[cnorgate]

The reality is that the best way to control population expansion is by bringing good healthcare to a region. People in the third world have huge families for a number of reasons - a few of them include the reality that:

1) Many children will die young, so in order to have at least a few that survive they need to have a large number of them

2) They have no form of birth control available available to them, so even if they wanted to they could not control the population

To go along with this, in societies that lack a social safety net / old age pensions, your children are your retirement fund, so you tend to have many of them.

It's a multi-faceted problem, but there are humane, concrete solutions that don't involve acts of god.

[bayesianhorse]

Contraception, counter to intuition, doesn't affect population growth...

There's a nice course on EdX about global poverty.

[lutusp]

> The reality is that the best way to control population expansion is by bringing good healthcare to a region.

That's a very good idea, and consistent with civilized standards and compassion, but it will not "control population". Population is a different issue with its own rules and constraints.

> but there are humane, concrete solutions ...

There are no "humane, concrete solutions". There are no solutions at all, not for a civilized people who honor individual rights. We can force people to reduce their numbers and abandon any right to call ourselves a civilized people, or we can honor individual rights and watch the unfolding of a catastrophe.

This is not a movie where all the problems get resolved in the third act. This is reality, and nature is in charge.

People who (like the author of the linked article) wave their hands in the air and say it will all work out, just don't understand biology and natural selection.

[fedvasu]

No that is the problem right there. The advent of good(pretty good for a 3rd world country) health care in India ensured explosive growth of population. The only humane way to control population is extensive education of the masses,strongly backed by government(military can be engaged, if required) It means breaking away from religious factions and beliefs. It is impossible in India where minority politics is very important and in an Islamic country like Bangladesh it would be difficult.

[lutusp]

> The only humane way to control population is extensive education of the masses ...

Absolutely true, but for one thing. If we educate the masses, we will reduce the average fertility along with doing a lot of general good. Who could argue against that?

But natural selection does perverse things with our best-laid plans. If we educate the masses, natural selection will efficiently select those who weren't educated, or who weren't educated very well, and within 100 years, those people will represent the entire human population.

Those who doubt this scenario need only study the spread of MRSA, in spite of many well-educated people fighting the good fight:

http://mrsa-research-center.bsd.uchicago.edu/timeline.html

Quote 1: "1960-1967: nfrequent hospital outbreaks of MRSA in Western Europe and Australia - See more at: http://mrsa-research-center.bsd.uchicago.edu/timeline.html#s...

Quote 2: "2012: Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology-published study showed MRSA infections doubled at academic medical centers in the U.S. between 2003 and 2008. Hospitalizations increased from about 21 out of every 1,000 patients hospitalized in 2003 to about 42 out of every 1,000 in 2008, or almost 1 in 20 patients."

We fought and lost that battle, in the midst of the most advanced society that has ever existed, with a full armament of scientific methods and knowledge. And we didn't have to honor the tastes and individual rights of the organisms we were fighting -- we could be ruthless and warlike. We lost anyway.

Now, because of MRSA, to visit a doctor exposes you to a greater risk than ... well, than most reasons to visit a doctor.

[fedvasu]

so we are in a fix (in other words ooh! poops).any study or effort to beat nature from selecting stupidity?. I used to joke about natural selection as "survival of the dumbest"(I used to be a creationist nut, back in freshman days) I guess "dumb is the new fit!"