122

JOURNAL OF CREATION 33(3) 2019 || ESSAYS

Thomas Malthus’s influence on the eugenics and abortion movementsJerry Bergman

size relative to the resources available subjects the “lower classes to poverty, which causes disease and premature death”.9

Furthermore, the poor will then be forced to live in much worse conditions, many of them reduced to abject poverty.10 Malthus also observed that societies throughout history have experienced epidemics of disease, crop failures leading to localized famines, and wars, all events which have reduced the population while masking the fundamental problem of populations overstretching limited resources.

Malthus’s ideas rapidly became hugely influential in economic, political, social, and even scientific thought, despite it being obvious that his writings clearly strongly argued against the popular 18th-century European view that humans have an almost limitless ability to improve society.11

Proposed solutions

Malthus argued that two types of checks can hold a population to within its resource limits. The first were negative checks, which included famine, disease, and war. The second were preventive checks, including birth control, abortion, and celibacy. The application of population control, as later proposed by Francis Galton, called ‘eugenics’, was necessary to produce improvements in the average size and strength of humanity by forcing the less fit into a life of celibacy.12

As a Christian clergyman, Malthus put more emphasis on positive eugenics, such as marriage postponement until the couple could support a family. This, he felt, “coupled with sexual abstinence … was the best means … of easing the poverty of the lower classes”.13 Malthus also addressed the question of how an omnipotent and caring God could allow all the suffering he saw all around him. He concluded that humans were solely to blame for human suffering, writing:

“… it is the intention of the Creator that the earth

Thomas Malthus proposed human population growth would continue unchecked until it was eventually culled by the less fortunate members dying from famine and disease. Malthus believed that population growth would preclude long-term progress towards a better society because the earth’s ability to produce food would be unable to keep up with the normal population growth.1 Population checks, including poverty, misery, vice, crime, and starvation, would begin when the population level exceeded the land’s ability to produce food. In developing their idea of evolution, both Darwin and Wallace exploited this proposal, concluding that the effect of Malthus was to cull the least fit. This would result in the survival of the most fit and evolution of the species.

Thomas Malthus (figure 1) is rated as one of the 100 most influential people of all time, partly due to his influence on several modern social movements.2 For example, it “was from Malthus that Darwin derived the principle of Natural Selection, the central mechanism in his theory of evolution”.3 Malthus also inspired the population control movement, which was a major influence for both the birth-control and abortion movements.4 Thomas Malthus is widely known today mostly for his well-known book, An Essay on the Principle of Population (figure 2). Although first published in 1798, it is still in print, which indicates both its popularity and significance today.

His background

Thomas was the sixth of eight children of Daniel and Henrietta Malthus.5 Daniel Malthus, a friend of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was from a ‘good family’.6 In 1798, Thomas Malthus was appointed as Anglican country curate at Okewood, near Albury in Surrey.7 On 12 April 1804, Malthus married his cousin, Harriet, a marriage that produced three children. Also in 1804, he became Professor of History and Political Economy in Hertfordshire, Haileybury.8 His students affectionately referred to him as ‘Pop’ or ‘Population’ Malthus due to his focus on population theory.

An essay on the principle of population

Between 1798 and 1826, Malthus published six editions of his book, each subsequent update addressing more of the criticisms that arose against his theory. Malthus observed that a segment of every human population almost always ended up in poverty. If left unchecked, the human population tends to grow in a geometrical fashion (2,4,8,16), while food production increases only arithmetically (2,4,6,8,10 …). This is clearly unsustainable, as the rapidly increasing population

123

|| JOURNAL OF CREATION 33(3) 2019ESSAYS

should be replenished … with a healthy, virtuous and happy population, not an unhealthy, vicious and miserable one. And if, in endeavouring to obey the command to increase and multiply, we people it only with beings of this latter description and suffer accordingly, we have no right to impeach the justice of the command, but our irrational mode of executing it.”14

‘Preventive checks’, such as limiting birthrates, by such means as birth control and abortion, were later used as population controls by several Western nations. It was believed such checks could ensure a higher standard of living for all, while concurrently increasing economic stability.4

In Malthus’s day, many observers regarded high fertility as an economic advantage because it increased the number of workers. Malthus, however, convinced most economists that, even though high fertility might increase the gross economic output, it tended to reduce the per capita output. In 1823, Malthus contributed an article on population in the Encyclopædia Britannica supporting his view.

