SDARI: San Diego Association of Rational Inquiry Monthly Meetup

[ Program announcements are posted at http://www.sdari.org ]

Speaker: Professor Milton Saier, UCSD

Topic: Mankind's Greatest Biologist and Greatest Problem.

Charles Darwin is generally recognized as the greatest biologist who ever lived due to his discovery of the Third Law of Biology: natural selection and evolution. His importance is illustrated by the fact that all of Biology makes sense only in the context of evolution. I will talk about him as a person and the qualities possibly responsible for his incredibly insightful discoveries: his recognition that all living organisms on Earth are related by common descent, his understanding of natural selection and how it shaped species divergence, and his deduction that humans arose in Africa by the same mechanism as for all other species.

Human overpopulation, the greatest problem facing mankind, is the easiest to solve. Much evidence reveals that rapid growth rates in underdeveloped countries are not due so much to religious beliefs, social values or political structures but are simply due to the lack of contraception and abortion services. Drs. Martha Campbell and Malcolm Potts at UC Berkeley have statistically analyzed the reproductive behaviors and fertility rates in over 100 countries to show this to be true. The famous Socioeconomic Theory of Human Reproduction has been shown to be false in large measure, in spite of the incomplete and inaccurate beliefs of economists and other madmen. The environment is far more important to the future of humankind than is the economy.