Sayonara

Which formats do you use? Which is your favourite? Which won't you use, and why? Let battle commence!

Publishing on Kindle is free. They have 35% and 70% royalty options plus they provide a print-on-demand service. There is an ocean of crap on the Kindle store, but as a new author you probably want your book floating in an ocean of crap rather than in a sea of excellence.

Dune - Frank Herbert Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood Three of my favourites. My favourite author at the minute is probably the irreverent Kurt Vonnegut. I've acquired most of his main novels as and when they have come up on Kindle offers, and I'm reading them between episodes from A Song of Ice and Fire.

Currently reading Jailbird, by Kurt Vonnegut. He's an odd one, but I do like his books.

Actually not all cultures say men were made by gods. There are quite a lot of creation myths that say we came from animals. Others have us coming from rocks or mud. Some really badly thought-out ones even have men witnessing the creation of man. This is why we call them myths.

The rank list shown in the Admin settings currently looks like this: Lepton 0 Quark 10 Meson 50 Baryon 100 Atom 200 Molecule 400 Protist 750 Organism 1000 Primate 1500 Scientist 3000 Genius 5000 SuperNerd 10000 Postcount Hacker 65535 Certain member groups have the permissions to change this to a custom rank. When you reach the number of posts for the next level, your rank might not change straight away. This is because the forum software carries out some tasks as scheduled batch operations.

Blike has been promising cheese nips since just after the turn of the century. I have yet to see a single one.

@PureGenius, this thread reads as delusion and fantasy. Members have repeatedly asked you to show your working out. Put up or shut up.

Please note guys - if you want one of your own threads deleting, renaming, or moving, use the report post feature. This lets all the staff know about your request, instead of just one of us. I've come back to the site from an extended absence and I have quite a lot of mails asking me to close or move threads. Obviously those requests went unfulfilled because I wasn't here.

Is it just me or is about 1/3 of this thread pie in the sky?

Now here's something we haven't seen before.

As long as by life you mean "the mechanical operation of the cellular machinery", yes. My point is that this is a biological discussion, so if you mean to claim anything other than that, then you must demonstrate it. Well, I call cow poo. The issue can be resolved easily by declaring and justifying the definitions for the terms. This has been requested repeatedly throughout the thread by various means. What you have just attempted is to muddy the waters in the hope that people will just give up and join in on the big old equivocation. Just like you did earlier when you said "BTW, since you do not have a particular milestone for when a human embryo becomes a human person, why not consider it to be the moment of conception?" I'm sorry but this is a science site. Here we argue by applying reason, not abdicating from it. Are you saying that you now reject that argument, or that you didn't understand what you were saying? An even better question would be "what is the precise nature of the soul, and where in the body is it stored?"

I think that deserves its own live camera stream. Although the spider looks bad-ass I think that the wasps have the advantage of numbers. I vote WASPS!

Because it's tiny and in a stupid place. I would have thought we can move that.

