Insect-ifying Humanity: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy

Dr. Paul Ralph Ehrlich (1933-2026), who passed away last week at the age of 93, was perhaps the world’s most famous opinionator on the population question since Reverend T.R. Malthus himself. An unabashed apostle of population control and prophet of impending worldwide demographic catastrophe, he preached a secular gospel of "overpopulation" and eco-apocalypse from his perch at Stanford University for over 50 years.

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Paul Ehrlich died. His contempt for human life didn’t.



I was in the delivery room for my eighth child when I found out Paul Ehrlich died.

Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” did not come from concern for the environment. It grew out of a basic contempt for his fellow man. He viewed people not as the foundation of society but as a destructive force consuming resources. His warnings about overpopulation and climate issues were not about protecting nature. They were about controlling and reducing the number of people.

Ehrlich prided himself on the hundreds of millions of babies who were never born because of his ideas. That is his legacy.

This line of thinking was not original. Ehrlich drew directly from Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century writer who argued that population increases faster than food production, leading inevitably to catastrophe. Malthus provided the intellectual justification for elites of his era to look down on the poor and the growing families among them.

Ehrlich updated the same argument with modern statistics, computer models, and environmental language. He took it farther. Ehrlich functioned as a modern version of the Albigensians, the medieval sect condemned by the Catholic Church for teaching that physical matter and the body were inherently corrupt. Those believers discouraged marriage and childbirth, seeing procreation as trapping more souls in an evil material world. The ultimate good preached by the Albigensians was for followers to starve themselves to death to show their commitment to not consuming resources.

Ehrlich repackaged these ideas in pseudoscientific terms: Stop having children, or you will destroy the planet. The message stayed the same — human life and babies are the problem.

His specific forecasts failed, one after another. He predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s and ’80s. That did not happen.

He wrote that India faced unavoidable mass famine and societal breakdown. Instead, new agricultural techniques dramatically increased food production there and across Asia.

In a famous 1980 wager with economist Julian Simon, Ehrlich claimed prices of key raw materials would surge due to scarcity over the next 10 years. The prices fell, and he lost the bet.

Ehrlich had an easy time settling his $10,000 bet with Simon. He mailed the check shortly after receiving both the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the “ecologist’s version of the Nobel” for his ingeniously wrong ecology — twin prizes that netted him $485,000 (about $1.15 million today).

Despite this best-selling record of error, Ehrlich’s outlook and recommended policies gained influence among those who consider themselves the educated, evidence-based class. University departments, international organizations, and media outlets adopted his assumptions.

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Gene Arias/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank

When he wasn’t barnstorming lecture halls demanding that parents be taxed at higher rates than selfish adults, he was making multiple appearances on "The Tonight Show,"where he warned that “there’s a finite pie. The more mice you have nibbling at it, the smaller every mouse’s share.” Johnny Carson nodded along, no doubt contemplating the alimony he had paid out over the course of four marriages.

Our elites were not simply mistaken about the facts. They embraced Ehrlich’s ideas because they already held contempt for the people they aimed to direct. Large families in middle America, working parents, and growing populations in developing nations represent something they want to limit — too many independent voices, too many demands on resources, too much resistance to top-down planning.

This shared attitude explains why policies inspired by Ehrlich persisted, from China’s one-child policy to aggressive carbon pricing that burdens ordinary households and education that frames having children as environmentally irresponsible.

The goal was never just saving the planet. It was managing populations that elites view as excessive and unruly.

It may no longer be in vogue in communist China, which is now scrambling to recover from the disaster of crushing birth rates through forced abortion and sterilization, but progressives throughout the Democratic Party and Europe are still wildly enthusiastic about suppressing new life in the name of “freedom.”

Maybe the closest Ehrlich ever came to being correct is when he predicted that Britain would no longer exist as a viable nation by the year 2000. That will not happen for another year or two under Keir Starmer’s leadership. The U.K., it turns out, won’t be undone by climate catastrophe or mass starvation, but by its embrace of Paul Ehrlich’s worldview. In 2023, England and Wales aborted nearly 300,000 babies. Live births dipped below 600,000.

Ehrlich is gone, but the impulse he represented continues in policy circles and institutions that treat the human population itself as the central threat. Families across the country continue to reject that message. They are choosing to raise children and invest in the future without apology.

Ehrlich prided himself on the hundreds of millions of babies who were never born because of his ideas. That is his legacy. It had to be, because, as he boasted throughout his lifetime, he got a vasectomy in 1963 after the birth of his first child.

Paul Ehrlich lived 93 years. His family tree spanning four generations is less crowded than the recovery room I’m in right now.

CBS kicks off new year with  'mass extinction' prediction from 'anti-human' depopulationist who spent his career being proven wrong



Biologist Paul Ehrlich, 90, has lived long enough to see his most dire predictions disproven, but evidently not long enough to reconsider his alarmist approach to demographics.

In a "60 Minutes" interview run on CBS Sunday night, Ehrlich suggested that a mass extinction — not wholly unlike the one he prophesied would take place in the 1970s but never happened — was under way.

