Paul Ehrlich, the celebrity bug scientist-turned-environmentalist who wrote a tract against babymaking called The Population Bomb, was disastrously wrong and never really admitted it. He spent his life defending The Population Bomb and saying he wished he had been more strident in it.

He predicted mass starvation as a consequence of a growing population, but the opposite happened: When the population grew, hunger dissipated. Now we face a crisis of low birth rates, and we are on the verge of a shrinking population.

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Ehrlich just died, which means he can no longer advocate forced sterilization and try to convince everyone that babies are bad. But the sad thing is, he doesn’t really need to — because much of the population is already so convinced.

Just check the pages of the New York Times. You could start with the laughable subheadline on their obituary, which refused to grant that Ehrlich was wrong.

pic.twitter.com/LgYXaogNKF— Derek T. Muller (@derektmuller) March 15, 2026

pic.twitter.com/LgYXaogNKF

But picking on the New York Times editors is not terribly apt on........

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