Andrew Shelley wrote:

>
>If you study biological systems, you will see that none of them ever aim for a
>steady state population. All living things attempt to maximise their
>reproductive success, through different strategies, and indeed, this idea is
>central to the concept of evolution, reproductive success being the
>definition of evolutionary fitness.
>
So your recommendation is that each and every one of
us has just as many children as we possibly can.  This will prove
the greatest fitness of those who breed the most.

In biological systems, species either have some species-imposed
limits on their numbers (one offspring every two years, fledglings hatched
several days apart so in lean years the latecomers die, etc. etc.), or
the ecosystem imposes limits on them (such as boom-bust cycles of rabbits or
lemmings).  Although the rodents' natural inclination is to overrun the
world, natural limits
prevent this, at the cost of tremendous suffering to the oversized
population
cohorts.

As humans, who can presumably think ahead, we can either let the natural
limits kill off many millions of us (like rodents), or we can
self-impose limits to keep our
population in bounds.  Nature gave us one means of slowing down the
birth cycle which is prolonged nursing.  However, humans have pretty
much abandoned this practice.  So we need to use what we have, which
is our intelligence.  (No, wait, did I really say that? ;-)

    Lynnet