Population Bomb “arguably the worst book ever written”? Okay, but why?
| April 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Alex Berezow at ACSH:
Do you see yourself as a worthless cockroach contributing to the collapse of human civilization? Probably not, but Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich thinks precisely that about you.
Fifty years ago, he published arguably the worst book ever written, The Population Bomb, which declared that human overpopulation would cause mass starvation. Instead, the Green Revolution (led in part by ACSH co-founder Norman Borlaug) caused global food production to explode, and the world population more than doubled from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 7.6 billion today.
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Now, at the age of 85, Dr. Ehrlich still hasn’t let reality change his mind. In fact, he’s doubled down on his apocalyptic prognostications. In an interview with The Guardian, he likens humans to cancer cells. The article reads like a crackpot manifesto, channeling the unscientific ramblings of the Food Babe along with the conspiracy theorizing of Alex Jones: More.
Indeed. But naturalism plays an underlying role in all this. Ehrlich’s assumption seems to have been that human beings are mere animals who do not perceive our own situation and adjust our practices, left to ourselves. History shows that we always do.
My own (O’Leary for News) grandparents, just for example, had quite large numbers of children (9 and 10, respectively) because, if you were running a family farm in the early twentieth century, growing your own children made much more sense than paying out scarce and precious cash to hired hands — and ending up in debt to a land-grabbing bank. It was roughly the same in India, I later learned.
GMOs changed a lot but so did mechanization of farming. And guess what? Young couples adjusted their expectations of family size. That would have happened without any government intervention, let alone loads of propaganda about a population bomb. Because people have minds and they think.
See also: A science writer admits that the population bomb fizzled?
and
How naturalism rots science from the head down
5 Responses to Population Bomb “arguably the worst book ever written”? Okay, but why?
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No, it’s not “mere animals”, it’s mere software or pure math.
Scientists have been making the same basic error since Swift parodied them in Laputa. They model reality in a form that works best in math; in modern times specifically a form that works best in software.
Living things don’t do linear or exp. They always end up doing tanh or sin. Why? Because living things ALWAYS adjust to circumstances with immediate analog negative feedback. Math, whether on paper or in software, can’t do analog adjustment. Computers handle linear and exp beautifully, so scientists see everything as top-down unadjusted linear or exp.
As to line of thought from Ehrlich:
So he wants to destroy humans in order to save the world? Might I suggest that humans were intended to be here on earth and that the earth was specifically designed with humans in mind all along?
In laying this point out,,,
First off, the Earth is not nearly as haphazard and insignificant in the universe as the Copernican/Mediocrity Principle has falsely led many people to believe.
This widely believed Copernican/Mediocrity principle has now been overturned by our two best, most validated, theories in science. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics respectively.
First off, in the 4 dimensional spacetime of Einstein’s General Relativity, we find that each 3-Dimensional point in the universe is central to the expansion of the universe,,,
,,, and since any 3-Dimensional point can be considered central in the 4-Dimensional space time of General Relativity, then it is now left completely open to whomever is making a model of the universe to decide for themselves what is to be considered central in the universe,,,
Einstein himself stated, The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS [coordinate systems].”
Fred Hoyle and George Ellis add their considerable weight here in these following two quotes:
As Einstein himself notes, there simply is no test that can be performed that can prove the earth is not the center of the universe:
Here are a few more references that drives this point home:
Even Stephen Hawking himself, who claimed that we are just chemical scum on an insignificant planet, stated that it is not true that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong,,, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”
Even individual people can be considered to be central in the universe according to the four-dimensional space-time of General Relativity,,,
,,, In fact, when Einstein’s formulated both Special and General relativity, he gave a hypothetical observer a privileged frame of reference in which to make measurements in the universe.
Whereas, on the other hand, in Quantum Mechanics it is the measurement itself that gives each observer a privileged frame of reference in the universe.
In fact, in quantum mechanics humans are brought into the laws of physics at the most fundamental level instead of humans being a result of the laws of physics as Darwinists had falsely imagined us to be.
And as leading experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Richard Conn Henry who is Professor of Physics at John Hopkins University states “It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe.”
Moreover, there are Anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) that strangely line up with the solar system and earth.
Radio Astronomy now reveals a surprising rotational coincidence for Earth in relation to the quasar and radio galaxy distributions in the universe:
Moreover, in the following paper, Robin Collins found that photons coming from the CMBR are ‘such as to maximize the intensity of the CMB as observed by typical observers.’
In relation to photons from the CMB being ‘such as to maximize the intensity of the CMB as observed by typical observers.’, in the Privileged Planet video and book we find that “The very conditions that make Earth hospitable to intelligent life also make it well suited to viewing and analyzing the universe as a whole.”
Moreover, in the following video, astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross reveals that We Live At The Right Time In Cosmic History to see the Cosmic Background Radiation, or as he put it in the video, we live at the right time to see ‘God creating the universe’:
As well, in relation to living at the right time in cosmic history to see God creating the universe, in the following article Dr. Hugh Ross, via Brandon Carter and the anthropic inequality, reveals that we also just so happen live in the narrow window of what he termed to be the human habitability time
Here are a video and article that further back up this claim:
Moreover, although atheists assume that planets that are able to support intelligent life are fairly common in the universe, the fact of the matter is the probability of finding another planet that is able to support life in this universe is virtually impossible.
In further establishing our centrality in this vast universe, in the following video, physicist Neil Turok states that we live in the middle, or at the geometric mean, between the largest scale in physics and the smallest scale in physics:
Here is a picture that gets his point across very clearly:
The following interactive graph is also very interesting to the topic of geometric ‘centrality in the universe’:
As you can see, the preceding interactive graph pegs the geometric mean at 10^-4 meters , which just so happens to correspond to the limits to human vision as well as the size of the human egg.
This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision as well as the size of the human egg could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly at the geometric mean.
Moreover, in 2013 Michael Denton’s wrote a paper detailing the fact that chemistry itself is of maximum benefit ‘for warm-blooded, air-breathing organisms such as ourselves’.
And although the purported evidence for human evolution is far weaker and illusory than most people realize,
Although the purported evidence for human evolution is far weaker and illusory than most people realize, it is interesting to note that leading Darwinists themselves admit that they have no clue how evolution could have produced the particular trait of language in humans.
In other words, although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as lions, bears, and sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and, more specifically, infuse information into material substrates,,
What is more interesting still, besides the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information and have become ‘masters of the planet’ through the ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and who is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states, “The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena.”
Moreover, besides being foundational to physical reality, information, as Intelligent Design advocates have been pointing out to Darwinists for years, is also foundational to biological life.
It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’ than finding both the universe, and life itself, are both ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and, moreover, have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our unique ability infuse information into material substrates.
Perhaps a more convincing evidence that we are made in the image of God and that our lives have meaning and purpose could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was indeed God.
But who has ever heard of such a thing as that?
Thus in conclusion, far from what atheists profess to believe,,,, that they are basically just chemical scum whose lives have no more meaning than slime mold, the fact of the matter is that multiple lines of evidence from science itself attest to the fact that each of us have far more significance and meaning in this universe than what they presuppose.