PhilGoetz:

It isn't? What would we see that would be different? Do you expect to be able to pick out boom-bust cycles that occur in 3 or 4 generations, in a fossil record going back 2 million years?

WrongBot:

If Malthus were wrong, we could expect to see any number of things that don't involve growth-overpopulation-crash cycles. For example, we might see slow and steady population growth with very irregular population crashes which correspond with major natural disasters (which are responsible for sudden, large, discontinuous declines in the available food supply). In this particular scenario, we would expect to see very few human fossils that show signs of malnutrition. Whereas if Malthus had been right, we would expect to see much more fluctuation in population levels, and therefore a proportionally high number of human fossils with signs of malnutrition, because deadly famines would be proportionally more common.

Since I guess I wasn't sufficiently clear: each bust generation should contain a high percentage of individuals who die of starvation or are significantly malnourished during their childhood. For simplicity's sake I'll make an incredibly generous assumption that that percentage is 10%, though I'd expect it to be much higher in reality. If one in every four generations is a bust, then that's 2.5% of all humans in the past 2 million years whose skeletons would show significant signs of malnourishment. But the fossil record contains many fewer malnourished humans than that already conservative figure!

PhilGoetz:

Yes; which is why I mention the Lotka-Volterra equation, and its general acceptance by biologists, as evidence that you are wrong.

Please see the edit to my earlier post. The Lotka-Volterra equation assumes infinite food.

Please also see this link, which JoshuaZ posted. Key quote:

Are such cyclic systems common in Nature? No. How well does the model predict population changes in the real world? Not well, and some of its shortcomings are apparent.

PhilGoetz:

No, seriously. You just said that hunter-gatherers had no viruses or bacteria. Then why did they have immune systems?

Yeah, my bad. I stand by what I said about epidemics, but that bit is obviously wrong.