From Ferren MacIntyre, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam
I am a reasonably good computer modeller: tell me what you want modelled, and
I can probably do it. Tell me what answer you want, and I can probably get it
for you. I have inadvertently done this often enough to realise that my
subconscious subtly influences my choice of parameters. Now, whenever I get an
answer that warms the cockles of my heart, I suspect that I have been suckered
yet again.
The comforting population study from the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (This Week, 5 October, p 8) seems to fall into this same
category: bear in mind that not a single professional demographer in the past
three centuries has believed that the population could double. Remember when the
US population was going to level off at 180 million?
I will put my money on an earlier model in New Scientist, which at
least has the merit of having been exactly on target for a third of a century:
J. H. Fremlin’s “How many people can the world support?” (New Scientist
, 29 October 1964, p 285). Yet even your illustrator treated it as a joke.
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