(…) For instance, the present population of Latin America [o livro é de 1976] is around 300 million, and already many of them are under-nourished. But if the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where the people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid human carpet over the whole area of the continent. This is so, even if we assume them to be very skinny – a not unrealistic assumption. In 1,000 years from now they would be standing on each other’s shoulders more than a million deep. By 2,000 years, the mountain of people, travelling outwards at the speed of light, would have reached the edge of the known universe.

It will not have escaped you that this is a hypothetical calculation! It will not really happen like that for some very good practical reasons. The names of some of these reasons are famine, plague, and war; or, if we are lucky, birth control. It is no use appealing to advances in agricultural science – ‘green revolutions’ and the like. Increases in food production may temporarily alleviate the problem, but it is mathematically certain that they cannot be a long-term solution; indeed, like the medical advances that have precipitated the crisis, they may well make the problem worse, by speeding up the rate of population expansion. It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at a rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

The Selfish Gene, de Richard Dawkins. Chapter 7, Family Planning.

O negrito é meu.