“So, Miss Royal Society, if there were three things you could change about the world, what would they be?”
 
OK, so there isn’t a Miss Royal Society (it’s proving hard enough to get the Society to elect female fellows in respectable numbers). But a report issued by the Society today reads like the answers often heard from toothsome beauties in swimsuits.
 
The report is on issues relating to global population and consumption. The Society’s first request is that “the international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today.” The Royal Society doesn’t want any children to go to bed hungry, you see.
 
Second, they’d like people to stop being so greedy: “The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels.”
 
Third, they want people in developing countries to stop having so many babies.
 
If it really were a beauty pageant, we’d all gape in awe at the gaffe, then share the video with our friends. We could share the 5.7MB PDF of the report, but really, that’s a lot to read when the top three recommendations are, respectively, banal, naive and reminiscent of an edict issued on behalf of the British Empire in the latter part of the 18th century.
 
The case study given for the family planning problem is Niger, where the report tells us “over a quarter of women older than 40 have given birth to 10 or more children.”  The report explains that Niger’s high fertility is not, for the most part, due to poverty, education or access to family planning. The biggest problem, the report says, is the double-barrelled shotgun of Niger’s polygamous culture, and – wait for it – its “large desired family size”.
 
Yes, they actually want all these children! In fact, the report goes on to admit that married women in Niger want an average of 8.8 children. So let’s put that first statistic another way: the majority of women in Niger have, or will have, roughly the number of children they’d like to have. That’s not a problem, surely?
 
Well, apparently it is. The Royal Society’s issue is that, from a global perspective, these women really aren’t team players: they are producing more than their fair share of humans.
 
In science circles, there’s an old joke about theoretical physicists helping out a troubled dairy farmer. It’s not actually that funny, so I’ll cut straight to the punchline where the physicists say, “first let’s assume the cow is a sphere.”  The point is that science is often ill-equipped for realities outside the lab. The Royal Society’s report is well-intentioned, and Sir John Sulston, the chair of the panel that produced it, is both an excellent scientist and by all accounts a deeply impressive human being. The problem is, scientists are good at science, and beauty pageant contestants are generally beautiful. From the evidence presented so far, these are not qualities that seem to qualify either group as advisors on world affairs.