Paul R. Ehrlich

Ehrlich's mother's Reform-Jewish German ancestors arrived in the United States in the 1840s, and his paternal grandparents emigrated there later from the Galician and Transylvanian part of the Austrian Empire.

Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion.

Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.

During his childhood his family moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, where he attended Columbia High School, graduating in 1949.

Although Ehrlich was not the first to warn about population issues — concern had been widespread during the 1950s and 1960s — his charismatic and media-savvy methods helped publicize the topic.

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on as a guest more than twenty times, with one interview lasting an hour.

Ehrlich earned a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953, an M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1955, and a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1957, supervised by the prominent bee researcher Charles Duncan Michener (the title of his dissertation: "The Morphology, Phylogeny and Higher Classification of the Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea)").

During his studies he participated with surveys of insects in the areas of the Bering Sea and Canadian arctic, and then with a National Institutes of Health fellowship, investigated the genetics and behavior of parasitic mites.

In 1959 he joined the faculty at Stanford University, being promoted to professor of biology in 1966.

By training he is an entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera (butterflies).

He is well-known for popularizing the term coevolution in an influential 1964 paper co-authored with the botanist Peter H. Raven, where they proposed that an evolutionary 'arms-race' between plants and insects explains the extreme diversification of plants and insects.

This paper was highly influential on the then-nascent field of chemical ecology.

He is president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.

He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

A lecture that Ehrlich gave on the topic of overpopulation at the Commonwealth Club of California was broadcast by radio in April 1967.

The success of the lecture caused further publicity, and the suggestion from David Brower the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, and Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books to write a book concerning the topic.

Ehrlich and his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, collaborated on the book, The Population Bomb, but the publisher insisted that a single author be credited; only Paul's name appears as an author.

In 1967, he went so far as to insist that countries such as India be allowed to starve, while aid would only be given to those countries that were not considered to be "hopeless".

Decades later, Ehrlich's continued prominence and the failure of the book's predictions to materialize led to renewed scrutiny and criticism.

The New York Times said his "apocalyptic predictions fell as flat as ancient theories about the shape of the Earth".

Science author Charles C. Mann wrote that the book's predictions "fueled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world", including coercive population control policies and even forced sterilizations.

Ehrlich's pointed criticism of India in particular (for instance, emphasizing the overpopulation of Delhi rather than Paris, which had nearly triple Delhi's population at the time of writing) has been criticized for focusing much more on "feelings" than on actual data.

Neither of the Ehrlichs have ever publicly renounced predictions, instead insisting that they were largely correct, despite the errors noted by many experts.

In their sequel to The Population Bomb, the Ehrlichs wrote about how the world's growing population dwarfs the Earth's capacity to sustain current living standards.

The book calls for action to confront population growth and the ensuing crisis:

Ehrlich became well known for the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which he co-authored with his wife Anne H. Ehrlich, in which they famously stated that "[i]n the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

Among the solutions suggested in that book was population control, including "various forms of coercion" such as eliminating "tax benefits for having additional children," to be used if voluntary methods were to fail, as well as letting "hopeless" countries like India starve to death.

Scholars, journalists and public intellectuals have mixed views on Ehrlich's assertions on the dangers of expanding human populations.

While Paul A. Murtaugh, associate professor of statistics at Oregon State University, says that Ehrlich was largely correct, Ehrlich has been criticized for his approach and views, both for their pessimistic outlook and, later on, for the repeated failure of his predictions to come true.

The original edition of The Population Bomb began with the statement: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

Ehrlich argued that the human population was too great, and that while the extent of disaster could be mitigated, humanity could not prevent severe famines, the spread of disease, social unrest, and other negative consequences of overpopulation.

Ehrlich has proposed different solutions to the problem of overpopulation.

In The Population Bomb he wrote, "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control."

Voluntary measures he has endorsed include the easiest possible availability of birth control and abortion.

He was appointed to the Bing Professorship in 1977.

For example, in response to Ehrlich's assertion that all major marine wildlife would die by 1980, Ronald Bailey termed Ehrlich an "irrepressible doomster".

Ehrlich has acknowledged that "some" of what he predicted has not occurred, but nevertheless maintains that his predictions about disease and climate change were essentially correct and that human overpopulation is a major problem.

Whereas American journalist Jonathan V. Last has called The Population Bomb "one of the most spectacularly foolish books ever published", journalist Fred Pearce argues that overconsumption is the real problem.

Ehrlich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Ehrlich and Ruth Rosenberg.

His father was a shirt salesman (unrelated to the German scientist Paul Ehrlich), his mother a Greek and Latin scholar and public school teacher.