I understand that's what you're saying. But you need to realise that once a living resource is removed from its population the ecological consequences are already in effect. It simply does not matter whether that resource gets fried, grilled, or dropped in a bin. I also realise that you advocate a system whereby catches should more closely match actual consumption, but there are two problems here: it is largely unworkable for fish and similar resources (and already practised with the resources which it works for), and as I said it only shifts k, it doesn't magically side-step it. That's not in dispute. At least, not by me. Because you seem to have the idea that fishermen can closely match demand. The reality of commercial fishing is that this is impossible in anything approaching real-time, and problematic on an orders-based system unless your customers like having to wait a week or so to get something that isn't really fresh any more. If you could change culture sufficiently that people would accept "a fish" as a fish meal, regardless of the species, it could actually work. However the achievement here - as I noted some time ago and then repeated - is that you have nudged the carrying capacity up very slightly. It's still there. You're right, population biologists wouldn't take anything like that into account because it wouldn't in a month of Sundays occur to them that it could be a factor. Population biologists don't spend all their time thinking about things like this at all. Ecology, after all, at no point involves mapping the routes that energy takes through biological systems or the abiotic factors which influence those routes. Bear in mind that carrying capacity somewhat assumes that you expect the population to remain in its current state, morphologically speaking. For humans this could extend to the preservation of a minimum level of civilisation. And you can't photosynthesise many of the materials we depend on, whether this is for building healthy bones, hydro-electric dams, or the processors in autopilots. Again, that would just be a process of mitigation, of eking out the existing resources for as long as possible. Carrying capacity is shifted and not removed. IIRC, there is thought to be a lower size threshold for complex intelligence. Our brains work as well as they do because of the number of neural connections. If you shrink the brain down, by necessity you shrink the number of connections that can form and exponentially cripple intelligent processing. Needimprovement had a specific motive when he started this thread (as well as others). Not defining his terms is part of the strategy. Quite so. However when we talk about "waste" as a function of resource movement we're not usually evaluating it in subjective or emotive terms. Or at least, that's not the impression I got when you were talking about waste. But the term "over-population" as applied in ecology is simply a descriptor, like all other scientific terms. If it has political overtones in some circles that has no explanatory or argumentative power in a conversation about ecology, because it's being invoked in the wrong domain. Under-resourcing would probably be acceptable in a discussion like this, but I think over-population is more useful in most ecological meltdown scenarios as it also applies to intraspecies competition spikes, geographical over-population, pandemics, and so on. While the meaning of 'under-resourcing' and 'over-population' coincide here, they don't have the same scope. All sciences are politically neutral. What is not neutral is the application or pursuit of science within a policy-led framework. Right, but that wouldn't be the "fault" of population biologists, would it? It would be due to the policy decisions of the ruling body of whatever society you are talking about. People's objections to such policy would not magically neutralise the scientific knowledge used to formulate them. Many ecological models are wonderfully scalable. The idea of models is to, well... model real world scenarios, not simply entertain undergraduates and generate employment. As much as you may dislike the idea that complex behaviours can be described by sets of formulae, and operate within the bounds of certain rules, the usefulness of current ecological models is demonstrated in the real. The fact is that they work. They make accurate predictions and they have explanatory power. Both of those fall into the "making it a bit harder to calculate" category.

Understood. I actually came back and added that bit in to the start of my post and with hindsight I should probably have tweaked the rest of it to be less snitty so I apologise if it came off as being adversarial. I think the main problem we are having here is that you had to go and choose fish as your example. You could not have picked a worse resource for matching yields to demands! This is why I asked if you knew about commercial fishing... ...and I have to say I only know much of anything about it because by pure chance I happened to see a programme on television the week before last which went into some detail regarding net catches. Obviously in the real world it is more complex and there are many variants on the process but essentially for our purposes pretty much the main decider of what fish are caught by a boat (ignoring geographical distribution of species) is the size and shape of the holes in the nets. Until the nets are winched back onto the boats fisherman have no idea what range of species will be in them, or in what proportions they will be represented. The fish market is basically fed random selections of product. To a certain (and rather small) degree you can control what hits the market by modulating frequency of fishing trips and locations visited, but I think most nations already do this to a very strong extent by having quotas and designated fisheries. I will admit I was unaware of this until we started this discussion, but there is even such a thing as "fisheries science". Neither the Matrix scenario nor human consciousnesses stored in hardware are ecologically interacting populations in the same sense as our current population and I really don't think the same models would be applicable. Even Lotka-Volterra wouldn't apply and that's like your population biology bread and butter (except in the case of a Tron-esque gladiatorial combat scenario and then LV models might actually work splendidly). When I make a statement about what the population biology of a species predicts given a certain change (in this case we were assuming population increase) then there is the tacit assumption of all other things being equal, as is the basic comparative strategy in almost all other scientific disciplines. Once we start changing the scenario in more major ways, for example by invoking world-dominating robots, then obviously it's going to influence the prediction because the applicable rules will almost certainly change. Incidentally I'm not sure how compatible the Matrix scenario is because if you remember, we were the resource. Actually if memory serves we had a thread about the resource consumption of the machine race some time ago... that might be worth seeking out. Absolutely, yes, I completely agree. And this is one of the problems with needimprovement's premise. As I indicated when I first joined this thread I have misgivings about his motives for starting it, and the fact that he has not yet taken the opportunity to address my criticisms speaks volumes ("I'm talking about a different kind of over-population to you" would seem like the obvious tactic). The more I read over this thread the more I see that we are talking "from two sides of the same coin". I don't think I really mean to state that total population is the determining factor in resource consumption, but that it is a more tangible descriptor of whether or not a species is in a state of over-population. This would be why the defining attribute, k, is expressed in terms of population size: it's because the resource consumption rate is the actual data that informs the calculation. Of course with humans it's more complex than with other species because we do not have uniform dietary habits, but you need to understand that the reason I said earlier something like "population biology doesn't care how the fish is used" is that as far as the ecological maths is concerned, those food service facilities are consumers just like the people they are serving. The concept of "waste" is a luxurious human conceit; if someone eats 5000 fish in their lifetime and then dies a virgin you could just as well call those fish resources wasted. But we don't, and I am not really sure why. Yes, I can see where you are coming from. It's just that unless needimprovement wants to redefine "over-population" as something that has nothing to do with populations then it really is a "yes or no" question. Although I think there is a bit of an element of me being a bit defensive because it sounded like you had an axe to grind. Which I suppose is fair enough because as it turns out you kinda do Okay so I was a bit glib with that comment. The management of the resources is simply not relevant; what's important is the consequence of the availability of resources. In population ecology (and therefore in reality, which it describes) a group* is over-populated if the available resources are insufficient to sustain the group at that size. This results in population shrinkage due to famine or migration, or in the instance of local human populations, importation. Note that it does not necessitate the extinction of that population; it's simply an expression to describe one state of the population dynamics being played out. That's it. * By which I mean 'all the individuals of a species living in a particular habitat'. The carrying capacity is a numeric means of predicting the maximum population size prior to that point being reached, for a given habitat and species. It's a very reliable tool and it is not inapplicable to humans just because we can move resources around, substitute food types, etc. Those aspects just make it more difficult to calculate.

