Sketches of general and comparative demography.

We are gathered here to discuss a branch of biology that can almost be described as a new field of science despite the fact that man has been studying it and writing about it for more than 3,000 years. Population study as a truly scientific discipline is new in the sense that there are large and obvious gaps in our fundamental knowledge, our concepts, and our techniques. And there are still some notable conflicts in our interpretations of the facts we do possess. My commission for this opening session is to set the stage for the presentations that are to occur here during the next nine days, and I undertake the task well aware of the fact that some of these sessions may be illuminated by brilliant fireworks and that I run the risk, while setting the stage, of also setting off premature explosions. I believe that the risk is worth while. The field of population studies is the branch of science that lies at the heart of the most crucial problems currently facing mankind. If we can discover no more than our actual areas of agreement and disagreement within the next fe~y days this will have been an invaluable Symposium. I suppose that many of our colleagues, in looking over the list of participants and subjects in this Symposium, will wonder just what it is that has brought together such a strangely assorted group of people, drawn, as we are, from the lists of anthropologists, mathematicians, zoologists, and even economists. I assume that it is part of my task to explain this phenomenon, so, before sketching modern concepts, I am going to try to trace the historical course of events that has made it meaningful at this time to assemble a group such as this. 1 My task will be easier if I suggest at the very outset that this Symposium is not as heterogeneous as our subtitle suggests, that we are not really here to discuss the two subjects of "animal ecology" and "demography" but are all here to talk about the same thing.