With an unstoppable global warming, overpopulation, and food and water shortages.

[rjsquirrel]

14. Lol I'm a biologist

with a PHD and a tenured professorship.

It's amusing to be lectured on science.

Humans have survived climate change events in our past. We will likely survive the current changes.

But your response simply ignores my point. I didn't deny the reality or severity of climate change, which is indirectly a subject of my research (which deals directly with extinction however!). All I said was that your question assumes humans make rational decisions to reproduce or not based on prevailing risk factors.

That is arrant nonsense. Humans continue to reproduce under conditions of far more immediate threat to their existence than climate change. And have for all of our history.

Think about it for a moment. Until about 1930 a third of all women died in childbirth. Knowing those were their odds, why did women continue getting pregnant, besides lack of birth control?

Population growth can indeed be depressed by external conditions and psychological factors, both quite well documented phenomena. But the mammalian instinct to reproduce can't be reasoned away.

The reality of severe climate change may well impact reproductive patterns in all kinds of ways. But humans don't "decide" to have babies. We do it because it is the main drive that animates our evolutionary history. Or any other species for that matter.

Your initial question is based on false assumptions.

Maybe if I rephrase it as "why don't humans stop fucking if the world is frightening?" you can see why. That is what you are asking, unadorned.

I'm not arguing about climate change, a subject on which we largely agree (I just don't think it's reversible anymore and do not expect, as an expert on species extinction in fact, that it suggests an extinction level event for human beings, just our current social and technological and population dynamics).

ETA that among other things we are likely genetically programmed to make more babies when we feel our social groups to be threatened. Someone has to survive to move the genes down the line.


ETA also: your question is better addressed to rational choices fully under conscious control, such as "why do humans continue to drive SUVs given their knowledge of impending climate catastrophe?"