Who is Thomas Malthus?
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was a British scholar and minister of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Malthus was ordained as a Minister of the Church of England in 1788. He is most famous for his “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798). In this work, Malthus proposed several ideas that were contradictory to the optimistic social philosophies of the time. His work was alternately applauded and criticized by various groups, though his influence on Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was considerable. In the end, Malthus is best remembered for his contribution to Darwin’s evolutionary theories than for anything else. In “Population,” Thomas Malthus proposed that populations, both human and animal, grow at an exponential rate. That is, populations grow through repeated multiplication. At the same time, he stated that food supplies can only grow at an arithmetic rate. That is, food supplies grow through repeated addition. This means that populations wil
