If we manage to avoid extinction for a few centuries, cognitive capacities among the most capable people are likely to increase substantially merely through natural selection. Because our storehouse of potent knowledge is now so large and because of other factors (e.g., increased specialization in the labor market), it is easier than ever for people with high cognitive capacity to earn above-average incomes and to avoid or obtain cures for illnesses of themselves and their children. (The level of health care a person can obtain by consulting doctors and being willing to follow their recommendations will always lag behind the level that can be obtained by doing that and doing one’s best to create and refine a mental model of the illness.)
Yes, there is a process that has been causing the more highly-educated and the more highly-paid to have fewer children than average, but natural selection will probably cancel out the effect of that process over the next few centuries: I can’t think of any human traits subject to more selection pressure than the traits that make it more likely the individual will choose to have children even when effective contraception is cheap and available. Also, declining birth rates are causing big problems for the economies and military readiness of many countries, and governments might in the future respond to those problems by banning contraception.
If we manage to avoid extinction for a few centuries, cognitive capacities among the most capable people are likely to increase substantially merely through natural selection. Because our storehouse of potent knowledge is now so large and because of other factors (e.g., increased specialization in the labor market), it is easier than ever for people with high cognitive capacity to earn above-average incomes and to avoid or obtain cures for illnesses of themselves and their children. (The level of health care a person can obtain by consulting doctors and being willing to follow their recommendations will always lag behind the level that can be obtained by doing that and doing one’s best to create and refine a mental model of the illness.)
Yes, there is a process that has been causing the more highly-educated and the more highly-paid to have fewer children than average, but natural selection will probably cancel out the effect of that process over the next few centuries: I can’t think of any human traits subject to more selection pressure than the traits that make it more likely the individual will choose to have children even when effective contraception is cheap and available. Also, declining birth rates are causing big problems for the economies and military readiness of many countries, and governments might in the future respond to those problems by banning contraception.