April 5, 2005

more hamish:

4 Comments

From Hamish, my old high school buddy:

In Gene­tics I once saw the growth curve of a yeast popu­la­tion, in a jar, and the growth curve for the human popu­la­tion over­laid, and sta­tis­ti­cally they were more or less the same. Only pro­blem is that the popu­la­tion collap­ses about fifty years from now to a steady state of about ten per­cent of its current level.

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4 Responses to “more hamish:”

  1. [journey] says:
    April 5, 2005 at 5:59 PM

    [jour­ney] scratches her head and won­ders…
    ’Collap­ses’? I’m gues­sing this means that even­tually abor­tion and eutha­na­sia will narrow down the popu­la­tion level, but is this sta­tis­tic a result of the yeast-human com­pa­ri­son?
    (Read: can yeast tell our future?!) ;)

  2. Ulrich Hobelmann says:
    April 5, 2005 at 11:23 PM

    Yeast and popu­la­tion growth?
    Beer: hel­ping peo­ple have sex since 18something :)
    No seriously, for some rea­son human popu­la­tion seems to top out at a cer­tain point. Maybe it’s that highly edu­ca­ted women are more cons­cious that having kids is not always fun. While une­du­ca­ted coun­tries have 3 – 4 kids per woman, in Ger­many it’s more like one or some­ti­mes two, and that’s coun­ting those that actually start a family (I believe the ave­rage is 1.4). North Ame­ri­cans are higher than that (over 2.0), owing to reli­gion I would guess.
    Maybe it’s just that in a wealthy society fun rules all, so not taking any res­pon­si­bi­li­ties has high prio­rity. The work cul­ture I encoun­te­red at uni­ver­si­ties in Ger­many and the USA seems to rein­force this assumption.

  3. Toby Hede says:
    April 6, 2005 at 1:43 AM

    »‘Collap­ses’? I’m gues­sing this means that even­tually abor­tion and eutha­na­sia will narrow down the popu­la­tion level
    A grea­ter issue is simply just overc­row­ding — even­tually the resour­ces to sus­tain a large popu­la­tion will run out, not to men­tion like­lihood of epi­de­mics being rapidly trans­mit­ted through popu­la­tions plus the inc­rea­sed social pres­sure can lead to all sorts of con­flict (I remem­ber rea­ding that stu­dies of rats in crow­ded popu­la­tions auto­ma­ti­cally culling the weak as popu­la­tion pres­sure increased).

  4. Hamish says:
    April 6, 2005 at 6:55 AM

    Hi Toby
    “rats in crow­ded popu­la­tions auto­ma­ti­cally culling the weak as popu­la­tion pres­sure inc­rea­sed“
    Eeek. That’s pretty much what its gonna be like.