Overpopulation & terrorism: rats in a
cage
by John Omaha
Many people will find it difficult to compare human
populations to rat populations. Many humans will suffer for that cognitive
impairment. When a pair of reproductively competent rats are placed in a
closed space and provided with sufficient food, they will reproduce and
reproduce until the space is filled with rats. At a critical density, wars
break out. Some rats, alpha males, claim territory and defend it. Others
attack. Sound familiar? Only difference between rats and humans is the
language-making capability of the human left brain. We humans give names to
our territoriesó"World Trade Center" is one. The right brain,
impelled by drives and emotions, is the fundamental force operating here. The
left brain makes "reasons" for what the right brain is going to do
anyway. Some of these "reasons" are: democracy, Islam, God, Allah,
terrorist, Third World, globalization.
What we are seeing is the result of an exponentially
increasing population. This is population biology at work. Anthropologists and
population biologists studied all the wars in history for which adequate data
were available. They learned that war breaks out when the percentage of the
population consisting of single males in the age range 16-26 exceeds a certain
fraction of the total population. Whatever Osama bin Laden may call it,
whatever Al Fatah, or the PLO, or Jonas Savimbi, or Mexican President Fox, or
the Australians who refuse to allow the Indonesian refugees into their
country, whatever the East Timorese may call it, the Afghanis, the Pakistanisówhatever
name is given is not correct; the correct name is overpopulation.
And this is just the beginning. World population stands at
over 6 billion now. Projections differ on how high it will go. At one point it
was projected to top out at 15 billion. Then it was reduced to 13 billion. The
latest numbers I have seen are 9 billion. This will happen in the next 25
years. What happens after that? Mass die off. Itís a fact of population
biology. Eventually the bacteria on the Petri dish use up all the resources
and die. We live on a spherical Petri dish. Almost all the resourcesóremember
that "living space" is a resourceóare used up. As groups led by
alpha males come into unavoidable contact with each other, conflict erupts.
Osama bin Laden is an alpha male. Yasser Arafat is an alpha male. The clerics
of the Taliban are alpha males. God help us, our alpha male is George W. Bush.
The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and whatever was going on
in Pennsylvania are conflicts between population segments assembled behind
alpha males in an overpopulated, confined space, in which the segments are
seeking to expand into territory that is resource rich compared to their own.
Unfortunately, all the players are thinking from inside the
box. Bush tells us weíll find the terrorists and punish them. The terrorists
are only the proximate problem. The terrorists are the vanguard of the real
problem: the surplus billions of people on this spherical Petri dish. Only
when the true problem is identified and addressed will we escape the
inevitable fate of our speciesóa mass die off that will sometimes look like
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and will at other
times look like AIDS and at other times like "ethnic cleansing" in
Serbia.
Control of our specieís reproductive drive is the central
survival issue our species must solve if Homo sapiens is to be a successful
evolutionary experiment. Solving the issue will require the cooperation of all
human beings. We are not doing very well.
John Omaha, Ph.D., is with Chemotion Institute:
Treatment, Education & Research for the Ingestive Disorders P.O. Box 528
Chico, CA 95927 530-899-7719 E-mail: jomaha@sunset.net
