By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture - Population growth is hard to predict because it is often affected by unpredictable factors. For example, after about two thousand years of relative population stability in Europe, dramatic improvements in the field of medicine, including increasing life-spans and a rapid drop in infant morality, ushered in rapid increases in population beginning in the eighteenth century. This led to fears of mass starvation arising from a catastrophic “population explosion”, fears which were proven groundless by rapid improvements in agricultural techniques.