Reverend Thomas Malthus believed that massive population growth would facilitate famine or disease. This phenomenon was called a Malthusian catastrophe. It was thought to cause an equally massive decrease in population.
Chat with our AI personalities
The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny
Thomas Malthus
Authoritarianism
Thomas Hobbes believed that citizens must give up some of their liberties to form order.
By writing a book that proposed human suffering and death from starvation because the population of humans went up exponentially but the supply of food goes up arithmetically. Darwin took this idea as an insight. He figured that populations of organisms produced far more progeny then the environment could supply with resources. So a selective process would be put in place. The fitter organisms would survive and reproduce while this much less fit would lose the struggle for existence.