CHAPTER 11 WHY ARE SO MANY BIOLOGISTS ALARMED? All hail to biologists. By greatly improving our agricultural and our understanding of the processes that affect sickness and health, biologists have contributed far more to human progress and contemporary well-being than has any other discipline. We owe them our gratitude. We do not, however, owe to biologists that we pay attention to them when they talk pure nonsense about subjects entirely outside their field of special knowledge. Certainly in the past few decades, and perhaps as far back as Malthus' and Benjamin Franklin's time -- the most strident prophets of doom about environment, resources, and population have been biologists, with some handmaidens among the physicists and chemists. The bestsellers among the book-length warnings of disaster due to population growth have been Willam Vogt's Road to Survival (1948), Fairfield Osborn's Limits of the earth (1953), Karl Sax's Standing Room Only (1960), and Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, (1968), all biologists, and there are literally scores more by biologists that are little known; The Limits to Growth is a rare exception in this genre that was produced by MIT engineers (Meadows et al., 1972). Biologists have consistently warned about supposedly impending shortages of the staples of economic life -- food, farmland, raw materials, a clean environment, species of wildlife -- to the peril of our standard of living. And they have asserted that the quality of human life has gotten worse rather than better. They even threaten us with economic doom, a subject they claim to speak about with more authority than economists. Biologist Clark denies that "those who have been trained in modern `economics' actually deal with economic realities" (Clark, 1989). Another well-known biologist: "Perhaps the most serious single academic problem in the world is the training of economists" (Raven, 1988, p. 229). One reads that "Economic theory was developed at a time when human population was small and the planet was considered an infinite resource" in The ZPG [Zero Population Growth] Reporter (September, 1991, p. 1). And as Ehrlich put it (please forgive the personal examples to come), "economists confuse `pollution' with the more serious problems of loss of ecosystem services", referring to "the sort of blunders Simon and other economists of his ilk commit when they attempt to deal with problems of population, resources, and environment". And two prominent environmental activists combine to make this statement: Another impediment to perceiving and acting on overpopulation has been conventional economics, which activist and author Hazel Henderson has called "a form of brain damage"...For example, economist Julian Simon, whose work has served as a rationalization for recent U. S. population non-policy, maintains that population growth generates its own solutions" (Mills, 1991, p. 48). More biologists's statements about economics and economists may be found below. Why do biologists behave so? Here are three personal anecdotes to introduce the more general discussion: 1. At a social occasion, a very, very distinguished biologist -- let him/her remain nameless except to say that s/he heads a major scientific institution in the Washington area -- confidently and vigorously made a collection of distressing assertions about the economic condition of graduate students. When it was suggested that her/his judgments did not square with aggregate statistics, s/he dismissed census data and historical trend data as irrelevant, and inferior to her/his personal observations and data s/he is familiar with at a single university, and to the journalistic reports that he/she had read in the newspapers. 2. When I debated at the University of Wisconsin with distinguished ecologist Garrett Hardin about whether more people have good or bad effects in the long run, the large audience was mostly composed of biologists and their colleagues in "environmental studies." Hardin was openly contemptuous of all data, but especially statistical analyses of such phenomena as immigration and unemployment, asserting that the Malthusian theory was more to be believed that empirical refutations of it. "[O]ne cannot expect much in the way of secure truth from statistics," he said. Instead, we should "use such theory as we have that looks secure, that makes sense, and see if we can't make sense of the world using this theory." The audience applauded Hardin's remarks, and not a single critical question was asked of him in connection with his rejection of historical experience. 