Customer Reviews

Population, Evolution and Birth Control: A College of Controversial Ideas

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I am using this book now to research a project I am working on dealing with overpopulation. This has been the most helpful book I have come across by far, as it is a collection of various authors who have commented on the issue. The commentators range from Malthus to Benjamin Franklin to the Bible to Aristotle to Darwin to Hardin himself.

Garrett Hardin (1915-2003) was one of the world's greatest population, environmental resource scholars best known for his work, "The Tragedy of the Commons". This book is an educational population resource guide to a large cross-section of the world's greatest thinkers. A "who's who" in the human population forum.

It is a beautiful compilation or "collage", if you will, of thoughts and essays, and papers from Malthus, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther, Raymond F. Dassman ("Environmental Conservation"), Paul Ehrlich ("Population, Resources"), Aristotle, Tennyson, Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Margaret Sanger, Robert Frost, and many, many more.

A choice sample of what we find inside is a paper written by Alan Gregg in 1955, "A Medical Aspect of the Population Problem": "The destruction of forests, the annihilation or near extinction of various animals, and the soil erosion consequent to overgrazing illustrate the *cancerlike* effect that man-in mounting numbers and heedless arrogance-has had on other forms of life on what we call `our' planet". "Metastasis is the word used to describe another phenomenon of malignant growth..."

This is a timeless tribute to Garrett Hardin and is one of the most helpful works for population study references.

I lost my ancient, well-read copy and am buying another because it is such an eclectic (meaning the BEST OF, from wide-ranging sources) collection that it belongs on every bookshelf of seminal thinking. I often quote Fremlin's article on how many people the world can support, and B. Franklin's letter to a friend giving advice on the choice of a mistress.