298 



SCIENCE 



L. A. DuBridge 



The Inquiring Mind 



Reprinted from Engineering and Science 

 Magazine, October 1954, with the permission 

 of the author and publisher, the California 

 Institute and Technology. 



In 1798 a monk by the name of 

 Thomas Robert Malthus pubhshed a 

 paper with a long and complex title 

 which attempted to analyze man's fu- 

 ture on this planet. Examining past 

 experience and bringing to bear on this 

 experience the brilliant logic of an 

 analytical mind, he came to some 

 rather dire conclusions about the fu- 

 ture. It was quite obvious to him that 

 men had to eat; that the only major 

 source of food was the arable land; that 

 the area of such land was limited. 

 Therefore, there was a limit to the po- 

 tential food supply, and hence to the 

 population that could exist on the 

 earth. 



On the other hand, he noted that 

 the human population tended to grow 

 at an ever-increasing rate. Anv sort of 

 voluntary birth control, it seemed to 

 him, would be either unnatural or im- 

 moral. Therefore, the only possible fu- 

 ture was one in which the population 

 eventually outgrew the food supply, 

 and thereafter death by starvation, dis- 

 ease and war would take over to bal- 

 ance a birth rate which knew no con- 

 trol. 



Clearly, a world in which most of 

 the people would assuredly die of one 

 of these causes was not a very pleasant 

 one to contemplate. 



However, here we are 156 years 

 after the Malthusian prediction, and 

 the portion of the world that we live 

 in does not face the Malthusian death 

 sentence. Our population is expanding 

 at a rate never dreamed of in Malthus' 

 time. There are four times as many 

 people on the earth now as then. At 

 the same time, here in the United 

 States at least, we have far more trou- 

 ble with food surplus than with short- 

 age. We buy potatoes and dye them 

 blue, butter and let it spoil, wheat and 

 give it away, in our desperate effort to 

 avoid the economic consequences of 

 growing more food than we can eat. 



Surely Malthus was the most mis- 

 taken man in history. Or was he? 



Actuallv, as Harrison Brown points 

 out in his recent book (from which I 

 shall now borrow heavily), The Chal- 

 lenge of Man's Future, Malthus' rea- 

 soning and logic were entirely correct. 

 His only misfortune was that his ob- 

 servations and assumptions were later 