3. Bernard Davis, a distinguished member of the Bacterial Physiology Unit at Harvard Medical School, who speaks his mind unusually freely, wrote me, "I am convinced as a biologist that in the long run the problem of population growth is likely to turn into the world's most oppressing problem" (letter of October 26, 1989, italics added). No data were cited. The organizations most influential in our national life on these matters, and on such related matters as (human) population growth and in-migration, have been biologically oriented, from A- Z - the Audubon Society to World Wildlife Fund to Zero Population Growth. And in the quotation above, Davis implies that he has a special point of view as a biologist about a matter whose truths one would think are independent of a person's occupation. Would a scholar make assertions about rent control or cancer research or population growth "as a chemist" or "as a Chinese philologist?" Over the years I have wondered about the modes of thought involved in the thinking of people at large that lead them to consistently-erroneous judgments and prophecies about materials and environment. Others and I have identified a long list of cognitive elements. Causes of the wide dissemination of these judgments without scientific foundation have also been discussed -- for example, the penchant of the newspapers for bad news. But the specific characteristics of the thinking of biologists -- I speak about the category for convenience, though of course there are important exceptions -- have not previously been discussed, to my knowledge (though also see Chapter 12). And in light of the importance of biologists in this movement, the topic calls for special treatment. The biologists will be quick to point out the limitations of an outsider in analyzing the thinking of biologists. But two decades of biologist-watching in the context of doomsday scares provides some useful experience. The cognitive elements that come to mind are the following: 1) The non-historical character of most biological work, except for the study of evolution. There is little reason to think that eagles or human kidneys are very different now than seven millennia ago. And individual "human nature" may be much the same now as then. But society's powers to produce goods and to develop new capacities are vastly greater than earlier; consider the difference between the technological responses to the Black Death and to AIDS. Applying the assumption of constancy in society's responses to a food or fuel shortage, or to a change in climate, since (say) 5000 B.C. until now, leads to grave (sic) mistakes. Malthusian famine, for example, no longer occurs on this earth, as witness the overflowing shipments of food to starving countries in Africa. The causes of starvation no longer include the physical inability of society to transfer food to starving people, or the incapacity of cultivators to plant, harvest, and store enough for their needs. To continue to think about starvation as it was in earlier centuries leads to unsound policy prescriptions. It is hard to square a reasonable perspective on human history with this sort of statement: If you asked me right now, "Has science been a net benefit or a net harm to mankind?" I have to say "I don't know". So far it's done about as much harm as it's done good. Maybe a little more harm than good. Americans are part of the lucky group, but most people in the world are living considerably more miserable lives than they lived six or seven thousand years ago. We are the most vulnerable population the world has ever seen. We're more crowded. We have more undernourished people than have ever lived before. (Paul Ehrlich quoted by McBride, 1980). Inexperience with phenomena that change over time may also be responsible for biologists looking at too short a series of experiences. A recent example is a single hot summer (1988) being taken as the harbinger of global warming. Another recent and costly example was the conclusion, based on just a few years of price rises about a decade ago, that petroleum in particular and energy in general are becoming more scarce. (Remember biologist Paul Ehrlich's "What will we do when the pumps run dry?") Sometimes centuries are required to determine whether a trend is occurring. Observations covering a period even as long as fifty years in the Nile River's history can make it look as if the Nile is going dry, by continuing to show a drop in the river's level for that long a period. Only data covering many centuries put half a century into proper perspective (Baumol and Oates), and prove that one can only draw the correct conclusion - that in the long run the Nile is neither rising nor falling very much - if one gathers and observes the data for that long a period; Figures 9-1, 9-2, and 9-3 portray this story. The same is true with trends in climate; one can easily be fooled by looked at temperatures for just a year or a decade (or even a century). Biologists' work does not equip them with experience to deal with such long time-series. Figures 9-1, 9-2, and 9-3 [Baumol and Oates, SOH] 2) The characteristic use of experimentation with individuals rather than survey of the aggregate universe, epidemiologists constituting an exception. Though variability in results can be important in biological experiments, variability is less central a phenomenon than in social science. If penicillin kills bacterial infection in one case, repeated study in the laboratory can refine the conditions under which the effect will occur reliably. Jonas Salk and co-workers were able to draw tentative conclusions from a test of an AIDS vaccine in three monkeys, one of whom did not have the virus and two of which did have it. In contrast, the connection between, say, population density and economic growth is "only" statistical. No