Darwin exploits Malthus

When attempting to solve the origin of species problem, Darwin read widely including, in 1838, Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Charles Darwin openly acknowledged the central role that Malthus played in the development of his own ideas about biological evolution. Darwin even referred to Malthus as “that great philosopher”.15,16 Darwin added: “ … it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones … destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.”17 Thus, Malthus’s writings were clearly the primary source of Darwin’s conclusion that the single most important contribution to evolution was the doctrine of the survival of the fittest by natural selection.

Although Darwin even felt Malthus explained the origin of all species, he recognized that the application of Malthus’s remedy, namely preventive checks, would actually work against evolution.18 Darwin ignored Malthus’s humanitarian response to the problem and, instead, saw the ruthless, brutal survival-of-the-fittest force as the dominant contributor to evolution. He taught that for creatures to evolve, biologically inferior animals must be selected out by ‘red in tooth and claw’ natural selection, leaving the superior animals to take over the earth.

Darwin’s theory, then, is actually Malthus’s theory, slightly modified.19 Specifically, Darwin altered Malthus’s thesis from the poor and less fortunate dying off due to overpopulation to the biologically inferior dying off as a result of being unable to compete against the more fit life forms.20 Darwin called his process natural selection to differentiate it from the artificial selection process that humans use to modify animals

Imag

e: S

cew

ing/

CC B

Y 4.

0

Figure 1. A formal portrait of Thomas Robert Malthus

Figure 2. The cover of the 6th edition of Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population

124

JOURNAL OF CREATION 33(3) 2019 || ESSAYS

for human goals. He also believed that the solution Malthus stressed would not work because “the doctrine of Malthus, applied with manifold force to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, [would fail because] … there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage”.18

Darwin realized that the end result of Malthus’s negative checks would be the formation of new plant and animal species; thus was born his ‘species theory’, which “would grow and develop over the next few years. He quickly drew the analogy between the role of nature in shaping her species and the role of humans in shaping breeds”, a process we call animal breeding.21 A problem was that the Darwin–Wallace theory only explained the loss of characteristics and even whole species, and not the gain of new genetic information required to produce new species, a problem that neither Darwin nor anyone else since then has been able to solve.22

Evolution’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, also acknowledged the importance of Malthus’s writings as being critical to his own evolution theory, noting that without it he probably would “not have hit upon the theory of Natural Selection”.23 Wallace explained:

“… the most important book I read was Malthus’s Principles of Population ... . It was the first great work I had yet read treating … any of the problems of philosophical biology, and its main principles remained with me as a permanent possession, and twenty years later gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species.”24

Malthus proven wrong

Even during Malthus’s lifetime, the many major problems with his theory soon became obvious:

“… what economists now call the ‘Malthusian Trap’ ––that as population rose, personal income levels decreased. This was true in England, but only until about 1800. When Malthus wrote his Essay on Population in 1798, real wages had been stagnant or declining for generations ... . But after 1800 the facts told a different story. By the … early 1830s … personal income was increasing even as the population grew.”25

The reasons geometric population growth in the 20th century did not result in a Malthusian catastrophe, as Malthus had expected, included that greater labour specialization and capital investment in mechanical equipment had resulted in major improvements in agriculture production. Other improvements included the use of fertilizers and petrochemical pesticides to control crop pests, mechanization (tractors and combines), and the introduction of high-yield farm crop varieties. Humans have also learned to generate electrical and mechanical power from fossil fuels and other sources to pump water for irrigation.

One of the most critical agriculture innovations was Justus von Liebig’s 1840s discovery that nitrogen was a central factor in plant growth. Liebig learned how to synthesize the bio-available form of nitrogen called nitrate, and began the fertilizer revolution.26

The second critical development that negated Malthus’s thesis occurred in the early 1900s when chemist Fritz Haber developed a process to synthesize fertilizer by using high temperatures to combine hydrogen derived from methane with atmospheric nitrogen.27 The energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process is now used throughout the world to fixate atmospheric nitrogen to produce low-cost artificial fertilizers. All of these developments have now largely negated Malthus’s major thesis.

As a result, the seemingly common-sense Malthusian premise has been falsified. Zubrin, in a chapter titled ‘The data that proves Malthus wrong’, reviews world population growth data plotted against GDP per capita growth, documenting how crop production has historically outstripped population growth. The data also show:

“… with the right political and social conditions, men’s inventiveness, creativity, collaboration and innovation actually accelerate the production of food and other resources as population increases, rather than deplete them … . Food production in the past few decades has grown exponentially and … new technologies have replaced the need for scarce or outdated resources.” 28

Both the hawk and man eat chickens; the more hawks, the fewer the chickens, but more men usually means more chickens.29 Scientists who regarded Malthus as a failed prophet include the late editor of Nature John Maddox.30

For the reasons noted above, the food situation has actually improved significantly since Malthus. Despite the world population doubling between 1960 and 2000, calories produced per day, per capita, has globally increased by 23% during this same period.31 Furthermore, as any restaurant worker knows, about half of all food grown today is wasted; reasons for this include high crop yields, government programs for price control, and general wastage due to poor handling and storage. If the waste were reduced, the earth could easily support a much larger population than exists today.

