Flattened Population

Dr. Raymond Pearl believes that in the 17th Century, world population began to rise from a relatively static figure of about 450,000,000. Now it is approximately 2,100,000,000--an average density of some 40 persons to the square mile. Dr. Pearl has constructed a "logistic" curve following the population rise of the past three centuries. If this curve is not skewed by some worldwide catastrophe, if it continues to follow its geometric destiny, it will go on rising, but more slowly, and will flatten out some 160 years hence at a population figure of 2,600,000,000. Reasons: contraception, postponement of the marriage age, an obscure biological factor which tends to diminish the fertility of Homo sapiens.

This speculation is contained in a slender, thoughtfully written book full of charts and tables, published this week and called The Natural History of Population* Author Raymond Pearl, an eminent biologist of Johns Hopkins University, has been much in the news lately because Harold LeClair Ickes, an eminent Washington politician, lighted on one of Pearl's researches in another field in an attempt to show that U. S. newspapers avoid certain types of news. Dr. Pearl had concluded that tobacco impairs a smoker's chances for long life; umbrageous Secretary Ickes felt that this finding was insufficiently reported in the press, a view which Dr. Pearl himself failed to share (TIME, Jan. 23). Longevity and population are only two of Raymond Pearl's major interests. Others are nutrition, death, eugenics, diseases of poultry.

*Oxford University Press ($3.50).

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