creative love story #dadlife advice to my kids love of my life, & everyone else #dmr #4horsemen #Death, #Famine, #War, and #Conquest

4 horsemen The Book of Revelations in the New Testament lists the Four Horsemen of the #Apocalypse as conquest, war, famine and death, while in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel they are #sword , #famine , wild #beasts and #pestilence or #plague. But whatever we call them, they are remarkably close to what we might call the four horsemen of ecology that regulate population size in nature. Horseman 1: Predators
In The Serengeti Rules, Carroll writes: “Kill the predators and the prey run amok.” Horsemen 2 and 3: Pathogens and parasites
It may be useful to distinguish between what the Old and New Testaments call “plague,” by which I mean the infections we pass on to each other (even though many of them, such as COVID-19, originate in other animals) and pathogens and parasites that we don’t spread directly to each other but are spread to us by other animals, (which might be considered “pestilence” – diseases spread by pests). Horseman 4: Food supply
We have one horseman left – food supply: How effective will this be in controlling the human population? The fifth horseman: That’s us
Clearly, Elton’s “four horsemen” are not controlling the human population. But something is working: While world population continues to increase – the UN projects it will reach 11 billion in 2100 – the rate of increase has dropped “from 2.2 per cent per year 50 years ago to 1.05 per cent per year,”