According to the New York Times:

[The] projected peak in China, 1.4 billion people, will be lower than previously estimated and . . . it will occur sooner. With the fertility rate declining to fewer than 1.6 births per woman in this decade from 2.2 in 1990, China's overall population growth rate has slowed to 0.5 percent annually.

In contrast, India's 1.4 percent growth rate is being driven by a fertility rate of 2.7 births per woman.

The bureau's International Data Base projects that China's labor force will peak at 831 million - 24 million more workers than today - in 2016. That is because the number of newcomers to the labor force in their early 20s is expected to start declining in 2011 after reaching 124 million.

In India, the number of new entrants to the labor force is expected to reach 116 million in 2024 before decreasing.

According to the same report, the world's population is growing, but its rate of growth is about to enter a steep decline. It may be that we will witness the world's peak human population in our lifetimes.

via New York Times and US Census Bureau

Top image via Premshree Pillai.

Professor Steve Jones of the University of London, said in a recent lecture that a reduction in the age of human fathers has decreased the percentage of offspring with genetic mutations:

“For a 29-year old father [the mean age of reproduction in the West] there are around 300 divisions between the sperm that made him and the one he passes on – each one with an opportunity to make mistakes.

“For a 50-year-old father, the figure is well over a thousand. A drop in the number of older fathers will thus have a major effect on the rate of mutation.”

Improved sanitation, nutrition, and medical care also have an impact, ensuring that 98 percent of children in the Western world survive to age 21 and enabling a greater percentage of members of one generation to pass their genes to the next generation than in previous ages. Humanity’s increasing population and geographic mobility is also to blame:

“Small populations which are isolated can evolve at random as genes are accidentally lost. World-wide, all populations are becoming connected and the opportunity for random change is dwindling. History is made in bed, but nowadays the beds are getting closer together. We are mixing into a global mass, and the future is brown.”

Leading geneticist Steve Jones says human evolution is over [The Times via Slashdot]

Cylons have thinned an interplanetary civilization down to 50 thousand members, and as season four begins the humans have been reduced to roughly 41 thousand. We even know roughly how many days it's been since the first Cylon attack. In our chart, we've correlated each population change with an event, including when each new Cylon is revealed.

All this information comes directly from the show, where most episodes begin with a population number. Numbers are also frequently bandied about in trials and policy debates. Many of these numbers were faithfully recorded, in great detail, by the amazing folks behind the Battlestar wiki. Is this emphasis on hard numbers a reflection of the U.S. obsession with numbers of dead in Iraq, or is it just part of a general trend toward realism in science fiction?

Image by Stephanie Fox. Special cylon reporting by Nivair Gabriel.