EVOLUTION AND INTEGRATION OF MECHANISMS THAT REGULATE POPULATION GROWTH

As the population of the world grows at compound interest every year, we need to know what happens to animals, including Homo sapiens, when their territories become overpopulated. In this symposium we shall hear reports, based on observation and experiment, 'on the physiological effects of crowding and stress brought about by overloads of intraspecific interaction among several animal species. Anthropologists seeking to explain the evolution of man are coming to realize that it was not only the acquisition of tool-making and speech that made our ancestors human, but also their ability to tolerate each other's presence. There can be little doubt that our ancestors were genetically changed by natural selection so that they could live in increasingly larger and more complexly organized social aggregations. Now that the rate of human population increase has itself increased to unparalleled proportions, the problems of food supply and standing room become insignificant and academic compared to the problem of increasing stress and decreasing sanity, which the following papers will elucidate. But even more important for present purposes than these practical considerations may be the fact that Christian and his associates have opened a new door to the study of evolution, a non-Malthusian kind of natural selection. Unless I am hopelessly naive, this symposium should mark some kind of a landmark, of use to workers in many branches of science.