The natural history of population : University of London Heath Clark Lectures 1937 delivered at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine / by Raymond Pearl.

  • Pearl, Raymond, 1879-1940.
Date:
1939
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The natural history of population : University of London Heath Clark Lectures 1937 delivered at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine / by Raymond Pearl. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    with some plausibility that they give the appearance of having some survival value, or at least of not being positively harmful, because they became even moderately widespread only during that recent portion of human history in which living has been relatively easy for all mankind. It has been relatively easy for two reasons: low density of population, in general; and rapidly increasing knowledge of applied science with its accompanying industrial developments. In a world where getting a living was easy, altruistic social relations were correspondingly easy. Instances and locali¬ ties of a real struggle for existence between individual men (other than during sizable and persistent wars, or in the processes incident to the assumption of the ‘white man’s burden’) have been rare in this world since the beginning of the nineteenth century. And few have ever seriously alleged that war is an altruistic enterprise; nor is it at all un¬ certain that the pleasures of ‘civilizing’ backward peoples are, like those of condescension, singularly one-sided. So, then, the first significant point to be noted in the natural history of population is that all populations every¬ where are composed of individuals bent on surviving as individuals just as long as possible. They do not want to die. Individually and collectively they resort to every device they can think of to put off for as long as may be the ulti¬ mately inevitable end. If it should be rationally demon¬ strated at this moment that the world’s problems would be easier of solution if there were fewer people in it, and that a considerable social service would be rendered to mankind if a substantial number of men forthwith painlessly de¬ parted from it, one can be quite sure that only a corporal’s guard would step forward as volunteers for euthanasia. Many might be convinced of the rationality of the idea in general, but would advance no fewer than a million reasons that some one else should achieve the glory incident to so noble a public service. Biologically their position would have much in its favour. For when man’s instinct for indi¬ vidual survival completely ceases to influence his conduct all will be over and done so far as he is concerned as a species. No problem will fret him thereafter.