Are you going to answer any of the other criticisms and or queries? I mean, if you're going to slap "-1" on the lengthy reply I gave you, in which I invested considerable time, then you really ought to say why you disapprove.

I asked if you were kidding because of the gross assumptions you would have to apply before attributing to me the role of "on-paper analyser" and ruling out the possibility that I could be capable of understanding business practices, the supply chain, etc. This was both arrogant of you as well as being factually incorrect. Frankly it influenced the entire tone of my reply. And in point of fact I think you would struggle to justify the comment in any case, given the rest of your post. I'm afraid I don't see how customer purchasing decisions can influence fishing decisions made in the past, even if it's the recent past. Are you proposing that if someone fancies a nice bit of halibut they should put an order in with the Bureau of Fishing some days in advance? I also don't see how we can expect such massive degrees of accuracy from fishing boats. Do you only have a vague idea as to how fish are landed on commercial scales, or have you actually planned this out in a terrifying level of detail? Post numbers are at the top right of posts, next to the time and date of posting. I'm not duplicating effort, you can quite easily go back and read the thread. I have not intentionally stated that humans are "spreading resources too thin" (although this phrase could actually be interpreted a number of ways so it's quite possible that you think I have), and I am not advocating anything. Needimprovement started this thread as and with the contention that there is no such thing as over-population - I am here to tell him this is incorrect. The only argument I am putting forward in this thread is one that gives the basis for over-population existing and that's the one that was in post #38, which you don't appear to have looked at. If you have recognised in my posts markers for some particular stance that you oppose and assumed I hold that position then you should probably say so now to save us both a lot of time. I think you'll find that that is your inference, not my implication. With reference to your posts, I am pointing out (although admittedly not terribly well) that while the average resource utilisation efficiency of a species will affect the rate at which resources are consumed this is only a per capita figure which is meaningless without the population size being considered. I only pointed this out because you said: "I just don't understand how you can attribute such resource depletion to population numbers when you can go to any food-service facility such as restaurants and supermarkets and see for yourself how much food is thrown away hourly" ...which to me suggests that you think that the size of a consuming population plays a minor role in the decisions of organisations which are sourcing food to sell to that population. Beyond that I have no interest in discussing (at least, not in this thread) the business practices of certain societies. It's not relevant to whether or not over-population is a myth. Again, not interested. Whether or not we think population control is a bad thing or that some people and cultures get a raw deal has no influence whatsoever on the existence or non-existence of over-population. Yes, I get that from your posts. It's just that in this thread it has no relevance beyond being a tangential concern. It's a point of social interest; it has nothing at all to do with the population biology that describes the phenomenon which needimprovement is denying. Just because you really really want to talk about it here, doesn't mean we all do. Let's have another separate thread that is entirely devoted to the specifics of resource utilisation. WTF Lemur, get a grip. I haven't cited any data analysis and there are no assumptions whatsoever in pointing out which principles of ecology apply to changes in a population that is resource-consuming. Go back and read post 38 and then tell me that it's wrong because restaurants sometimes order in too much fish for the customers they serve.

