In other words, you’re pointing out that the people who have the most ability to choose how many children to have, choose on average to have fewer and therefore to reduce their genes’ relative frequencies in the next generation. They also have longer generation times, amplifying the effect. This is equivalent to “humans defect against evolution’s goals as soon as they have the opportunity to do so.”
Subpopulations which do this are expected to disappear relatively quickly in evolutionary time scales. Natural selection is error correcting. This can mean people get less intelligent again, or they start to really love getting children rather than enjoying sex.
Correct. In a few handfuls of generations the population shifts in those directions. This holds as long as evolutionary timescales are the important ones, but it it not at all clear to me that this is what matters today. If the subpopulations that do this move faster than even short evolutionary timescales, then the selection pressure is light enough that they can oppose it.
I have no problem with a world where people evolve towards wanting more children or caring less about sex itself. I think if it were easy for evolution to achieve that it would have happened a long time ago, which means I think in practice we’re selecting among subpopulations for cultural factors more than biological ones. That, in turn, means those subpopulations are susceptible to outside influence… which is mostly what we’ve been seeing for the whole timeline of fertility dropping as nations develop economically. Some communities are more resistant because they start with stronger beliefs on this front, but none are immune. And frankly I think the only way they could be immune is by enforcing kinds of rigidity that the larger world won’t want to permit, seeing as they’d be seen as abusive, especially to children.
As far as intelligence goes: a world where the average person gets dumber while a small elite becomes smarter and more powerful and wealthier (by starting companies, inventing technologies, controlling policy making, and adopting things like life extension and genetic screening as they become available and viable) is an unstable powder keg. Eventually there’s conflict. Who wins? That depends on how big the gap is. Today, the smart people would probably lose, overwhelmed by numbers and lack of coordination ability. In the future, when the boundaries between populations are stark and stable cultural divides? Well by then the smarter subpopulation has all sorts of options. Like a custom virus that targets genetic characteristics of the low-intelligence subpopulation and causes infertility. Or armies of robots to supplement their numbers. Or radically longer lives so that they at least increase in absolute numbers over time and can have more children per lifetime (just slower) if they want to (note: this would enable people who love having kids to have even more of them!). Or carefully targeted propaganda campaigns (memetic warfare) to break down the cultural wall that’s sustaining the differences.
In other words, you’re pointing out that the people who have the most ability to choose how many children to have, choose on average to have fewer and therefore to reduce their genes’ relative frequencies in the next generation. They also have longer generation times, amplifying the effect. This is equivalent to “humans defect against evolution’s goals as soon as they have the opportunity to do so.”
Subpopulations which do this are expected to disappear relatively quickly in evolutionary time scales. Natural selection is error correcting. This can mean people get less intelligent again, or they start to really love getting children rather than enjoying sex.
Correct. In a few handfuls of generations the population shifts in those directions. This holds as long as evolutionary timescales are the important ones, but it it not at all clear to me that this is what matters today. If the subpopulations that do this move faster than even short evolutionary timescales, then the selection pressure is light enough that they can oppose it.
I have no problem with a world where people evolve towards wanting more children or caring less about sex itself. I think if it were easy for evolution to achieve that it would have happened a long time ago, which means I think in practice we’re selecting among subpopulations for cultural factors more than biological ones. That, in turn, means those subpopulations are susceptible to outside influence… which is mostly what we’ve been seeing for the whole timeline of fertility dropping as nations develop economically. Some communities are more resistant because they start with stronger beliefs on this front, but none are immune. And frankly I think the only way they could be immune is by enforcing kinds of rigidity that the larger world won’t want to permit, seeing as they’d be seen as abusive, especially to children.
As far as intelligence goes: a world where the average person gets dumber while a small elite becomes smarter and more powerful and wealthier (by starting companies, inventing technologies, controlling policy making, and adopting things like life extension and genetic screening as they become available and viable) is an unstable powder keg. Eventually there’s conflict. Who wins? That depends on how big the gap is. Today, the smart people would probably lose, overwhelmed by numbers and lack of coordination ability. In the future, when the boundaries between populations are stark and stable cultural divides? Well by then the smarter subpopulation has all sorts of options. Like a custom virus that targets genetic characteristics of the low-intelligence subpopulation and causes infertility. Or armies of robots to supplement their numbers. Or radically longer lives so that they at least increase in absolute numbers over time and can have more children per lifetime (just slower) if they want to (note: this would enable people who love having kids to have even more of them!). Or carefully targeted propaganda campaigns (memetic warfare) to break down the cultural wall that’s sustaining the differences.