Civilized population.

Is this a silly question ? I live in a country where you can ask for a medal when you have raised a large family : a bronze medal for 4 or 5 children ; a silver medal for 6 or 7 ; a gold medal for 8 or more. It depends of the place where you are living, but there is often a "money bonus" offered to "good mothers". When I was a kid, I remember I saw these medals given to mothers of 15 children. So, can we speak of "civilized" or "not civilized" people ? To have or to not have a "birthrate policy" is also a matter of civilization. My opinion is that human beings have always been "civilized"...

In a world where children starve, I am not sure that we can go about making claims of being civilized. And look at the world; we kill each other off all the time, and we do continue to overpopulate. It's interesting to me that both these things are great for the economy.

If we were not 'civilized' (a broad term, I'm not sure we're civilized even now when you look at the news reports!) lets say than women got pregnant when ever the opportunity arose. So they could have, lets say, a baby each year or thereabouts. But, if we weren't 'civilized', we would lack medical know how as well as contraceptive know how and many of these babies would die. Many of these mothers would also die, and poor exhausted women would die earlier than currently. There would also be a higher incidence of child mortality. If we were not 'civilized', you also have to consider that people generally would have a shorter life span due to accident, injury, a harder day to day life, lack of medical care etc etc. I'm not sure you'd have the population boom you might expect when you think of couples having babies all over the place, as the mortality rate would also be considerably higher. Just thinking though ...

Hi Lore, the number of offspring an organism can produce in its life span is called its biotic potential.Since the reproductive life of a human female is from roughly 13 years to 50 years let us say she can produce around 20 offspring.But the environment can sustain only limited number of individuals , this is called its carrying capacity.But when the biotic potential is more than its carrying capacity , there will be destruction of individuals due to shortage of food , or famine , earthquake etc.This is called environmental resistance.So there will always be a check on population by the environment even if the human beings were not civilized.

Perhaps if there were no issues in the world there would be more and more children per family is my thought. Personally I am glad I only had two as being a single parent as I was, would have been really tough if I had more then the two.