Oh god please not again.

You're kidding, right? No, actually I'm saying it doesn't make any difference if the fish is eaten or not if it is removed from the population in either case. As far as the consumption of natural resources goes, once a resource is irreversibly sourced it can be considered "used"; the details of how it is used are irrelevant (unless of course you are stockpiling it, but this tends to happen with things like gold, not with halibut or mackerel). I really don't see how that could be made more simple. And yes, you could increase utilisation efficiency by attempting to ensure that close to 100% of all harvested fish are eaten, but as I said before this only shifts k. I have already explained why this is significant to the thread topic in post #38. I don't think I have ever advocated birth control in my life (nor opposed it for that matter), so I am not sure why you think I did so in this thread. Please go back and look at my post, #38. I replied to you because you were querying whether Padren really attributed resource paucity to overpopulation rather than wasteful practices. Do you think that a percentage wastage per capita plays the larger role, or do you think it might be the fact that there are billions of 'capitas' that has the more significant part to play? How about if we double the human population, but keep resource utilisation the same? What if we double it again? Again? How about if instead of doubling it, we halve it? At what point do you think the significance of resource utilisation efficiency will become more important than raw population size? Any idea? Probably not. This is because you have not done the stuffy old boring analysis "on paper". Well I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that's the actual work in understanding the situation right there. The commercial and economical modelling will only ever explain why the situation is the way it is, and give ideas about how our behaviours can change. It won't force the underlying ecological principles to be different. Sorry. No matter how efficient our technologies make us, humans are still subject to the same types of ecological constraints as every other species on this rock. Now pardon me for having a working understanding of them.

Not wishing to stereotype or anything but the French individual sense of entitlement is certainly not new.

Because it's not a matter which is determined by looking at sloppy business practices. It's a matter which is determined by studying the appropriate ecological models and applying them to the available data. It doesn't matter to the carry capacity of the planet whether or not the fish gets eaten. Once it's out of the water and its head gets stoved in, it's out of the game. Not exactly. To keep increasing our population, we'd need to get more biomass from somewhere. To just "keep going" we could eat each other

