Word: darwinism
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...Darwin admits that present-day food production can be stepped up. He says, for instance, that a way of turning wood into human food would be a great forward step. The Germans used this very simple process on a large scale during World War II, and "wood molasses" for cattle feed has been produced in small quantities...
...Sight. But Darwin is not interested in such small details. On his chosen scale of 1,000,000 years they will not be important. Each laborious triumph in food production will only put off the evil day. The earth's population will double again, again and again. After ten centuries of well-fed doubling, it will have increased 1,024 times. In the unlikely event that the food supply will have kept pace, another mere thousand years of doubling will certainly bring the end. In the year 3953 A.D., the earth will be felted with people as thick...
...Darwin's view, the human molecules have one fundamental property that dominates all others: they tend to increase their numbers up to the absolute limit of their food supply. This is the familiar thesis of Thomas Malthus, a senior contemporary of Grandfather Darwin whose gloomy predictions of starvation have haunted mankind for 150 years...
...Grandson Darwin restates Malthus. Human increase, he says, is a "geometrical progression." The more it has increased, the faster it will increase in the future. Food supply, on the other hand, increases only "arithmetically" by simple addition. Past increases do not add to its speed of increase...
...natural rate of increase of passably well-fed peoples, Darwin says, leads them to double their numbers every 100 years. To feed the doubled population, food production must be doubled too. Twice as much land must be cultivated or the old land must be made twice as productive. In the next century the population will double again, and the earth must produce four times as much food as it does...