Another factor is that, in many areas, including Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States, the birth rate is now significantly below replacement level, which is about 2.1 children per family. Some nations now actually use financial incentives to encourage families to have more children in order to help maintain or increase their population levels. Because these programs have had very limited success, immigration now appears to be the only way that many countries can maintain their current population levels.

125

|| JOURNAL OF CREATION 33(3) 2019ESSAYS

The harmful results of Malthus’s and Darwin’s theories

Malthus’s idea also became the intellectual basis of natural selection, not only for both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, but also for Herbert Spencer, who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ and birthed modern ecological–evolutionary social theory.32,16 Historians today call Malthus “the most dismal scientist” because his doctrine “served to rationalize the starving of millions” of people for what was believed to be the good of humanity as a whole.33

Darwin’s theory argued, as did Malthus’s for humans, that most animals produced more young than the environment could support. Consequently, they had to struggle with each other in order to survive. This ‘struggle for existence’ resulted in those life-forms best adapted to their environment surviving, while others perished. If certain characteristics allowed the animal to be able to survive to reproduce, these characteristics would be passed on to its descendants and by this means new species would gradually be formed.34

Believing that basic human nature could not be changed, Malthus wrote: “the actual population [is] kept equal to the means of subsistence by misery and vice”.1 Individual decisions regarding sex, children, and work determine the population’s expansion, an idea that inspired the abortion movement, as well as government regulation of the population, such as in communist countries.35

Among the many scientists who disagreed with Malthus was evolutionist Ronald Fisher who was skeptical of using Malthusianism as a basis for natural selection.36 Fisher did not deny Malthus’s basic premises, but emphasized the importance of the role of controlling fecundity in solving the problem.37 Furthermore, Professor Beth Houston wrote:

“But Darwin, like Malthus, was wrong in assuming that populations always outpace resources. Researchers have found that populations are held in check not by starvation, disease, or predation but by intrinsic forces; there is no overarching ‘struggle for existence’, no natural selection that preserves the strong and destroys the weak. This doesn’t mean that there is no struggle, only that some cosmic fundamental struggle is not the core motivation for life; life is not created and sustained by a struggle for food. Even in times of catastrophe, such as extreme drought, species survive by adapting or moving on, and geneticists now know that the ability to do either is already preprogrammed in the species.”38

George Washington University Anthropologist Eric Ross depicted Malthus’s work as a major rationalization not only for the eugenics and abortion movements, but also for the social inequities produced by both the Industrial Revolution and the anti-immigration movement.39 Malthus’s theory implied that if the population continued to grow unhindered doom for humans would result, providing justification for human

oppression and tyranny, and widespread use of abortion such as in China and Russia.40

Far from being the result of overpopulation, historians claim that events such as the 1846 Irish famine and the massive starvation in India in the late 1800s were more of a result of attempts to apply Malthus’s doctrine to control people than the results of the potato disease and drought, respectively, that are normally claimed to have cause these human tragedies.41

Malthus also had a critical influence on Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes (figure 3), who in the Buck vs Bell Supreme Court case allowed eugenic sterilization of those persons whom the eugenic supporters determined were inferior people. In 1914 Holmes purchased a copy

“… of a new edition of Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. Holmes was thoroughly won over by the book’s bleak vision of the future, in which human population outstripped the food supply. In a letter to his friend Frederick Pollock, Holmes wrote, ‘Malthus pleased me immensely—and left me sad’ … . Holmes said, ‘that politicians and labor leaders still live on’. Holmes would later declare himself a ‘devout Malthusian’. Malthus appealed to Holmes’s cynical, misanthropic side. He later explained to a friend, ‘I look at men through Malthus’s glasses—as like flies—here

Figure 3. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The author of the now infamous Buck vs Bell Decision that opened the floodgates to the eugenics movement in the United States and the rest of the world. Formal photograph taken around 1930.

