CHAPTER 38
THE REASONING BEHIND THE RHETORIC 
I know no time which is lost more thoroughly than that 
devoted to arguing on matters of fact with a disputant 
who has no facts, but only very strong convictions.  
James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages 
(London:  Swan Sonnenschein, 1901.

CHAPTER 38:  TABLE OF CONTENTS
What "Everyone Knows" - the Vicious Circle
Simple world-saving humanitarianism
Taxation fears
Supposed economic and political national self-interest
Fear of anti-Western ideologies
Dislike of business
Belief in the superiority of "natural" processes
Religious antagonisms
Racism
The belief of the better-educated that they know what is 
best for 
	the less educated
Lack of historical perspective
The Prophetic Impulse 
Fitness of the human race
Conclusion  
   The editor of the world's most important scientific 
journal repeats in editorial after editorial that 
"Increasing population and increasing industrialization 
pose threats to the environment... The population 
explosion has to move to top priority". He calls for 
"programs for effective population control".  And he 
insists that we must undertake "restrictions to our 
freedoms" such as moving closer to each other in the 
cities, and drive fewer cars, in order to stop "dooming 
our ecosystem", "preserve agriculture lands", and avoid 
"the energy crisis that is bound to come in the not-too-
distant future."
   All this is written without any supporting data as if 
there cannot be any question about these propositions - 
but in stark contradiction to the data and analysis of 
articles that have appeared in that had appeared earlier 
in the same journal.  The message is that the danger is 
so great that we should not bother with the ordinary 
evidential procedures of science.  
   If such opinions are not scientific, then what is the 
reasoning behind them?  Earlier chapters suggested some 
explanations for people's doomsday fears about minerals, 
food, and energy--especially the seductively simple twin 
notions of a fixed stock of resources and the "law" of 
diminishing returns.  This chapter focuses on 
explanations for doomsday fears about population growth, 
though all such fears have much in common.  The 
discussion is truncated because a scant treatment here is 
better than no treatment at all.  The reasoning behind 
these matters, together with a discussion of the 
politics, requires an entire book to explain.  I hope 
that such a book is forthcoming soon.
   One type of "reasoning" behind scary beliefs about 
population growth turns out to be circular reasoning, 
which amounts to no reasoning at all.  Bad news feeds on 
itself.  Koshland himself chides others for unnecessary 
"gloom and doom" because, as he notes correctly, "Some 
people enjoy gloom.  Bad news sells newspapers."  (Maybe 
this means he has changed his mind about population, 
resources, and the environment, though I have not seen 
any such statement.)
What "Everyone Knows"--the Vicious Circle
   It is a truism (not true, of course) that resources 
are getting more scarce, and that population growth 
exacerbates the problem. You have read numerous examples 
of such statements in previous chapters by persons who 
are supposedly experts. These pessimistic assertions have 
become so accepted that eminent people in other fields 
treat them as assumptions in their own work, on an 
"everyone knows" basis - the way everyone knows that 
without sunshine the flowers will not grow.  Just a few 
examples of persons publicly decrying population growth - 
even signing petitions to the President and endorsing 
full-page advertisements that run in the nation's most-
read newspapers - that I have stumbled across in casual 
reading: Nobel agronomist Norman Borlaug; sociobiologist 
Edward Wilson; author Isaac Asimov; columnist Jack 
Anderson; Nobel physicists Murray Gell-Mann and William 
Shockley; Andrei Sakharov; basketball player Wilt 
Chamberlain; columnist Ann Landers; her sister, columnist 
"Dear Abby"; and John D. Rockefeller III.  Children's 
singer Raffi Cavoukian says "I clearly have heard the 
urgency of the Earth's cry...I really heard it to every 
cell of my body."  The Hammond World Atlas says that "the 
victory over nature, which had balanced population with 
food supply and space, is bitter, for the population has 
`exploded'."   Nobel prize-winners such as Linus Pauling 
and Wassily Leontief even serve on the board of directors 
of an organization claiming that "environmental 
degradation, traffic jams, deteriorating infrastructure 
and homelessness" are evidence for "the primary cause of 
these problems - overpopulation."   And there is a bucket 
more, including newspaper editorial writers, U.S. 
senators and representatives.  During his campaign for 
the presidency and then the vice presidency of the United 
States, Al Gore said that "the Earth's environment must 
and will become the central organizing principle of the 
post-Cold War world," told the American Statistical 
Association of "a dramatic change in the relationship 
between the human species and the earth", and said that 
of the causes "Number one [is] population"; and then the 
statisticians feted him despite his being as bad an 
abuser of statistics, when writing about this subject, as 
any person in public life.
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