History without resource driven wars
Usually when a population overgrows it expands in search of new land and if the fields are virgin and empty they become farmland and cities, but if the fields are already occupied and the resources are already being used, then the overgrown population usually prefers engaging war in an effort take over the lands instead of dying of hunger or thirst.
This thirst for resources can create nations or even empires as seen in all history of mankind.
That's simply the natural principle of survival of the fittest, right?
Could past wars for resources/land have been prevented if humans were biologically wired to have auto-regulated population growth, as to simply not reproduce or adjust reproduction speed when there is clear sign that there won't be enough resources to feed everyone?
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Biology cannot predict lifetimes ahead accurately enough to make this work.
If I have a population of 500 adult males and 500 adult females in a field, and resources to support another 100 persons, what "instinct" tells the individual males and females whether they should refrain from intercourse or not? If there is room, more than 100 of the 500 potential pregnancies will transpire, and then there will be over-crowding.
Then you have war: 1200 people compete for resources that can only keep 1100 people alive. Unfortunately, if you split those resources evenly, you don't change the physics of the equations, all 1200 die. Instead, people go to war to take an unfair share of the resources in order to feed their children.
Plus you have the opposite problem: Because of your proposed "instinct", when resources are stretched thin, nobody reproduces, so there is no next generation.
Statistically speaking, such systems have no equilibrium, and will swing chaotically until they crash.
Your biological wiring cannot predict the entire future of a child for its lifetime, so it cannot be certain if the child will always have resources, or not. We (and all animals) birth children into an unknown future.
It is true that many animals exercise a modicum of control over their pregnancies, so they do not birth offspring in circumstances that are very reliably predictable: Like a frozen winter. It is also true many species (including us) may not become pregnant during times of famine, or may spontaneously abort fertilized eggs if insufficient nutrition is available.
But our biology cannot predict a drought is coming in five years, or that the rabbits we live on will be wiped out by a disease, or that a plague of locusts will eat all our food crops.
Then we have 20% of the resources necessary for all of us to continue living, and engage in violence to determine which 20% of us, if even that many, are going to live by taking far more than their fair share of what is left. And the ones that get to live will be whomever is best at taking more than their share by denying others their share, by fighting better or thinking better, and the mates and children they protect and provide for.
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