Paul R. Ehrlich

Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist known for his warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources. He is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology. Ehrlich became well known for the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which he co-authored with his wife Anne H. Ehrlich, in which they famously stated that "[i]n the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

Among the solutions suggested in that book was population control, including "various forms of coercion," such as eliminating "tax benefits for having additional children," to be used if voluntary methods were to fail. Ehrlich has been criticized for his approach and views. For example, Ronald Bailey termed Ehrlich an "irrepressible doomster." Ehrlich has acknowledged that some of what he predicted has not occurred but maintains that his predictions about the disease and climate change were essentially correct and that human overpopulation is a major problem.

Ehrlich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Ehrlich and Ruth Rosenberg. His father was a shirt salesman, and his mother was a Greek and Latin scholar and public school teacher. Ehrlich's mother's Reform-Jewish German ancestors arrived in the United States in the 1840s, and his paternal grandparents emigrated there later from the Galician and Romanian part of the Austrian Empire. During his childhood, his family moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, where he attended Columbia High School, graduating in 1949.

Ehrlich earned a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953, an M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1955, and a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1957, supervised by the prominent bee researcher Charles Duncan Michener (the title of his dissertation: "The Morphology, Phylogeny and Higher Classification of the Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea)"). During his studies, he participated in surveys of insects in the areas of the Bering Sea and Canadian arctic, and then with a National Institutes of Health fellowship, investigated the genetics and behavior of parasitic mites. 

In 1959 he joined the faculty at Stanford University, being promoted to professor of biology in 1966. By training, he is an entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera (butterflies). He was appointed to the Bing Professorship in 1977. He is well-known for popularizing the term coevolution in an influential 1964 paper co-authored with the botanist Peter H. Raven, where they proposed that an evolutionary 'arms race' between plants and insects explains the extreme diversification of plants and insects. This paper was highly influential on the then-nascent field of chemical ecology.

He is president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. A lecture that Ehrlich gave on the topic of overpopulation at the Commonwealth Club of California was broadcast by radio in April 1967. 

The success of the lecture caused further publicity and the suggestion from David Brower, the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, and Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books to write a book concerning the topic. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, collaborated on the book, The Population Bomb, but the publisher insisted that a single author be credited; only Paul's name appears as an author.

Although Ehrlich was not the first to warn about population issues — concern had been widespread during the 1950s and 1960s — his charismatic and media-savvy methods helped publicize the topic. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on as a guest more than twenty times, with one interview lasting an hour.