title: Influence of human reproduction on environment. What features of biology and economics cause them to see population differently?
abstract: Disciplinary isolation: like species with common descent, between whom a barrier has arisen, the disciplines have evolved independently. Each discipline evolves on its own dynamic. We are not concerned with opinions of eccentric individual scholars, but with the mainstreams, in particular of biology and economics that today strongly disagree. The disciplines have changed sides. Biology and economics disagreed also in the 19th century, but then biologists were optimists, economists pessimists, on the population-holding capacity of the Earth. Words are used differently in different disciplines, and that arises from and maintains different styles of thought, so that language is one of the barriers between disciplines. A serious matter when "data do not support family planning" is taken as an argument against family planning. Failure to support the hypothesis being tested by no means proves the hypothesis; it is as likely to show merely that the data are inadequate.
authors.affiliation: International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Keyfitz
mesh_terms: D001695:Biology; D004467:Economics; D004777:Environment; D005193:Family Planning Services; D005260:Female; D005298:Fertility; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011153:Population; D012098:Reproduction; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors