Comments on a Paper by John B. Graham, "The Relation of Genetics to Control of Human Fertility"

COMMENTS ON A PAPER BY JOHN B. GRAHAM, "THE RELATION OF GENETICS TO CONTROL OF HUMAN FERTILITY"* DUDLEY KIRKf Perhaps my role as the only social scientist participating in a population genetics meeting accounts for my invitation from Dwight Ingle to comment on Dr. Graham's paper. As Graham freely admits, his paper has little to do with genetics and is in fact an appeal for more scientific and political effort on population limitation by his biomedical colleagues. I do not fault him for this general objective; the world population problem certainly needs more scientific study and constructive action than it now receives. Nor do I disagree with Dr. Graham's major points that rapid population growth may and often does adversely affect nutrition, social welfare, economic development, and the quality of life. My disagreement with Graham lies in his interpretation of facts, his draconian conclusions, and his recommendation that human genetics be curtailed as a "baroque" science. Graham properly accuses demographers like myself of decrying the hysteria of biologists about population growth. Demographers and many other social scientists have viewed with dismay the naive and simplistic statements of biologists in this field. It is not that demographers do not comprehend the gravity of the problem—indeed it has been their major preoccupation in the last twenty years. But, with the fanaticism of the newly converted, biologists have been quite prepared to indulge in exaggeration in their eagerness to put an apocalyptic vision before the public. I do not for a moment regard Graham as guilty of deliberate mis- * Adapted from remarks presented at the Panel on Population Genetics, Conference on Genetic Disease Control, Washington, D.C., December 8-5, 1970 [I]. t Morrison Professor of Population Studies, Food Research Institute, Stanford University , Stanford, California 94305. 284 I Dudley Kirk · Control of Human Fertility representation. He is a man of great integrity and compassion. But in this paper he has been swept along in the full cry of biologists' alarm about world population growth. One could not question all of Graham's paper without writing a longer one. I will rather point to two common sources of disagreement between social scientists and biologists and then illustrate from his first three charts. 1. The numbers game.—Biologists are prone, as indeed demographers were some years ago, to point to inevitable Malthusian disaster by extrapolating present rates of population growth to "standing room only." But long-term extrapolations predicting an anthill density of population in the United States and in the world are merely arithmetic exercises with little relevance to reality. There are many socioeconomic trends that, if continued, will bring disaster long before population pressure will. To take only a single such trend among hundreds, the rate of murders in the United States is said to be increasing at 7 percent per year. If this is true and continues very long, the population problem will have been more than solved before we are well into the next century. Any constant geometric rate of growth, no matter how large or small, ultimately leads to astronomical absurdities. There are checks and balances in the social system that are today operating to reduce rates of population growth just as they operated to raise the birth rate in the United States after the depression of the 1930s. Paralleling the possibility of 300,000,000 Americans in the year 2000 at present rates of population growth is a very different result from another extrapolation. If the rates of fertility decline from 1960 to 1968 (mostly before the present brouhaha about zero population growth) are extrapolated, couples will on the average have only half a child by the end of the century.1 Of course I do not expect this to happen; it merely illustrates the fact that strong forces to slow our population growth were already well under way in the 1960s. In any case, the United States' population is currently running along the lowest of four series of forecasts made by the United States Census Bureau as recently as 1969. This lowest series yields a population of 266,000,000 by the year 2000, not the 300,000,000 often cited. Our problem in the...