Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment

The hypothesis of Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment is that human beings, like many other species, are able to adjust their population numbers to the carrying capacity of the environment. The author points out that in response to perception of scarcity or abundance of resources, culturally mediated values, beliefs and behavioral patterns are modified in ways that can either raise or lower rates of population growth. Abernethy in this way moves beyond the ideological debates that have sundered the field of policy and population. In real world time and space, cultural adjustments that balance population and resources are made over a long stretch in relatively stable or known environments. These adjustments also operate in processes that involve technological advances that appear to increase carrying capacity, and these usually act to support and underwrite population growth in any given area.

Virginia Deane Abernethy is professor emeritus of Psychiatry [Anthropology] at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.