[jacoblyles]

In the 1500s we invented Humanism.

Now, finally, in this post-modern world we have invented Anti-Humanism. This allows truly clever humans to signal how truly clever they are. Because it takes a truly clever human to recognize the value of Anti-Humanism.

Simple folk still think humans are a good thing.

[derefr]

Simple folk also cause stock market bubbles. The point of "anti-humanism", as you term it, is not that there should be fewer humans forever--it's that there should be fewer simultaneously. Just like publicly-traded companies, people want to have more direct descendants--greater returns--today, even if it means their "company" (all descendants looking forward) will be worse off after another year/generation. Anti-humanism is basically a recommendation to maximize long-term, instead of short-term, gains: to have fewer children and provide each with more resources such that each child will be more likely to be able to have high-quality descendants of their own.

An interesting analogy can be drawn from dwarf wheat, the grain that allowed the agriculture industry to become exponentially more efficient and productive over the last several decades. Dwarf wheat is a "genetically modified" crop, but not in the way you would imagine; we didn't make it hardier, or higher-producing at its own expense, or anything else. All we did to get massive gains in wheat production, was to turn off the part of the wheat's genetic code that made each stalk of wheat attempt to grow taller than each other stalk of wheat, thus making every stalk expend the majority of its resources on (inedible) stalk, and relatively little on (both edible to us, and reproductively important to it) grain. Since all the wheat has the gene for competitive growth turned off, all the wheat ends up short--and so all the wheat stalks still end up getting just as much sunlight, but can use all the resources they would have put into growth upward to instead sprout hardier, more nutritious grain.

Humans--all animals [1]--have a competitive program of their own: absent certain status-signaling drives that arise in high-intelligence+education groups, each human attempts to have as many children as possible to ensure their line has as many opportunities as it can to be passed on. The length of our stalks is pretty ridiculous :)

[1] Okay, maybe not all animals. I'm sure some parthenogenetic lizard or other such beastie fails this test after careful thought.

[maxerickson]

Dwarf wheat handles fertilizer better (shorter, thicker stems can hold up a larger seed...):

http://books.google.com/books?id=22JBi4RC-HwC&lpg=PA55&#...

Any crop wheat has already been bamboozled into massively over-investing in each seed.

[jacoblyles]

The 1960s called. They want their failed Malthusian predictions back.

[derefr]

It seems odd to accuse someone of Malthusianism who specifically went out of their way to mention the mass-farming techniques that have stalled Malthusianism.

On the other hand, those farming techniques rely on heavy fertilizer loads--which then rely on either hydrocarbons (which we will run out of) or large masses of animal waste--which requires large numbers of animals--which requires feeding those large numbers of animals. And what do they eat? The majority of the mass-farmed crops. Just because it's stalled now, doesn't mean it's stalled forever. :)