“I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb,” wrote Wall Street Journal reader Kenneth Emde of “population scientist” Paul Ehrlich’s most famous work in a 2023 letter. “I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later, the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.”

It’s cold comfort, but Emde was hardly alone in deferring to Ehrlich’s supposed expertise. The longtime professor of biology at Stanford University and advocate of an apocalyptic theory of human overpopulation, who passed away on Friday at the age of ...

© National Review