Explain The Two Major Population Explosions In The Course Of Social Evolution

2,000 years ago the world, in terms of population, was only the size of the United States of America, 300 million people. Today, the world’s population is at seven billion and counting. If the population rose at a steady rate from year 0, we would’ve reached 1 billion people by about 210 A.D. This, however, was not the case. We reached 1 billion people in 1800 A.D, which means that there had to be very odd growth periods for the population as a whole REWORD ME. From 0 to 1000 A.D. the population only rose about 10 million people, “and well into the second millennium, [the population] grew less than 0.1 percent each year” [1]. However, from the year 1800, with 1 billion people worldwide, to 1930, the world gained another billion people. We then reached three billion people in 1960, five billion in 1987, and 7 billion in 2013. One can clearly see that once we entered the 19th century, the world’s population started growing like a 14 year old boy going through puberty; rapidly, and without any warning. One thing that can explain this growth is called the Demographic Transition.The Demographic Transition is a theory that explains the growth.

“The Wreck of Time,” written by Annie Dillard, illustrates societies battle with population. Dillard emphasizes the disasters that savage our world. According to the author, “ By moderate figures, the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber the living.” (Dillard 168) The amount of natural or man-made catastrophes do not affect the population as much as we claim. Dillards opinions are supported with facts throughout her essay, but readers are still left to question, why is our world considered to be overpopulated? Perhaps it is time for our society to consider Earth is not overpopulated in terms of people, but in resources. In addition, humans are struggling to grasp that other ecosystems are also being affected. With the introduction of Darwinism (the theory of evolution, by natural selections), humans are programed with the mentality of “survival of the fittest” forcing our humanity to evolve. Although evolution proved to be beneficial, as our immune system and way of life improved, we sacrificed our natural resources along the way. The problem with our society is not the lack of knowledge, but the ignorance and selfishness within our society. Overpopulation, threatened by the lack of resources, intimidates humans to disrupt biodiversity as we know it. (1) Man-made changes jeopardize our biodiversity. (2) As a result, the Earth’s resources are being depleted due to rapid consumption. (3) Even though we lack resources,

The human population rate has changed throughout the ages. By looking at the table we were given the human population has increased heaps from 2000 years ago. If we look at our ancestors they lived with a small existence but this has changed as we have developed and there is more agriculture in this world. Population grew very slowly in the 1000 A.D. also decreased after the Black Death causing large numbers of people wiped out. Then in the 1800 A.D. the industrial revolution came, soon living standards were raised and there was food shortage with the population. In 1927 medicine was introduced this meant that there was increased life expectancy, so the human population grew more. There was more advantages from agriculture, medicine and sanitation

Dr. Forsyth implements plenty of evidence as well as proven statistics to back up his outlook on these issues. The growth of human population is happening at an exponential rate, implying that in a short period of time population growth will double. “We find it difficult to comprehend exponential growth, but it may prove to be our fatal blind spot” [3]. When analysing the world’s population over a long period of time, it took roughly 19,000 years for the world’s population to go from 5million people to 500 million people in 1500 A.D. [4] With an estimated population of 7.5 billion people [5], for a period less than 1000 years, population increased more than 1500 times its size than it was in the 1500’s. In addition, on a more minute scale of time, in 1950 the world’s population was roughly 2.5 billion people [6] in merely 50 years the world’s population has tripled. With these statics, it is evident that the world’s population is increasing at an incomprehensive rate. With populations at their peak, overconsumption is another problem this world faces, as Dr. Forsyth affirms “humans consume far more than their fair share of the Earth’s natural productivity.”[7] Due to this over consumption of resources, there is a vast demand for cheap food which results in the clear cutting of large forest to generate room for new plantations of food. When doing so, humans destroy habitats that

As the human race continues to grow older the population starts to grow. Population growth is a change in the size of a population over time, depending on the balance of births and deaths over a period of time. For the world, population grows when the amount of births exceeds the amount of deaths. As shown in figure 1, the world’s population grew very slowly until about 1750 that is when the population growth started to increase rapidly. Figure 2 shows the growth of the global population from 1950 onwards, it also shows the projected population growth up to 2050. The global population is estimated to rise to approximately 9 billion people by 2050.

During the first 2 million years of the United States’ history, the human population was a minor element in the world ecosystem, with at most 10 million members. One Hundred thousand years ago, with the dawning of the Stone Age, the number of human beings began to increase more rapidly. The relative balance before these times gave way when the human population developed methods of agriculture and animal breeding. This enabled them to stay in one location upon the earth instead of searching for food.