Despite having had the primary claim in his magnum opus proven wrong by real-world trends, Ehrlich doubled down, concluding that the world now faces "too many people, too much consumption, and growth mania."

The biologist's remarks were subsequently denounced and ridiculed, with some critics suggesting that Ehrlich's "anti-human" rhetoric, which helped inspire China's one-child policy resulting in hundreds of millions of abortions, is as dangerous as it is still wrong.

What are the details?

Ehrlich is an American biologist and professor emeritus of population studies at Stanford University. Extra to being a member of the American Philosophical Society and a member of the Royal Society, he also served as a correspondent for NBC News.

Ehrlich told "60 Minutes" that the "rate of extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time."

"Humanity is not sustainable," he claimed. "To maintain our lifestyle — yours and mine, basically — for the entire planet, you'd need five more earths. Not clear where they're gonna come from."

The biologist alleged that there are insufficient resources and waning biodiversity, such that "humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we are sawing off."

In his popular 1968 book "The Population Bomb," Ehrlich suggested that hundreds of millions of people would soon perish from starvation on account of overpopulation.

As one partial remedy, he advocated for coercive population control, such as abortion and birth control, "if voluntary methods fail."

Big Think reported that at the 1974 UN World Population Conference, developing nations rejected coercive proposals to curb the population through eugenicist means, as proposed by Ehrlich, calling such bloody initiatives imperialist.

Ehrlich also predicted that civilization would meet its end in the 1970s; England would disappear by the year 2000; India was doomed; and American life expectancy would drop to 42 years by 1980.

These predictions clearly did not come true.

HumanProgress noted that contrary to Ehrlich's suggestions, the population rose from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8 billion in 2022; the world produces record amounts of food; the global crude death rate has dropped by approximately 37%; and both London and India are still standing.

While American life expectancy has dropped in recent years, it stands at 76; 34 years higher than that foreseen by Ehrlich.

Scott Pelley, the reporter interviewing Ehrlich for "60 Minutes," conceded that contrary to the biologist's warning of widespread famine, "the green revolution fed the world."

Ostensibly holding out hope that some of Ehrlich's predictions might yet come true, Pelley noted that "he also wrote in '68 that heat from greenhouse gases would melt polar ice and humanity would overwhelm the wild. Today, humans have taken over 70% of the planet's land and 70% of the freshwater."

Researchers recently indicated in the journal Earth System Science Data that, contrary to Ehrlich's suggestion, only 14.6% of lands have been modified by humans across the globe.

A 2020 study suggested that roughly 50% of the earth's surface sees low human influence.

Ehrlich spoke to his evidently unwarranted 20th-century alarmism: "I was alarmed. I am still alarmed. All of my colleagues are alarmed."

No country for old men's anti-human alarmism

This renewed alarmism was not well received.

Andrew Follett, a senior analyst at the Club for Growth, stated, "Ehrlich has simultaneously the worst and most evil track record of any 'intellectual.' He's been consistently wrong about everything forever...and yet his 'ideas' appeal a lot to the elite because they think everyone who isn't them is yucky!"

\u201cCorrect.\n\nEhrlich has simultaneously the worst and most evil track record of any "intellectual."\n\nHe's been consistently wrong about everything forever...and yet his "ideas" appeal a lot to the elite because they think everyone who isn't them is yucky!\u201d
— Andrew Follett (@Andrew Follett) 1672693528

Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor and cognitive psychologist, wrote that he was "stunned to see always-wrong Paul Ehrlich softballed as an authority on imminent doom."

Media strategist Gabriella Hoffman tweeted, "Preservationist environmentalism like this poses a grave threat to people and nature. This thinking undergirds most climate alarmism too. Giving credence to Paul Erlich should instill doubt in one's credibility."

Jordan Peterson tweeted, "Paul Ehrlich has been famously wrong about everything he has predicted for six decades."

Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded, "His 'Population Bomb' book might the most damaging anti-human thing ever written."

\u201c@jordanbpeterson His \u201cPopulation Bomb\u201d book might the most damaging anti-human thing ever written\u201d
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@Dr Jordan B Peterson) 1672631714

The Cato Institute's HumanProgress.org underscored how "Paul Ehrlich was wrong in 1968 and he's still wrong now," suggesting that CBS should be ashamed for "leaving his narrative unchallenged."

Marian Tupy, writing in HumanProgress, suggested that this is just the latest instance of "left-leaning media outlets" helping to normalize "their message of anti-humanism and anti-natalism."

William McGurn, the chief speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Ehrlich's "crabbed worldview became an unquestioned orthodoxy for the technocratic class that seems to welcome such scares as an opportunity to boss everyone else around. In this way the missionary fervor once directed toward Christianizing the globe found its late-20th-century expression as proselytizing for population control."

McGurn suggested that "it turns out hell isn’t other people after all. To the contrary, human beings constantly find new and creative ways to take from the earth, increase the bounty for everyone and expand the number of seats at the table of plenty. Which is one reason Paul Ehrlich is himself better off today than he was when he wrote his awful book—notwithstanding all those hundreds of millions of babies born in places like China and India against his wishes."

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