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Show Two Robeck sits forward at his desk. In front of him is a pad of narrow-ruled paper; his pencil lies at an angle across the pad, and a few lines of irregular handwriting cross the top of the page. His hand twists the pencil in an idle circle. There is a mug of lukewarm coffee on the desk; he lifts the cup to his mouth, and watches uneven concentric circles form on the surface of the coffee. He looks away from the paper which confronts him; with some satisfaction he notes a large pile of orderly manuscript pages at the back of his desk. It is the bulk of his opus terminus, "A Defense of Ending." The Defense has become much longer and more substantial than he had thought it would be; he had thought of it originally as a terse little note, to be published at the appropriate moment in the principal journal in his field; but somehow, during the year he had been at work on it, it had become a major treatise. Then, it would merely have attracted a bit of curious attention-, now, it will accomplish something more. He sits forward, picks up a random portion of the manuscript, and reads it: . . . indefinite or infinite individual survival would, of course, spell disaster for the species. This is as true for humans as it is for other groups. We observe that in animal groups, when a population begins to exceed the carrying capacity of the site . . . |