Nerd Farmer
RAW POPULATION NUMBERS.
The greatest threat to public lands, private homes, and clean water & clean air, is us and more of us.
People keep having more than the replacement number of children (that's two children per person). On the average: Each person needs to have a child to replace them when they die.
Since men don't actually give birth, that means each women produces 2 children, one to replace herself, and one to replace a man.
So each woman can produce 2 children, and each man can father 2 children, and population numbers stay the same. (Assuming that we are only counting those children who live, grow up, and reproduce).
LOPSIDED POPULATION CHANGE
But just like in wild animals, and animals meant to be sold, there is lopsided fertility, and lopsided survival rates.
Some male partridge father many of the chicks - that means that many male partridge get to father no chicks at all.
Some female bobcats have good territories, and successful hunts, many of their kittens survive. Other female bobcats don't have such good territories, or don't hunt so well - their kittens die.
Some dog breeders choose well advertised types of dogs, pay to get referrals, run good websites, and know how to market their puppies (or they join the pipeline) - they can sell thousands of puppies.
Many pet dogs are never permitted to have a litter, ever.
That is what lopsided reproduction rates means. Each pair don't have two surviving offspring. Many have few or none, others have many offspring.
If the death rates don't match the birth rates, then that species is growing or declining in population numbers. But the "lop sidedness" is not from the raw numbers, but from WHICH animals are reproducing and at what rate.
It use to be thought, among some groups, that lopsided fertility was good - the fit had more offspring, the less fit shouldn't get to breed.
Now, people realize (some people realize) that if one stag sires all the fawns on an island's herd of elk, then all of that years crop of fawns are brothers & sisters.
If that sort of lopsided fertility continues, the whole elk herd on the island will be inbred. They will have no mates available except their own family members - and that is NOT healthy.
On a larger scale, our planet, Earth, is our island.
Animals who die without reproducing, leave their genes in the dust of time.
The genes that march forward into the future, march in the bodies of the next generations.
We ourselves die. Our children die, our grandchildren die. But genes are handed down through time. Therefore, we are all on an island.
When reproduction gets too lopsided, a species looses some of it's store of genes forever. Many of those genes code for things like immunity to disease.
The genes that make for a good computer nerd, probably were their inside of cavemen, and they have combined to produce the type of person who would be good at computers, since before there were computers.
Before computers, a computer nerd was a misfit, an anachronism - now, they shine.
What other combinations of traits make a person a misfit now, but will someday have there place? We don't know.
What if in the 1800s governments only let the best farmers, the best horse-shoers (farriers, blacksmiths), the best cooks, to reproduce? Our species might have lost the genes that it would later need, to combine to make the computer & it's software, possible.
We need diversity even more than the animal species do.
We have so many different niches in our society, and so many new openings that new combinations fit best in. It is the new combinations, at the right moment in time, that are the avaunt guard of science, art, and social adaptations.
Our species has to produce an Edison, a Ford, and a Gates every generation, or real progress fails and stagnation sets in.