126

JOURNAL OF CREATION 33(3) 2019 || ESSAYS

swept away by a pestilence—there multiplying unduly and paying for it.’” 42

In 1915, Holmes made his most direct plea for eugenics, in an essay in the Illinois Law Review titled ‘Ideals and Doubts’. The way to achieve the “wholesale social regeneration” that forward-looking people wanted, he argued, was not through “tinkering with the institution of property”—as the communists were urging—but “only by taking in hand life and trying to build a race”.43

He concluded that building a superior race involved applying Darwin to society. In fact, “Malthus’s predictions of a struggle for survival by cataclysm could not have been less accurate”.44 We now know that “instead of blind struggle, there was ingenuity; instead of selfish grab, there was co-operation; with an increase in population, there actually followed an increase in food” due to better farming techniques and new hybrids.45

His influence today

Although Malthusian ideas continue to influence scholars today, his theory has continued to fail for several reasons. Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich, inspired by Malthus, penned several books in the late 1960s predicting hundreds of millions of persons would die from the overpopulation crisis that he and other leading biologists expected to occur in the 1970s unless birth control and abortion were widely utilized by the population. 46

Ehrlich envisioned that the horrific future awaiting humanity included the starvation of millions, or even billions, of people. His numerous best-selling books (many coauthored with his wife Anne Ehrlich) documenting this dire future included The Population Bomb (1968; figure 4); Population, Resources, Environment: Issues in Human Ecology (1970); The End of Affluence (1974); and The Population Explosion (1990).47 All of his predictions have now failed and his work “has been proven spectacularly wrong.”48 The New York Times summarized his failure as follows:

“No one was more influential—or more terrifying, some would say—than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, ‘The Population Bomb’, sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over.’”49

Journalist Haberman added that Ehrlich also forecast“… that hundreds of millions would starve to

death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair ‘England will not exist in the year 2000’. Dr Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come’. By ‘the end’, he meant ‘an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity’.”49

The first Director-General of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, in his 1964 book Evolutionary Humanism, called for a radical government-enforced world population control policy. Both Huxley and Ehrlich openly encouraged use of birth control and abortion to control the population. They also openly opposed the Roman Catholic opposition to birth control and abortion, as well as the church’s opposition to strict government-enforced population control.

Other examples of applied Malthusianism include the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome, and the ‘Global 2000’ report completed for the then President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. Reflecting the works of both Charles Darwin and Robert Malthus, both Professor Paul Ehrlich and science-fiction author Isaac Asimov also issued many appeals for government-mandated, forced population control.

Figure 4. Cover of the bestselling book The Population Bomb. Based on Malthus’s prediction, Paul Ehrlich wrongly envisioned an ensuing world-wide calamity. The book is an embarrassment today.

127

|| JOURNAL OF CREATION 33(3) 2019ESSAYS

Conclusion

Darwin and Wallace relied heavily on the ideas of Thomas Malthus, which have proven to be misguided, especially in the last century. Nonetheless, the widespread adoption of these ideas has led to moral problems such as the Malthus-inspired eugenic movement in the United States, Nazi Germany, Sweden, and other nations, as well as the widespread support for abortion.

References1. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Macmillan, New York, p.

49, 1895.2. Bonar, J., Malthus and his Work, Macmillan, London, UK, p. 1, 1885.3. Wade, N., A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, New

York, Penguin Books, p. 155, 2014; Chase, A., The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977.

4. Lopez, M., Hijacking Immigration? The Human Life Review 38(4):49–73, 2012.5. Lieberman, J., Malthus: His life and work, The American Biology Teacher

35(3):130–131; p. 130, 1973; James, P., Population Malthus: His Life and Times, Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York, 1979.

6. Petersen, W., Malthus: Founder of Modern Demography, 2nd edn, Transaction, p. 21, 1999; Hollander, S., The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1997.

7. Venn, J. and Venn, J.A., (Eds.), Malthus, Thomas Robert, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 10 vols, 1922.

8. Peterson, ref. 6, p. 30.9. Malthus, T.R., An essay on the principle of population; in: Oxford World’s

Classics, 1798, reprint, J. Johnson, London, p. 10, 1959.10. Malthus, ref. 9, pp. 10–11.11. Lieberman, ref. 5, p. 131.12. Malthus, ref. 9, p. 72.13. Geoffrey, G., Introduction to Malthus: An essay on the principle of population;

in: Oxford World’s Classics, 1798, reprint J. Johnson, London, p. xviii, 1959.14. Malthus, T.R., An Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th edn, W. Pickering,

London, app. I.6, 1826, quoted in Bonar, J., Malthus and His Work, Macmillan, London, p. 366, 1885.

15. Letter to J. Hooker, 5 June 1860; in: Burhardt, F. (Ed.), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 8, Cambridge University Press, New York, p. 238, 1860.

16. Spencer, H., Principles of Biology, Williams and Norgate, London, vol. 1, p. 444, 1864.

17. Darwin, C., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by his granddaughter, Nora Barlow, Norton, New York, p. 120, 1958.