The demographic changes were evident, from 791 million in 1750 to 1.7 billion in 1900. This demographic ‘jump’ took place because agricultural inventions such as mechanical reaper, chemical fertilizers, and refrigerators increased the food productions, thus leading to higher birth rate and lower death rate. With an increasing population, people started migrating from rural to urban regions to find work and to have a stable life. However, not only the changes existed. Since all people were not wealthy, most of them still lived in impoverished conditions even after a great deal of development during the Industrial Revolution.

Scholars estimated that population of the world was around 10,000 people 100,000 years ago and slowly inclined to a population of 500,000 people 30,000 years

Throughout a great portion of human history, humanity was stuck in what is known as the biological ancien regime. This biological ancien regime is defined as a moment in time in which population remained at a steady, rate, and birth and death rates balanced each other out, creating a status quo and no steady growth in population. That being said, what helped humanity escape this biological ancient regime, the British Agricultural revolution, can be seen as the single most important development in human history, for its ability to take humanity out of this regime, escape the Malthusian trap, and furthermore, aid the Industrial Revolution and the world as we know it today. According to Robert B. Marks in his book, “The Origins of the Modern World”, “nearly all of the world’s 750 million people, regardless of where they were or what political or economic system they had, lived and died within the biological old regime”, in 1750.

At the beginning of our era approximately 250 million people lived on Earth and by 1650 the population had grown only to 500 million. Yet, the rapid growth of population, starting in the nineteenth century, coincided with the development of the industry making the impact of the humanity on the environment, and in particular on the temperature change, considerable. In 1830 the planet population reached one billion, in 1930 it reached two billion, and four billion around 1975. In 1990 it was estimated 5.3 billion. It is clear that the growing population is consuming more resources, using more energy.

According to the lecture, “If the birth rate is higher than the death rate, then population growth will be exponential.” What sets us apart from history is the fact that our death rate has greatly decreased due to our ability to fight leading causes of death. In historic times, the average projected age of survival was far lower than it is now due to the lack of knowledge on how to deal with and prevent different diseases. As time passed, humans began to learn more about medicine and treating sicknesses, but this was a slow and steady process. Plagues like the Black Plague during the 1300s killed off millions of people in Eurasia, preventing the population from growing exponentially. Couple with war and crime that was at its peak during the 1940s, the population did not have room to grow up. But as time continued, the rate of war and crime decreased, leading to one less reason of death to worry about. Famine was also a huge cause of death during 1870 but begins to decrease in 2010. The combination of the decrease in causes of death that stems from the better technology to deal with diseases, less wide-scale wars, less famine, and the continuous birth of new live caused the population to seem rapidly grow from around the 1950s onwards (this makes sense as it was right around the end of WWII, the last major war to affect the entire world). The migration of people and intermixing

Between 1400 and 1700, the global residents rose slightly from 300 million to about 1,2 billion people but then this figure dropped marginally to just under 1 billion humans. After a decline of 300 million people, the number of this grew sharply by nearly 5 billion, to exactly 6 billion people worldwide at the end of the examined period.

It is commonly accepted that the population size of Homo sapiens was small in the beginning, with such a limited number and scattered population due to the existence of hunter–gatherers, a significant level of inbreeding would have been inevitable, almost indefinitely involving multiple kin relationships. These unions continued during the following slow population growth of human groups living mainly in rural settlements, with bottlenecks caused by periodic epidemics, famines, and warfare.

In the late eighteenth century, Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus described how human population, when unchecked, grows exponentially while resources (specifically food) exhibits arithmetical growth (Moseley, Perramond, Hapkie, & Laris, 2014). Malthus primarily blamed the poor for high fertility rates and argued for the abolishment of all welfare, believing that if the poor succumbed to the negative effects of poverty, overpopulation could be stopped. While this may seem a distasteful solution to modern environmentalists, one cannot completely erase population from the environmentalist equation. Despite the technological advances that rendered much of Malthus' musings passé, one cannot ignore the idea that the carrying capacity of earth loom unknown

Our planet’s carrying capacity for prehistoric Homo sapiens was probably near 100 million. However, without their Paleolithic ways of life and high-tech technologies, the population would be much less - possibly a couple tens of millions. The advance of agriculture allowed even larger population growth to occur, demanding for even greater land-use practices to earn more nourishment from land. At some point, their farming systems could have supported a couple billion people. The world population is currently almost at 7.5 billion, but with our technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.S. has estimated that the people born after we reach nine billion could be sustained if necessary expenses in food policies and anti-poverty