, the cause would not be the same. The cause would be the procurement of the necessarily resources, where in the experiment with rats they had enough food and water provided for the given population size, it was the lack of social space which is believed to have caused the break down.