matter how you look at a collection of observable entities such as countries, there will be many glaring exceptions to the main tendency, and the main tendency is likely to hold with a correlation that is closer to randomness than to perfect relationship. Looking only at particular instances -- say, at a particular country that is far from the pattern -- prevents drawing sound generalizations. There is a long history in medicine of disdaining statistical evidence in favor of "clinical" learning -- the rejection of Ignaz Semmelweiss's discovery of the sources of childbed fever being a leading horrible example. (Digression: The preference for conclusions drawn from the physician's own "clinical" experience rather than statistical reasoning has become almost ludicrous at a time when the main basis of judging the efficacy of drugs and operative procedures is controlled experiment, analyzed with statistical techniques, published in technical journals that are persnickety about the use of such evidential methods.) 3) Working with individuals as representative rather than with a sample as representative. Related to the idea of variability is the idea of representativeness. Biologists usually do not work with the idea of a representative sample from the universe of interest, and they do not need to understand the properties of biased and unbiased samples. Therefore, they are not protected against error from grossly unrepresentative samples. For example, one of the estimates of the rate of tropical deforestation most relied upon by biologists who forecast the denuding of tropical forests comes from Sommer's (1976) study that drew observations only from the sides of roads through the Amazon and elsewhere. Sommer then simply assumed that the forests would be similarly cleared for 4 kilometers on each side of the road, and then projected the number of kilometers of roads that would be built. No matter how clever the theoretical assumptions one makes to supplement these observations, such evidence is most unlikely to help one soundly judge the state of the forests that are not near the roads -- which are the bulk of forests, of course. The distrust of aggregate statistics by many biologists may derive from their relationship to representative individuals rather than samples. I wish I had a dollar for each biologist who, when I show aggregate trends toward better nutrition in the world over the decades, and decreasing scarcity of raw materials over the centuries, has recited -- just as Garrett Hardin did in our debate -- the old saw about lies, damn lies, and statistics. And they ask, "How do we know that your statistics are valid?" before even inquiring into the provenance and nature of the statistics. An example of this is the comment of a specialist in forensic medicine at a drug conference in Israel: "My one advantage over the other speakers is that I have seen firsthand the damage drugs do to the lungs, liver and kidneys of addicts", he said (Jerusalem Post, week ending April 29, 1989, p. 19). His own visual observations, and his emotional reactions to them, make him feel qualified to render a policy judgment without considering the many other aspects of prosecuting drug users and sellers. This is an example of the fallacy that psychologists have demonstrated to occur when vivid evidence is given more weight than it deserves, relative to pallid evidence such as data (See e.g. Nisbett and Ross, 1980, Chapter 3). 4) Usually studying entities other than the human person making characteristically-human adjustments to daily life and society, physicians being something of an exception. The subject of biological study is usually either a non-human organism or is at a level of organization below the organism. Concepts that are appropriate for non-human organisms -- niche, carrying capacity, etc. -- are inappropriate for the creative aspect of human beings which is the central element in long-run economic activity. Biologists then consider the human to be "just" an animal. As Hardin put it, "Since this is true for all other populations, it's hard to see how it can be false for the human population unless you say we're just utterly different from other animals, which a biologist is not willing to do" (1989 debate, p. 3). We may be animals, but we are not only animals in the sense that all that is important about us is also true of other animals. The 1960's and 1970's generalization of the work of Calhoun on Norwegian rats to policy recommendations for human society has been a classic example of this muddle. It may be that working with non-human species predisposes a person to have relatively little faith in the adjustment capacities of human beings. For example, in regard to the possibility of fusion energy, Paul Ehrlich was quoted as saying that cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is "like giving a machine gun to an idiot child". (Los Angeles Times, 4-19-89, Part V, pp. 1-2). Presumably the pronouncer of such pronouncements arrogates to him/herself greater wisdom than the people being pronounced about. Hardin says, "People often ask me, well don't you have faith in anything? And I always have the same answer, I do have one unshakable thing, and that is I have an unshakable thing in the unreliability of man. I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will make a mess of it" (debate, p.9). 