Overpopulation

“For instance, the present population of Latin America is around 300 million … But if the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where the people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid human carpet over the whole area of the continent.” (Dawkins Pg. 111).

This is Dawkins`s hypothetical situation about the earth`s future. Of course, he has taken into account the possibility that there will be famines, plagues, starvation, and other occurrences which will control the population of our planet.

This actually reminds of the famous English economist, Thomas Malthus, who stated that population grew much faster than food supply, implying that there wouldn’t be enough food to sustain everyone. His idea was discarded thanks to the green revolution, where new technology was created to produce a much larger supply of food compared to the amount of people. There are still Neo-Malthusians (contemporary geographers), which are taking Malthus`s theory back into account. Their arguments have to do exactly with what is quoted above.

Dawkins states that there is a solution to this problem, where we, as survival machines, are “guided by selfish genes, who most certainly cannot be expected to see into the future…” (Dawkins Pg. 111). Basically, he says that having too many children is a penalty. There are limited resources that a parent can provide for their child, meaning that only a certain amount of their children can become part of the healthy population. Ultimately, the genes for having many children never get passed on to the next generation in large numbers, since a very little amount of children containing these genes actually reach adulthood.

I can only assume that Dawkins is referring to third world countries with this theory, since it is in places like Latin America where people with very low resources are bearing more children than what they can afford. So what about the more developed countries where people do have enough income to bear many children? I have recently studied the situation of several generally rich countries such as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Italy, where there is actually a negative increase in society. How does Dawkins explain this with the selfish gene theory? I know that in the case of Japan, fewer and fewer babies are being born each year because more women are getting jobs with salaries equivalent to those of an average male. Since they spend so much time at work, they don`t think about having kids. This shows that women are taking a bigger interest in themselves than in the survival of their kin, through which the selfish gene should be passed on. Once again I ask, how does Dawkins explain this?