Does that mean you interpreted his "I'm just not sure" to indicate that there's a god-shaped hole in his logic armour? Oh come on. By that, could you perhaps mean "that would involve confronting a reality that contradicts doctrine"? Look, you started this. We have an expression in the UK: "in for a penny, in for a pound". If you aren't committed to the topic, don't open the thread. IOW, the name "Pro-life" is just as misleading as the arguments one becomes depressingly accustomed to seeing pro-life advocates trot out. There ARE some passable arguments. They are not at all emotion-wrenching, I admit, but they are also not festering logic abortions. Use those. For the love of the god you say you believe in, use those. OK, well the laws regarding unlawful killing are abundantly clear on this point, so what has this thread actually got to do with abortion? No, the consensus view is that life begins at conception. That is, the functioning of the cellular machinery of a genetic individual. There is no debate on that point because there is no disagreement. The disagreement arises when pro-life advocates misrepresent "life" as being the condition of person-hood, the unlawful killing of which is prohibited by law. As I have repeatedly stated, they are not synonymous conditions and no argument has EVER shown that they should be considered as such. More misrepresentation. The difference between a zygote and a person in a coma is that the zygote is a cell, whereas the coma patient is a person (in the developed, information-rich sense of the entity) who is academically, financially, emotionally, and culturally invested in his society, and likewise invested in by his society. He has a contract with his medical insurer and the hospital have ethical and legal obligations toward him and his estate. The inter-relationship of these obligations and contracts are complex however even if we ignored them entirely, there is a big difference between intervening in the possible development of a cell and considering "**** it, let him die" as a viable course of medical treatment. Again, you conflate "living" with the condition of being a person. You fail. Furthermore, the tactics you are using here are entirely predictable. You cannot hope to "downgrade" a definition to something as vague and malleable as you would like simply by launching banal attacks against tangentially significant behaviours occurring within certain social groups. It isn't a person. It's a foetus. It's not really okay at all. But for reasons that are different to the ones you might think. Primarily because at 34+ weeks the abortion would in fact be illegal in virtually any territory you could wish to name. But let's assume it was legal, just for the sake of discussion... it's still "not okay". It's "not okay" because the two adults are treated very differently for causing the same ultimate consequence, not because the baby dies. The baby is no more or less dead in either scenario. The law is replete with such apparent contradictions, purely because of the way that case law is tried and established. The scenario therefore doesn't really say anything about the moral position of abortion on any particular social scale. That is not the case. Person-hood is an emergent property which only begins with consciousness. No, I really don't think that you would 'be right' just because you made a facile and demonstrably wrong argument. Don't make yourself out to be on an equal footing with the people who actually know what they are talking about if you clearly aren't. These are matters of significant debate. There is not a definitive answer for you at this time. However, this does not mean that until the matter is settled we either have to take person-hood away from everyone, or award it to the zygotes. We do not know exactly when self-identity and recognition of own thoughts begin in an infant. But we are certain that undifferentiated balls of cells are not people, just as we are certain that someone undergoing anaesthesia is a person who is being temporarily relieved of their faculties. They are unequivocally not ceasing to be a person. So again, let's try not to equivocate, hmmm? The issue of clones was raised because you stated something which it directly contradicts. You have to either counter the argument, or withdraw your assertion and all conclusions that rely on it. If you want to discuss this subject at this level then that is how you need to do it, otherwise you fail by default. Your speculation on the purpose of human cloning isn't really relevant to the discussion. With regard to the birth rate, I don't think anyone in here really proposes that human cloning will or should become a means of 'padding out' future generations - it was brought up merely because you stated that life can only come from the fusion of gametes. The fact that cloning is possible is sufficient to rebut that assertion; cloning doesn't need to actually happen. Selecting a particular trait that can evoke an emotional response from the audience (oh look, the child is trying to get away from the threat!) is not sufficient as you are arguing by cosmetic similarity. I can transplant your argument directly and state that because the leaves of the plant Mimosa pudica curl in response to touch stimuli, the plant should therefore be considered a person and protected from being unlawfully killed. Or at least, that we should feel so emotionally blackmailed by such a notion that we ought at least to consider it, preferably while we happen to be in congress or the supreme court. You realise of course that all of the above are usually considerations and concerns of the abortion process as a whole. It is a fascinating idea and I think one that we ought to pursue vigorously in another thread. ---- Damn you Cypress, I was about to test a small change to the auto-merge settings! Never mind Yes, I agree with basically all of that. But still, while we can't necessarily strictly define all of the terms it is important - especially in this thread - to remember that they should still not be used interchangeably. We might not be able to box them off neatly but we can still be certain that they are not the same things. (Also bear in mind I read this whole thread from the beginning and responded as I went. Had I read it through from the start before replying en masse I would have seen that comment was hardly necessary for the most part, and that only one participant needs constant reminders.)

