The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [31]
“And all these examples became parables in the sixties and seventies because everybody thought that something of the same sort was going to happen to us,” Lisa finished for him. “I see.”
“If only,” Miller said. “What actually happened was that a few strident alarmists began telling people that something of the sort was bound to happen to the human population if we didn’t take measures to prevent it, and take them soon. For five years or so, a few people listened, and crew anxious—and then even they decided that by far, the easiest way to stave off the anxiety was not to listen to the alarmists. So they played the proverbial ostrich and stuck their heads in the sand. They were encouraged to do it by economic theorists who # thought that economic growth was the only worthwhile goal of collective human endeavor, and that population growth was good because it facilitated economic growth. Ironically enough, the original founders of Mouseworld were also anti-alarmists.”
Lisa hadn’t been expecting that, and she couldn’t take advantage of the pause that Miller left for her to pick up the baton and carry the argument forward.
“After Calhoun’s demonstration,” Miller continued, “other researchers tried to repeat his experiment using mice, which were more convenient by virtue of their smaller size. McKendrick was one of those researchers. The other experiments duplicated Calhoun’s findings, and so did some of McKendrick’s populations, but McKendrick also found some exceptions. Some of his mouse populations didn’t exhibit the standard boom/crash scenario. They adapted their behavior to a much higher population density than their wild cousins were used to. There was still a certain amount of nastiness, but they managed to limit their breeding without overmuch cannibalism, and the increase in mortality that helped bring the two into equilibrium was achieved without overmuch fighting.”
“I get it,” Lisa said. “Mice are meek, like snowshoe hares, while rats are more like lemmings.”
“That’s part of it,” Miller agreed. “But it’s not the whole story. Snowshoe hares may be meek, but they still go through boom-and-crash cycles. Nobody knows for sure, but the more important distinction might be that when rat numbers explode in the wild, they’re usually cut back by disease—as witness the Black Death. Calhoun’s rats were flea-free, of course, so they didn’t suffer the same check. Plagues of mice are more commonplace than plagues of rats, especially in limited spaces, but there doesn’t seem to be an external limiting factor that kicks in—not reliably, at any rate. For that reason, mice seem to have evolved their own internal limiting mechanisms. Because the mechanism is activated only under exceptional circumstances, which may occur only once in a hundred or a thousand generations, a lot of strains lose it to genetic drift—but enough retain it to gain a selective benefit when the conditions do arise. The same is true of some insects that became human commensals as soon as the first agriculturalists began cultivating wheat and rice. The grain beetles, for whom a field of wheat was Utopia and a granary Seventh Heaven, have relatively efficient internal mechanisms of population control, which can stabilize their populations and protect them from the devastations of boom/crash cycles.
“Storytellers in search of more reassuring parables argued that if mice were smart enough to avoid the worst effects of overpopulation, ultrasmart humans ought to be able to do it too. They chose to ignore the fact that it wasn’t intelligence that was enabling McKendrick’s luckier mice to do what they did. They also chose to ignore the fact that humans haven’t gone through nearly enough generations since the