18. Darwin, C., The Origin of Species, John Murray, London, p. 63, 1859.19. Johnson, P., Darwin: Portrait of a genius, Viking Press, New York, p. 41, 2012.20. Lieberman, ref. 5, pp. 131–132.21. Carroll, S., Remarkable Creatures: Epic adventures in the search for the origin

of species, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA. pp. 41–42; 2009; Young, R.M., Malthus and the evolutionists: the common context of biological and social theory, Past and Present 43(1):109–145, 1969.

22. Grigg, R., Don’t blame Malthus! Darwin and Wallace both credited an English clergyman for inspiring their evolutionary theories. What are the facts? Creation 32(3):45–47; p. 47, 2010.

23. Wallace, A.R., My Life: A record of events and opinions, Chapman & Hall, London, UK, p. 130, 1908.

24. Wallace, ref. 23, pp. 123–124.25. Snyder, L., The Philosophical Breakfast Club, Broadway Books, New York, p.

125, 2011.26. Ransom, C., 100 Inventions that Changed the World, Time-Life Publishers,

New York, p. 59, 2015.27. Ransom, ref. 26, pp. 59–60.28. Zubrin, R., Merchants of Despair: Radical environmentalists, criminal pseudo-

scientists, and the fatal cult of anti-humanism, New Atlantis Books/Encounter Books, New York, p. 16, 2012.

29. Zubrin, ref. 28, p. 5.30. Maddox, J., The Doomsday Syndrome: An assault on pessimism, McGraw-Hill,

New York, 1972.31. Lomborg, B., The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the real state of the

world, Cambridge University Press., New York, p. 62, 2001.32. Browne, J., Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Jonathan Cape, London, UK, pp.

385–390, 1995; Raby, P., Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life, Princeton University Press, NJ, pp. 13, 21, 2001.

33. Zubrin, ref. 28, pp. 5–6.34. Davis, I.C. and Sharpe, R.W., Science: A Story of progress and discovery, Henry

Holt and Company, New York, pp. 431–432, 1940; Thomson, K., 1798: Darwin and Malthus, American Scientist, May–June, p. 226, 1998.

35. Lopez, ref. 4, pp. 49–50.36. Fisher, R., The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 2nd revised edn, originally

published 1930, Dover Publications, Oxford, UK, 1958.37. Quoted in Sober, E., The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary theory in

philosophical focus, The University of Chicago Press, IL, p. 400, 1993.38. Houston, B., Natural God: Deism in the age on intelligent design, New Deism

Press, Bradenton, FL, p. 133, 2012.39. Trewavas, A., Malthus foiled again and again, Nature 418:668–670, 2002;

Lomborg, ref. 36, p. 61.40. Zubrin, ref. 28, p. 9.41. Póirtéir, C. (Ed.), The Great Irish Famine, Mercier Press, Cork, Ireland, pp. 88,

104, 1995.42. Baker, L., The Justice from Beacon Hill: The life and times of Oliver Wendell

Holmes, HarperCollins, New York, p. 601, 1991.43. Cohen, A., Imbeciles, The Supreme Court, American eugenics, and the

sterilization of Carrie Buck, Penguin, New York, p. 241, 2016.44. Wilson, A.N., Charles Darwin: Victorian mythmaker, HarperCollins, New York,

p. 20, 2017.45. Wilson, ref. 44, pp. 20–21.46. Lopez, ref. 4, p. 50.47. Ehrlich, P., The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, New York, 1968; Ehrlich, P.

and Ehrlich, A., Population, Resources, Environment: Issues in human ecology, W.H. Freeman,, San Francisco, CA, 1970 ; Ehrlich, P., The End of Affluence: A blueprint for your future, Ballantine Books, New York, 1974; Ehrlich, P. and Ehrlich, A., The Population Explosion, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1990.

48. Lopez, ref. 4, p. 51.49. Haberman, C., The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion, The New

York Times, p. 31 May 2015; Evans, L.T., Feeding the Ten Billion—Plants and Population Growth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, Dedicated to Malthus by the author, 1998.

Jerry Bergman has nine academic degrees, including five masters and two PhDs. His major areas of study for his graduate work include anatomy and physiology, biology, chemistry, and psychology. He has graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, Medical University of Ohio in Toledo, University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University. A prolific writer with over a thousand publications to his credit, including 43 books and monographs, Dr Bergman has taught biology, microbiology, anatomy and physiology, chemistry, biochemistry, geology, astronomy and psychology at the college level. Now retired, he has taught at The University of Toledo Medical College, The University of Toledo, Bowling Green State University and other schools for a total of close to 50 years.