This book I once read...

[cruzichick]

said there's less people dead at this point then those who are not.

Which I had also heard (although not with the internal rhyming component), but some non-work related web browsing brought me here:

http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowMan ... Earth.aspx

I especially like that in 50,000 BC the estimated population was 2. Lucky it was a male and a female, otherwise the species would have been SOL The site estimates that there have been about 106 billion people ever born, so the current population of over 6 bil represents 5.8% of all people born.

[ERawkStar]

Article from yesterday's National Geographic News:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... sions.html

I'm very skeptical about the estimated population being 2 in 50,000 B.C. I don't think this is something that will ever be known concretely, but wouldn't it be possible for homo sapiens to have come into existence as a group of more than two persons, i.e., that certain factors in a certain area caused the appearance of a very small homo sapien colony however many years ago?

[cruzichick]

Any real population biologists out there are welcome to correct me, but I think it's safe to assume that there is no homo sapien Adam and Eve; that there must have been a group of hominids(dozens? hundreds? thousands? I don't know) that together evolved into what we define as homo sapiens. It's pretty easy to conceive that a single founder bacterium had a mutation that made it resistant to antibiotics and gave rise to MRSA superbugs (although even that is probably not so simple), but not for sexually reproducing organisms.

Anyone interested in evolution might want to check out the farm fox study.

www.floridalupine.org/publications/PDF/ ... -study.pdf