5) Knowing too much about certain mechanisms may damage biologists' reasoning by causing these mechanisms to be adduced when they are inappropriate. An ecological example is the mechanism that pushes animal species toward equilibrium in population size; this will be discussed below in connection with Benjamin Franklin. Charles-Edward Amory Winslow tells how the control of epidemic diseases lagged because of too much misplaced knowledge: It is fascinating to note how, for two millennia, laymen were generally contagionists and physicians were miasmatists. Nor was this due to traditionalism or prejudice on the part of the medical profession. The layman observed certain obvious phenomena and jumped at the conclusion of contagion. The physician, knowing more, was quite correct in denying that any then-available theory of contagion could explain the facts. (1943, pp. vi, vii). Many biologists make astonishingly brave assertions about subjects that are wholly outside their fields of research, assertions intended to be understood as expertise rather than as mere lay opinion. Perhaps the amazing success of biological science in recent decades induces such extraordinary confidence in biologists who have not done research on the topic that they will hazard grand statements about, for example, resource economics -- without even studying the body of work of economists for whose field the topic has been central throughout its history. Some biologists go so far as to tell economists that their discipline is fundamentally wrong and they do not understand their own subject matter. Ehrlich, for example, frequently asserts that only an ecological viewpoint -- that is, his own viewpoint -- can make sense of economic phenomena. Here it is necessary to quote at some length to give the full flavor of this criticism: It has long been clear to ecologists that the extreme growth orientation of mainstream economics is a major reason that politicians, businessmen, and others advised by economists, as well as the public at large, fail to recognize the increasing seriousness of the population crisis in particular, and the deepening predicament of Homo sapiens in general. Most people do not recognize that, at least in rich nations, economic growth is the disease, not the cure (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1990, p. 175). The failure of conventional economics to contribute to a resolution of the human predicament is understandable from a cursory examination of what economists are taught. Since they are unaware of the stress that natural systems are now under, most economists believe that the scale of economic activity can be increased indefinitely ... (p .176). The absurdity of the idea of perpetual economic growth ...(p. 177). backwards ...But even ignorance of physics is not sufficient excuse for the faith of economists in infinite substitutability. (p. 180). In our opinion, whether humanity will be able to move toward a population size and an economic system sustainable largely on income will depend in no small degree on economists (p. 181). If we are to escape our current predicament, [economics taught from an ecological point of view] should become a major area of specialized education, and replace neoclassical economics as the central focus of economics departments. Considerable instruction on the basics of how the physical-biological world works must be included in the training of all economists. Otherwise they will con- tinue to whisper the wrong messages into the ears of politicians and businessmen (p. 182).. Economists think that the whole world is just a market system, and that free goods are infinitely supplied. They are a discipline built on transparent mistakes, from the point of view of a physicists or a biologist. Economists are probably the most dangerous single profession on earth, because they are listened to. They continue to whisper in the ears of politicians, all kinds of nonsense. Everybody feels that the economic system is what dominates human affairs, when actually the economic system is hopelessly embedded in the physical and environmental systems. (McBride, 1980) Additional quotations of biologists about economists and economics may be found at the beginning of this chapter. The rejection of the economics discipline by biologists often goes hand-in-hand with the suggested substitution of an energy standard for the basic economic concepts of value theory. These biologists ascribe economists' analyses to ignorance of physical (sic) science. As Hardin put it, "[T]here is no use beating your head against the wall trying to discover an escape from the laws of thermo-dynamics. ... [N]obody looks for perpetual motion machines now, and only some economists believe in them" (debate, p. 5). But when making this objection as well as others, the biologists seldom refer to economic texts or show any other signs of having studied economic theory and empirical findings. Perhaps it is not fair to tar all biologists with the brush of the ideas expressed by a few such as Ehrlich