How far you can trust social scientists

Linguistics is one of the social sciences but not typically one of the ones that makes important sociological observations. Well actually it turns out that no one makes important sociological observations, because most of the observations that end up getting made are 100 percent wrong. The latest one is the theory of dysgenics. Actually that is a loaded term.

Dysgenics means doing something that is contrary to the benefit of the gene pool. And there were not that many things in that category. One of the very few of them was that women who are uneducated have more children than the women that aren't, as noted by the precipitous drop in world fertility rates.

Oh yeah, did all of you know that fertility rates are dropping? For them to drop in the first place was itself not predicted by social scientists, who all subscribed to a population bomb theory that the world is destroying itself because human beings are having too many offspring. Well, that might not be how everyone looks at it because often human beings are not viewed as part of the planet but part only of what is destroying the planet by its offensive behaviors like aresol cans and children. In the 1960's Paul Erlich of Stanford popularized the "one child" ethos because he made a bunch of predictions that human beings would either destoy themselves or the planet (whatever came first) by having too many children.

The problem with Erlich in particular and social science (my opinion) in general is that they do not make accurate predictions. And in my opinion there is no need for any predictions at all if they don't come true. It is interesting that all of these dire doomsday environmentalist theories have not come true but have still ended up causing major changes in human reproductive behavior. Well that is the theory anyway, even if it isn't an accurate one. It seems to me that all of this money and effort poured into the environmentalist movement is a waste of time because it has been geared toward averting a disaster that wasn't really going to happen anyway.

Back to why the population theory is wrong. Well no one knows, really. They just know that it hasn't been right. They don't even know to what extent it can be disproven. It is just obvious that it isn't all happening like Erlich et all said it would. He predicted that we were eating and throwing garbage away so fast that we would destroy the planet, but he wasn't even right about either how fast we are reproducing or its effect on the environment.

Because even though Erlich UNDERESTIMATED the number of human beings there would be at the end of the century, he OVERESTIMATED the amount of damage they would cause to the ecosystem. Meaning that there are even more people around right now but that it isn't cauing environmental catastrophe. That is because on of the original social scientists (in his day he was an economist but there is not must distinction anymore) Thomas Malthus predicted a linear relationshp between an organism and its environment.

The thing that Malthus got wrong, among others, was that the relationship between human beings and their environment can be manipulated. We are not like grazing cattle who will only limit their own voraciousness when we have eaten it all and we begin to starve to death. We can avoid eating up our entire environment and we can also create more of it. We don't just move on to other pastures, we can create greener ones that sustain more of us. Also not only can we avoid having a bad consequence on the environment we can have a beneficial environment, UNLIKE ANY OTHER ORGANISM ON THE PLANET. This is leaving Malthus now.

We are probably the only organism that is capable of developing a technology that will be able to actually avert an environmental catastrophe a la ones caused by bacteria pre-Cambrian explosion. Meaning that also the degree to which we reproduce can actually be beneficial to the environment, and the riskiest thing is that we not reproduuce fast enough to evolve a solution that will save the planet from eventual destruction, such as being obliterated by a meteorite.