Your article took an evolutionary theory and applied it to modern social and political ideas. My response was therefore also drawn from the modern world, and included modern examples. I am quite aware that this is a tiny moment on the timescale of evolution and that our bodies have not adapted to contraception. I thought, however, that it was permissible, given how you were talking about the present day.
Our technology effects all aspects of our lives and massively effects our chances of surviving or not surviving. This is especially the case today. For most of us now our entire day to day environment is an interconnected web of technologies, laid down by generations of humans. If we removed all references to “technologies our bodies have not yet adapted to” from this discussion then we would not actually be talking about modern day humans at all. We would be talking about a hypothetical group of hunter-gatherers or early farmers who would be subject to a whole different set of problems to the ones that we have today, so all discussions about modern social and political ideologies, and all conclusions about “future evolution” would be meaningless.
“If one fails to invest in children one can die with a higher net worth but ones evolutionary worth is zero.” This would of course be correct, if one died with zero children. However my example was of a woman who delayed childbirth, then had a small family (1-2 children). Not a woman who fore-goes reproducing all together. This would indeed be genetic suicide as you point out.
I stand by my point about older mothers and families with two incomes being better able to provide their children with an education, wealth etc.
150 years ago, in Britain only 50% of children born survived to adulthood. The figure probably gets lower the further back in time you go. Today that figure is 99%. Of all the children born in Britain today 99% survive to be adults.
The reasons for this are again technological: Modern medicine and better sanitation. Also better care in childbirth.
Yet if twice as many of us are surviving, only half as many of us need be born.
Our distant and not so distant ancestors may well have needed to have six or more children just to ensure that three of them survived. The more children need to be born, the more time women need to invest in raising them, and that may well have contributed to the popularity of the housewife / male provider model that you describe.
The doubling in survival rates changes the game a lot. Today, in developed countries, a small family of 2 children is perfectly adequate to full fill the biological imperative and get the parents genes into the next generation. 2 kids today is the same as 4 kids in 1850. 3 is the same as 6, and so on.
This has huge knock on effects for women, for families and for society in general. Because whilst raising say six or more kids to adulthood might well be a full time job for life, raising 2 kids is not. It is now easier for a mother to have a job, besides being a mother. It is now genetically viable for a woman to delay childbirth in order to pursue other interests. Just so long as she can still produce one or two children, that’s enough.
“Optimum fertility” is no longer required, and may actually have become a liability to the species as a whole. (See next section).
The high survival rate above only applies to fully developed countries. In other parts of the world the survival rate is still much lower, and that may partly explain why people in these countries have bigger families. Yet this is now changing.
Planet Earth: Human Population 7 billion and rising. Predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050.
Yet the world can only provide a fraction of these with the lifestyle that you and I enjoy. It is often said that if everyone in the world lived like the average person in the U.K., then we would need the equivalent of 3 Earths to sustain them. If everyone in the world lived like the average American then we would need four Earths.
As our numbers spiral up through the billions, so the numbers of many other species plummet down into the low thousands, hundreds and dozens. The Endangered Species list is so long that many scientists believe that we are in the midst of a Mass Extinction Event caused by the success of one species – us.
The greatest threat to our civilisation is NOT that we will die out through lack of babies. Rather it is that we will reproduce ourselves too well, use up all our resources, and populate our planet beyond it’s carrying capacity. At which point both our numbers and our civilisation will crash, causing a lot of human suffering.
Therefore, whilst having numbers of children that are below replacement level would indeed equal extinction if it was sustained over the LONG term, in the SHORT term it may be the only thing that saves us – as crazy as that may sound in standard evolutionary terms.
You cite America, Europe, and Japan etc as having “upside down population rates” yet when you consider it against this backdrop of huge population and finite resources, it makes sense that the groups that have the highest standards of living and the highest survival rates, should also have the lowest birth rates. If we all reproduced ourselves with the same gusto as our ancestors, then we would likely have exhausted our resources already.
Any technology or Social trend that results in people choosing to have fewer children is a Good thing.
Later marriage is a good thing.
Women having children later in life is good thing, because they will likely have fewer of them.
Women with education and jobs, careers etc. is a good thing because it allows them to live full lives and be valued, whilst still having relatively few children.
Homosexuality is a good thing because it gives sexual pleasure, without naturally producing kids.
Contraception is a very, very, very good thing.
And yes some people choosing not to have children at all is good, although, as you point out, it is extinction for the individual.
Does any of this look familiar to you? Fairly modern, liberal, social agenda, isn’t it?
If we could get our population down to a lower level and stabilise it there, then we would be able to give everyone in the world a fairer share of resources. We might even be able to give some land back to nature and save all those Endangered Species.
Globally the population is still raising, however the rate at which it is going up is now slowing. The reasons for this is believed to be better education for girls and the inclusion of women in the work force, as well as access to contraception.
Girls are getting married older than their mothers and grandmothers, and are having fewer children when they do marry.
Yes some women (and men) do indeed have lots more children than the typical western family, but, overall the observable global effect of feminism has been to slow the birth rate – and that’s good.
If every woman in the world followed your advice and returned to being a full time housewife, put up with male dominance, and wanted nothing more out of life than marriage and children, then it would doubtless trigger a renewed surge in population that would prove as suicidal for our species as not having any children would be for the individual. Like I said that increased survival rate is a game changer.