and Hardin. But Ehrlich can count as his collaborators, allies and supporters a very large number of distinguished supporters, he has received such prestigious awards for his work as Macarthur and Craufoord (sp?) and xx awards, and to my knowledge, no distinguished biologist has disavowed his statements as expressing the views of the biological profession at large. And his sort of viewpoint is expressed from positions of considerable influence. For example, Robert Goodland, the World Bank's principal ecologist, said that "the most important thing for the environmental movement is to revamp economic thinking" Science, May 15, 1987, p. 769). And based on this viewpoint, "World Bank president Barber Conable... announced a major reorganization of the bank that will include much more attention to resource conservation and the environmental aspects of development projects". This was despite the fact that the principal economists on the Bank's staff did not agree on the soundness of the proposed policies - and the bank is supposed to be an economic institution with economic justification (ibid). There is an interesting continuity from generation to generation in biologists' views about human ecology. This is Malthus's description of Benjamin Franklin's analysis: It is observed by Dr. Franklin, that there is no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each others' means of substinence. - - This is incontrovertibly true. - - In plants and animals the view of the subject is simple. They are all impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of their species and this instinct is interrupted by no reasoning or doubts about providing for their offspring -- the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment - - and among animals, by their becoming the prey of each other (Malthus, 2nd. ed., 1803, p. 203). Contemporary biologists, too, offer animal-ecology experiments as analogies to human population growth. Their models include Calhoun's famous Norwegian rats in a pen, hypothetical flies in a bottle or germs in a bucket, and meadow mice or cotton rats, which will indeed keep multiplying until they die for lack of sustenance. Price, in The 99th Hour, gives a typical example of this view. Assume there are two germs in the bottom of a bucket, and they double in number every hour. (If the reader does not wish to assume that it takes two germs to reproduce, he may start with one germ, one hour earlier.) If it takes one- hundred hours for the bucket to be full of germs, at what point is the bucket one-half full of germs? A moment's thought will show that after ninety-nine hours the bucket is only half full. The title of this volume is not intended to imply that the United States is half full of people but to emphasize that it is possible to have "plenty of space left" and still be precariously near the upper limit (Price, 1967, p. 4) But we must recognize what Malthus came to recognize. After he published the short simplistic theory in the first edition of his Essay on Population, and after he had the time and inclination to consider the facts as well as the theory, he concluded that human beings are very different from flies or rats. When faced with the limits of a bottle-like situation, people can alter their behavior so as to accommodate to that limit. Unlike plants and animals, people are capable of foresight and may abstain from having children from "fear of misery." That is, people can choose a level of fertility that fits the resources that will be available. And people can alter the limit - expand the "bottle" - by consciously increasing the resources available. As Malthus put it, "Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his career, and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world, for whom he cannot provide the means of support." Malthus came to stress the difference between the breeding of animals and of humans, and he decisively rejected Benjamin Franklin's animal analogy: The effects of this [preventive] check on man are more complicated... The preventive check is peculiar to man, and arises from that distinctive superiority in his reasoning faculties, which enables him to calculate distant consequences (Malthus, 2nd ed., 1803, pp. 3,9) . That is, human beings are different from the animals in that we have much more capacity to alter our behavior - including our fertility - to meet the demands of our environment. The biologists whose predictions about resources have been wrong across the board for the last two decades -- Paul Ehrlich, and Garrett Hardin chief among them -- have lost no public credibility and are quoted with as much avidity as ever. No single biologist has ever told me of a radical change in his/her views as a result of exposure to new scientific knowledge on these subjects, not even the 1986 report of the National Academy of Science on population growth and economic development. Nor have I heard of radical conversions among biologists from exposure to two decades (indeed, two centuries) of data which contradict the conventional wisdom, though I have heard of such radical changes among every other class of intellectual worker. This is particularly hard to understand about the