This year we celebrate the 200th an_niversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of his Origin of Species. Ideas about overpopu_lation were central to Darwin's theory that natural selection molds the evolution of organisms by the greater reproductive success of those best-suited to their circumstances in over-crowded populations. Darwin deserves recognition for his insight_ful contributions to evolutionarytheory, but he wasn't the first to notice the importance of the popula_tion problem. In 1729, Jonathan Swift (Fig. 1) wrote an essay called "A Modest Proposal."' When we read that in school as a classic example of satire, we weren't told that it was also a pioneering harbinger of evolu_tionary theory.
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