Quite where all this talk of population leaves your r/K theory, I am not sure. I am merely pointing out that lowering birth rates and small numbers of children per woman are not the evolutionary and social disaster that you seem to think.
The current situation of rich, fully developed countries having low birth rates, and poor, under developed countries having high birth rates is a temporary one. Over the next 50 years all countries will complete the transition to small families being the norm. That should create a more even genetic playing field.
First off, congrats on not running away. That’s rare in itself.
I see you’ve laudably retreated from your faulty interpretation of r/K, instead focusing on environmental alarmism to justify your values. So I will demolish that next.
Sure we can talk about r/K and modern humans, we just have to be careful about the additional complexities involved. Your argument failed to account and I corrected it.
I didn’t advocate removing all reference to technologies. Instead, I accounted for them correctly. Your following paragraph is straw man and moot.
Having 1-2 children is also genetic suicide. It is sub-replacement fertility. I dramatized the point in an example to help you grasp it.
“Of all the children born in Britain today 99% survive to be adults. ”
You think this is a good thing, but it’s not. Low child mortality results in spiraling mutational load, causing civilizational collapse. This underlines the unsustainability of the 1-2 children problem. Your working mothers are overinvesting in a suboptimal genetic legacy, accelerating the problem.
“Yet if twice as many of us are surviving, only half as many of us need be born.”
Replacement is 2.1 with modern tech, IIRC. 1-2 children = 1.5. 2.1>1.5.
Your next 2 paragraphs are moot.
Of course male capitalism and science have liberated women from drudgery, as they have men to a lesser degree. Yet leisure time is still vastly below the hunter-gatherer norm.
I have never used the phrase “optimimum fertility”, so I don’t know why you’re quoting it.
Your environmentalist logic is just as badly flawed as your feminist logic. The 3rd world is poor because of its low IQ. The limiting economic resource is verbal IQ; see Singapore, Japan and La Griffe du Lion’s Smart Fraction Theory II. Environmental conditions in the 1st world are vastly superior to 2nd and 3rd world conditions. Environmental alarmism depends on falsely combining cherry-picked data from the three worlds.
There is no high-IQ overpopulation. World IQ is dropping. Watch Gapminder. Malthusian population blooms in low IQ contries are due to technological diffusion and foreign aid. Logically, the solution to your environmental alarmism is genocide.
I have no problem with managing population level to national carrying capacity; see China and Japan. In the case of Japan, women’s lib and pro-child policy reversal were used to reduce national population to improve food security. Your position is incoherent because you imply that white feminism in America can reduce African overpopulation. White America has no overpopulation problem; see the deserted praries.
There is no high-IQ resource exhaustion outside (perhaps) the first transition of the industrial revolution. IQ is the only scarce resource. There are universes in a grain of sand.
“Any technology or Social trend that results in people choosing to have fewer children is a Good thing.”
That is retarded. Murder of women who bear three children is not a good thing.
Male homosexuality does not reduce birth rate. Male castration does not reduce birthrate.
” we would be able to give everyone in the world a fairer share of resources. ”
The evolution of intelligence depends on “the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life” – Charles Darwin. Your position is not only stupid, it is literally anti-intelligence. When Bantu eat San, that is natural selection.
My advice is not for women, it is for men. Women only have liberty because men permit it. When the insanity of the end of imperial golden age concludes, women will go back to being the wards of husbands and fathers that they always were. I expect nothing from women. They are programmed to rebel to the extent possible, in order to determine whether an r or K strategy is appropriate. Reproduction is too important for Mother Nature to permit women self-control or reason. This is a statement about bell curves; don’t bother with a binary thinker’s retort.
K strategists are perfectly capable of managing family size to the environment. See wolves. It is the r strategists who are designed to explode and then contract horrifically. There is no K unsustainable population bloom. Never has been, never will be. This is the reason a welfare state lowers national IQ.
Low IQ countries will only reduce birthrate when forced to by horrific Malthusian factors. Thus the correct solution is not spreading feminism to encourage irresponsible r-selected breeding, but patriarchy and the end of foreign aid. Or, for a total solution, replacement of low-IQ races with high IQ ones, or at least high-IQ rule, i.e. colonialism. That the West has temporarily declined the colonial mantle, or rather replaced it with a liberal version, does not mean China will do the same, as China’s involvement in e.g. Africa demonstrates.
The Chinese may be subject to the same holier than thou spiral that infects the West, as evidenced by their Cultural Revolution, but they do not have the same susceptibility to pathological out-group altruism that out-breeding Western Europeans possess. If you wish mercy and benevolence to pass from the Earth, you are going about it the right way.
Nature’s message is clear: Develop a worldview and policy compatible with genetic laws, or be replaced by some other race that will.
I like white women, and so I do not intend to permit them to destroy themselves, as they would do if given their pretty little heads. Pale is beautiful. Their tender feminine sympathies must be restricted to the orbit of family and neighbors, as Nature intended. Meanwhile, the men will go forth and wage cruel war, for man is wolf to man.
Oh for the woman who says, “With it or on it,” rather than, “That’s racist.” A woman was once something to be respected and feared. Now she is something to be gamed and discarded. Viva la revolucion.