Modern Art and Scientific Thought by John Adkins Richardson (review)

Books 367 The danger of overpopulation is disposed of by Maddox on the basis of reduced growth rates that have occurred in advanced technology societies. However, he seems to neglect the fact that this stage has come only after a several-fold increase in population had occurred following the Industrial Revolution and that, if a similar increase occurs in developing countries, unacceptably high population levels will result. The possibility of a future catastrophe is related to overpopulation , exhaustion of resources and excessive pollution , and may come about because all these phenomena have been growing exponentially. The understanding and appreciation of the exponential growth model, first demonstrated by Malthus in 1798, is central to any realistic discussion of the future-yet it is missing from The Doomsday Syndrome. Instead, Maddox states that the Earth ‘is still vast compared with the scale on which human beings live’. As would be expected, such a naive approach leads to erroneous perceptions of the future. For example, Maddox states that in Britain: ‘The prospect of dire fuel shortage, urgent as it seemed in the 1950’s, has been replaced within fifteen years by an almost embarrassing freedom of choice.’ At the close of 1973, few Britons would share his optimism. Maddox tends to overestimate the adaptability of man and society. After all, much of recent evidence shows that excess, sometimes catastrophic, occurs before corrective action is taken. Maddox is equally overconfident as regards the predictability of the future. For example, he claims that ‘ . . . it is possible to simulate by means of electronic computers the functioning of. ..a city so as to predict how it will respond to some change or other’. And yet, his views, and computers notwithstanding, urban problems remain mainly unsolved (including such behavioural phenomena as crime). Indeed, his own reaction to the ‘doomsday literature’ is a good illustration of the unpredictability of human behaviour. Those seriously interested in the future of society will find the book by the Science Policy Research Unit of SussexUniversity a much more valuable source of information . The purpose of the Sussex group of editors has been to clarify the complex issues, the assumptions and methodologies of the MIT models used in computer simulation as reported in The Limits to Growth. It could be argued that the doomsday predictions of the MIT report could be expected even without the benefit of a complex computer simulation, since they are surely the result of the inherent incompatibility of an assumed sustained exponential growth and a finite environment. As pointed out by Page (one of the contributors to the Sussex critique), the MIT models ‘are not attempting to predict The Future, but to show the possible consequences of present trends and relationships continuing without drastic change. Indeed, the message of most of the doomsday authors is not that forecasts are necessarily expected to materialize-but that they could do so if appropriate action is not taken now.’ For some 200 years, continuing growth of economic activities has been at the basis of progress in advanced technology countries. The MIT study suggests that a diffeient foundation, attuned to the physical limitations of the Earth, will be needed in the near future. Clearly, the next century cannot be realistically visualized on the basis of political and economic uniformity and the abolition of nation-state sovereignty. The current competition for resources and the resulting international conflicts provide perhaps a better indication of what can be expected. Similarly, it can be argued that political constraints may be as important as physical limitations, with respect to, for example, feeding the world and providing an adequate supply of energy. Perhaps the major significance of the Sussex ‘re-runs’ of the MIT model is the demonstration of its high sensitivity to small input changes. More recently, this again has been shown by T. J. Boyle (Nature 245, 127, 21 Sept. 1973), who found a numerical error (related to pollution level) in the MIT’s computations and obtained solutions leading to stable population levels. While information of the above type indicates some specific limitations of the MIT model, its main shortcomings lie in a different area. For obvious reasons, the model does not allow for human response as an...