Superstimuli—New technology creates activities that are so enjoyable that most people just don’t bother having children, or don’t want to have many children.
Default birth control—all individuals (of at least one gender) are implanted with effective birth control at birth/onset of puberty. It’s easy to turn off, and anyone who wants to turn it off can, but you can’t conceive without taking making an affirmative decision to do so. This could lower birthrates enough to hit replacement.
Nudges—like default birth control, but through other mechanisms. Rules and policies are put in place that gently discourage fertility (or gently discourage high fertility) without coercively preventing it. Tax incentives and the structure of social support fall under this category. This impairs high-fertility memes (as they are more expensive to execute) and thus lowers fertility.
Superstimuli: “most people” is an important qualifier. The Permian mass extinction eliminated most life on earth, yet it didn’t take long for those life forms that did survive to multiply back to malthusian limits. So in a superstimulus scenario, (like virtual reality/wireheading, etc.) the people who opt out and keep reproducing will continue increasing exponentially, until they hit malthusian bounds.
Default birth control: No-brainer. The people who turn it off have high genetic fitness, those who keep the default birth control have zero fitness. The only difference is the selection is for pronatalist sentiment instead of forgetfulness/irresponsibility.
Nudges: modern society already is punitive toward having many children, as they are essentially consumption goods and not productive capital from their parents’ perspective. Even though children are already costly non-producers, there are sub groups that highly value producing many kids. This cannot change through “gentle” approaches. Natural selection is a powerful force.
I agree with your answers to the other two, but superstimuli still shows some promise. Yes, evolution can always find a way around any particular fixed set of superstimuli, but what if people (say a few rich altruists) keep inventing new superstimuli as a way to limit the human population, and this process works faster than evolution can respond? Is that a plausible scenario?
I believe there are already subgroups that have already developed sufficient resilience to superstimuli that non-coercive measures are unlikely to succeed completely (and if they don’t succeed completely, they fail completely).
Anabaptists are a good example.Those who are seduced by modernity leave, those most orthodox, obedient, and conformist remain to reproduce. For hundreds of years, they’ve essentially been selecting for superstimulus-resistance qualities at the genetic/biological and memetic/cultural levels. I expect the future gains in superstimulus power are probably less than the difference between MTV/Megamalls/internet-porn/McDonald’s/Coca-Cola/Hip-hop and the simple prayer groups and barn-raisings they’re used to.
Of course, those rich altruists might very well use fraud or force to absorb resistant groups. By my values, they would be justified in doings so.
Those who are seduced by modernity leave, those most orthodox, obedient, and conformist remain to reproduce.
It’s quite possible that defection will outstrip reproduction, particularly as the group becomes large or geographically dispersed and its ability to exert powerful interpersonal influence on its members declines accordingly.
Your other responses assume that the urge to have lots of kids will find a way to dominate all or most other practical desires. This seems unlikely, for reasons I address elsewhere in this thread.
I agree that if fertility choice is determined substantially by genetics in the long run, or if it’s memetic and memes are stably heritable against outside pressure and over many, many generations, you will probably see runaway growth. I just don’t think either of those conditions is particularly realistic given existing evidence; I certainly don’t think existing evidence actively supports either assumption to the extent that I expect people to breed up to a Malthusian limit.
I’d be very curious as to what groups you think tend to show high fertility memes, and why you expect that behaviour to be stable in the very long run, and what evidence you have supporting that belief, if you do think it’s stably memetically heritable.
I’d be very curious as to what groups you think tend to show high fertility memes, and why you expect that behaviour to be stable in the very long run, and what evidence you have supporting that belief, if you do think it’s stably memetically heritable.
Anabaptists, as I pointed out in my comment, show high-fertility memes. I suspect they have already selected for genetic high-fertility predispositions as well. (Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd wrote extensively about anabaptist genetic/cultural evolution in “Not by Genes Alone”, which I highly recommend.) Anabaptist culture has thus far been highly resistant to the best modern superstimuli—in spite of the fact that their children are exposed to modern society through rumspringa and similar traditions. Therefore, it remains to be shown, by you, why future superstimuli will work (for every reproducing group) when all so far have failed. The vast majority of Amish children, for example, choose to remain with their communities instead of leaving.
The Amish population has been increasing exponentially for decades. They have shown an impressive ability to adapt to new economic models and yet maintain their unique identity, and resistance to modern culture.
Another group (which I suspect has gone even further than the Anabaptists in the strength of its memetic/genetic firewall) is the Mormon Fundamentalists. I’ve been intending to write a (short) post about them for a while, maybe I will get around to it soon.
These are answers to a different question: how could a singleton limit population? More precisely, they’re answers to the question of what a singleton could do now, since in the long run, people would evolve around any particular mechanism that doesn’t wipe them out, so the singleton would have to adapt.
This assumes high genetic heredity of fertility decisions. Binary fertility does seem largely like it has a strong genetic component, but once it’s there, the decision to have two children versus six children seems to be influence overwhelmingly by non-genetic factors. Once industrialization took root, fertility fell quite heavily. Since there would be rather strong selective pressures favoring “have more kids when resources are available,” this suggests that such an impulse, if genetic, is very easily outweighed by other factors.