biologists -- their imperviousness to new information on these subjects, and their continuation with the same unrevised views. Garrett Hardin asks, "What is the theory involved in this area?" and answers, "the essentials of Malthus" (debate, p. 2). No matter that that theory has not fitted the facts since Malthus, or that there is newer theory that does fit the facts. And even though he notes that history since then has been "rather embarrassing for his [Malthus'] theory," he concludes that "basically the Malthusian theory still explains the facts" (debate, p. 4). The analysis of Calhoun is identical to the assessment of Franklin, and Malthus's crushing retort to Franklin would seem as fresh today as it was then. William Petersen has suggested that biologists are unwilling to recognize that social science constitutes a body of knowledge which is not immediately available to the layperson (1976; 1977). This may help explain their willingness to make sweeping statements about economic and social phenomena without scholarly research. It may also explain the willingness of many biologists to use unscientific language when discussing these phenomena, e.g. likening population growth to a bomb, cancer, a swarm of maggots, and other malign phenomena, as psychiatrist Frederic Wertham pointed out some decades ago. One might wonder: Are Ehrlich, Hardin, et al. outliers? Certainly there are some, perhaps many, biologists who do not support their views, or do not support them fully. But one does not find similar prominent cases in other fields. Furthermore, those who espouse the kind of thinking that is discussed in this essay are almost never disavowed or denounced by associations of their colleagues. And the large scientific organization that has been most sympathetic to their views has been the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose conferences and official journal Science have been heavily dominated by biology. So it would seem that these most vocal biologists should not be seen as unrepresentative of their field. Will all this continue forever? SUMMARY Much of the alarm about environment, resources, and population growth originates with biologists, as has been the case for centuries. Chapter 00 discusses what is special about the thinking of biologists that makes so many of them become so alarmed about these topics. page 1 mediabk biolo11m July 18, 1995 EXCESS MATERIAL The common view of population growth - especially of population growth in poor countries - is that people breed "naturally." That is, poor people are assumed to have sexual intercourse without taking thought or doing anything about the possible consequences. In the words of environmentalist William Vogt, whose book Road to Survival sold millions of copies, population growth in Asia is due to "untrammeled copulation" by Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus, and the rest of "the backward billion." Biologist Karl Sax asserted that "nearly two thirds of the world's people still rely largely on positive checks [death by starvation and disease] to control excessive growth of populations."2 Or as Robert C. Cook, the long-time population activist and editor of Population Bulletin, put it more politely, "Over a billion adults in less developed countries live outside the realm of decision-making on this matter" of family size.3 And in the words of a well-known physician in the official Journal of the American Medical Association, "If we breed like rabbits, in the long run we have to live and die like rabbits."4 This idea goes hand in hand with the view that population growth will increase geometrically until starvation or famines halt it, in the ever-ascending curve shown in figure 11-1. Perhaps the ugliest of the biological analogies was dreamed up by Alan Gregg, the emeritus director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Medical Division, "There is an alarming parallel between the growth of a cancer in the body of an organism and the growth of human population in the earth's ecological economy."0 Gregg then asserts that "cancerous growths demand food; but so far as I know, they have never been cured by getting ------ The analogies can be found in our plundered planet." And the policy implications of this analogy are quite clear. Gregg then goes on, in his paper invited by the most eminent scientific journal in the U.S., to observe "how nearly the slums of our great cities resemble the necrosis of tumors." And this "raises the whimsical query Which is the more offensive to decency and beauty, slums or the fetid detritus of a growing tumor?" One set of demographic facts seems to confirm the view that humans will have as many children as conditions permit, After food supplies and living conditions began to improve in European countries several centuries ago, the birthrate rose. And the same effect has been observed in the poor countries in the twentieth century "While the data are not so good as to give decisive evidence, it seems very likely that natality has risen over the past generation - certainly in the West Indies, very likely in tropical America, and probably in a number of countries of Africa and Asia."12 page 2 mediabk biolo11m July 18, 1995