If you are going to state that you came into existence "unique" but also that you developed over a number of years with your possibilities being decided almost by chance, then I have to wonder how you would go about deciding what accounts for any differences in the outcomes? I mean, had you not "come into existence unique" would you be different now because of that one distant attribute, or because of the accumulated effects of chance-based development over time? That's an interesting analogy, but the difference is that the cake does not gain additional non-recipe attributes after it is baked. Say for example there is a family emergency and you have to leave immediately for the weekend; you won't think twice about switching the oven off and chucking the half-baked cake in the bin. The argument against abortion is that at some point that 'cake' will be a person. What is happening in this thread (rather disappointingly) is that certain people are conflating the point at which "life begins" with the point where potential person-hood emerges. The very fact that these two things are different is exactly why abortion can be allowed anywhere in Western civilisations despite the existence of legislation that prohibits unlawful killing. Because of this, it is important in these discussions to keep in mind that "human" and "person" and "life" are not interchangeable terms. It might be that he is not being intentionally vague with the phrase "beginning of life". Some yes, some no. You are equivocating different things. "Human" is the condition of belonging by genetic identity alone to the species Homo sapiens. "Life" is the condition of operation of the cellular machinery of an organism. For a practical and easily-understood example of how these things are neither synonymous nor mutually interdependent, consider the nature of dead babies. Then of course there is "being a person" which is a completely different kettle of fish. It is relevant because although the title of the thread gives its putative subject, needimprovement has already given the game away by posting a certain link. Could an alien life form equivalent in intelligence to humans not also be an animal of a "different species"? I'd consider carefully whether or not to call its race "people" or we might well end up being the ones who require endangered species laws. An empty factory is not considered a person because it is not a corporation. That's like saying that we wouldn't consider a living body to be a person for the same reason we won't consider a detached foot to be a person. In legal circles a business is treated as a person. That's the problem with these discussions - you can't very well align all your definitions along one axis. We have to use legal and biological definitions, which often offends the "compare like for like" sensibility of rational thought. You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts. I think what Azure is getting at is that we differ on what we call a "person" in the sense that you are regarding the set of organisms which you have observed to express person-hood, and concluding that organisms within that set are by necessity "people" and all "people" fall into that set. I believe that Azure and myself, and doubtless others, take the view that a person is defined by their expression of personality, which is a composite trait comprising a number of faculties emerging from certain activity patterns. While it is true that these expressions are essentially always observed in human beings it is entirely possible that they are also expressed in organisms which we cannot observe (for example, sentient alien life), or in artificial organisms which we have not yet observed (artificial intelligence), or "elsewhere". Please see my signature. I would not accept an argument by dictionary definition even from the Oxford English Dictionary, so you can imagine how I reacted to seeing a definition plucked from "wordweb online", a database that does not even credit any dictionary source. However if you insist on arguing by dictionary definition, then the definition your chosen source gives for "person" states (1) a human being. If you check you will see that they define "human being" as "any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage", which creates some not inconsiderable difficulties for all 'sides' in this discussion. Not sure who you were replying to with that second one (since you have cropped the names from all the quotes), but the definition quoted seems much fitter for purpose. The definition you are citing seems like a facile failure in understanding (which is obviously not your fault). Clarity is not an indicator of veracity. That's why we call it an analogy and not a direct description. The purpose of an analogy is to highlight the mechanisms of consequence, not to duplicate attributes. Why? Arriving at the same thing by trivially different (albeit frighteningly expensively) means doesn't require a new definition at all. It might affect how you label things from a social point of view (e.g. "natural human" vs "synthuman"), but a secondary definition would be pretty much redundant for something that is mechanically and functionally identical to something already defined. 'Course if it turns out that synthetically conceived humans can fly and live to be a million years old but sometimes explode for no adequately explained reason, then I'll retract that comment. And it's there, right there, that you are having your most significant problem. The condition of being a living organism is not the same thing as the condition of being a reasoning, self-aware being. What the church has to say on this point should be considered in the knowledge that the church is not in fact well-versed in matters of neurology, physiology, cognitive psychology, biochemistry, genetics, and so on, whereas it is well-versed in pointlessly propagating ideas that have no basis in reality. Belief does not influence reality. Well, you know... unless you believe in something so strongly you then act on it. Like assassinating someone over a political ideal. But inasmuch as belief can influence reality, you can't really 'believe' parthenogenesis into existence or non-existence. Which of these options do you think is the most likely explanation? 1) Divine intervention, parthenogenetic or otherwise; 2) Purely biological parthenogenesis; 3) The entire account is fictional; 4) Mary told a lie. I'll give you a clue. Things that have no weight tend to be more buoyant than things that are well-grounded. Because it isn't a person at the moment of conception. But it's not a matter of philosophy. The problem is not that everyone has some great difficulty in deciding when the milestone is, the problem is because there isn't a milestone one can point to. The development of sentience, intelligence, awareness etc arises from a number of processes which occur over a period of time.

Well, see the problem is that your scenario requires destiny, that is to say that people's fates are pre-determined. But if this were the case, then the abortion was always destined to occur and your baby genius could not have been born. On the other hand the alternative option, no predestination, means that your comment is still an unstructured appeal to emotion that has no relevance to your own thread. This has all the hallmarks of the "my initial strongly-worded claims eventually turn out to be a complaint that something is commonly misnamed" type of thread. I should point out, needimprovement, that overpopulation is in fact real. If you consider any given habitat, up to and including the scale of the entire planet, you will find that you have a finite resource pool. Since biological organisms require finite resources to live, elementary mathematics dictate that there must be an upper limit to the number of organisms which can simultaneously and continuously access those resources. In population biology that limit would be the carrying capacity k of the habitat. Now it is true that you can modify the value of k by altering the efficiency of resource utilisation, speed of replenishment, per capita minimum requirements, etc. But at some point you go as far as you can with changing those numbers and your only achievement is that you have shifted k, not removed it altogether. You can't remove it. Resource utilisation by definition cannot be infinitely low.