If it’s memetic rather than genetic, the argument requires extraordinary stability, for which I see little evidence.
I’d add:
Superstimuli—New technology creates activities that are so enjoyable that most people just don’t bother having children, or don’t want to have many children.
Default birth control—all individuals (of at least one gender) are implanted with effective birth control at birth/onset of puberty. It’s easy to turn off, and anyone who wants to turn it off can, but you can’t conceive without taking making an affirmative decision to do so. This could lower birthrates enough to hit replacement.
Nudges—like default birth control, but through other mechanisms. Rules and policies are put in place that gently discourage fertility (or gently discourage high fertility) without coercively preventing it. Tax incentives and the structure of social support fall under this category. This impairs high-fertility memes (as they are more expensive to execute) and thus lowers fertility.
These arguments all fail for the same reason.
Superstimuli: “most people” is an important qualifier. The Permian mass extinction eliminated most life on earth, yet it didn’t take long for those life forms that did survive to multiply back to malthusian limits. So in a superstimulus scenario, (like virtual reality/wireheading, etc.) the people who opt out and keep reproducing will continue increasing exponentially, until they hit malthusian bounds.
Default birth control: No-brainer. The people who turn it off have high genetic fitness, those who keep the default birth control have zero fitness. The only difference is the selection is for pronatalist sentiment instead of forgetfulness/irresponsibility.
Nudges: modern society already is punitive toward having many children, as they are essentially consumption goods and not productive capital from their parents’ perspective. Even though children are already costly non-producers, there are sub groups that highly value producing many kids. This cannot change through “gentle” approaches. Natural selection is a powerful force.
I agree with your answers to the other two, but superstimuli still shows some promise. Yes, evolution can always find a way around any particular fixed set of superstimuli, but what if people (say a few rich altruists) keep inventing new superstimuli as a way to limit the human population, and this process works faster than evolution can respond? Is that a plausible scenario?
I believe there are already subgroups that have already developed sufficient resilience to superstimuli that non-coercive measures are unlikely to succeed completely (and if they don’t succeed completely, they fail completely).
Anabaptists are a good example.Those who are seduced by modernity leave, those most orthodox, obedient, and conformist remain to reproduce. For hundreds of years, they’ve essentially been selecting for superstimulus-resistance qualities at the genetic/biological and memetic/cultural levels. I expect the future gains in superstimulus power are probably less than the difference between MTV/Megamalls/internet-porn/McDonald’s/Coca-Cola/Hip-hop and the simple prayer groups and barn-raisings they’re used to.
Of course, those rich altruists might very well use fraud or force to absorb resistant groups. By my values, they would be justified in doings so.
It’s quite possible that defection will outstrip reproduction, particularly as the group becomes large or geographically dispersed and its ability to exert powerful interpersonal influence on its members declines accordingly.
Your other responses assume that the urge to have lots of kids will find a way to dominate all or most other practical desires. This seems unlikely, for reasons I address elsewhere in this thread.
I agree that if fertility choice is determined substantially by genetics in the long run, or if it’s memetic and memes are stably heritable against outside pressure and over many, many generations, you will probably see runaway growth. I just don’t think either of those conditions is particularly realistic given existing evidence; I certainly don’t think existing evidence actively supports either assumption to the extent that I expect people to breed up to a Malthusian limit.
I’d be very curious as to what groups you think tend to show high fertility memes, and why you expect that behaviour to be stable in the very long run, and what evidence you have supporting that belief, if you do think it’s stably memetically heritable.
Anabaptists, as I pointed out in my comment, show high-fertility memes. I suspect they have already selected for genetic high-fertility predispositions as well. (Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd wrote extensively about anabaptist genetic/cultural evolution in “Not by Genes Alone”, which I highly recommend.) Anabaptist culture has thus far been highly resistant to the best modern superstimuli—in spite of the fact that their children are exposed to modern society through rumspringa and similar traditions. Therefore, it remains to be shown, by you, why future superstimuli will work (for every reproducing group) when all so far have failed. The vast majority of Amish children, for example, choose to remain with their communities instead of leaving.
The Amish population has been increasing exponentially for decades. They have shown an impressive ability to adapt to new economic models and yet maintain their unique identity, and resistance to modern culture.
Another group (which I suspect has gone even further than the Anabaptists in the strength of its memetic/genetic firewall) is the Mormon Fundamentalists. I’ve been intending to write a (short) post about them for a while, maybe I will get around to it soon.
These are answers to a different question: how could a singleton limit population? More precisely, they’re answers to the question of what a singleton could do now, since in the long run, people would evolve around any particular mechanism that doesn’t wipe them out, so the singleton would have to adapt.
This assumes high genetic heredity of fertility decisions. Binary fertility does seem largely like it has a strong genetic component, but once it’s there, the decision to have two children versus six children seems to be influence overwhelmingly by non-genetic factors. Once industrialization took root, fertility fell quite heavily. Since there would be rather strong selective pressures favoring “have more kids when resources are available,” this suggests that such an impulse, if genetic, is very easily outweighed by other factors.
If it’s memetic rather than genetic, the argument requires extraordinary stability, for which I see little evidence.