Well, I have always thought that Quinn's idea about humans and evolution makes a lot of sense: humans stopped participating in natural selection as soon as we developed the capacity to systematically and perpetually alter the environment to our benefit (i.e., the Agricultural Revolution of antiquity). From that point on, our very culture serves the adaptive purpose that we suppose natural selection to fulfill elsewhere in the biosphere.

And it is precisely because of this that our species is getting itself into trouble.

The statistic you quoted about US agriculture is not really representative of the rest of the world; for instance, it is also true that the US uses about 25% of the world's energy to support less than 5% of the world population. Hardly encouraging, considering our reputation for tech prowess.
It is a good point that world hunger is rarely about lack of food and more about poor distribution, so kudos for that.

I tend to look at the problem less in statistical Malthusian terms and more in ideological or anthropological terms. It just seems to me that human material cultural development is too greatly outpacing human intellectual/ideological cultural development; our belief systems lag too far behind our material circumstances. For instance, most people still live in a very anthropocentric world of fiction in direct defiance of the fact that we now know that the Universe is anything but anthropocentric and the planet on which we live demands a precise ecological balance and a finely tuned sustainable ethic of which such anthropocentrism is the direct antithesis.


I would agree with you that