The labour involved in raising kids has a higher opportunity cost for more competent people. Also due to regression to the mean, very intelligent people are unlikely to have children smarter than them so this may reduce rewards.
Intelligent, rational people not having kids is basically a tragedy of the commons. Everyone is better of (including the unintelligent and irrational) if this group has more children, but for each individual it is a pretty burdensome undertaking (even when taking into account selfish reasons to have kids) And our whole modern status system is unfortunately built in such a way that it exacerbates the problem rather than alleviating it.
I would guess that fertility would correlate most strongly with precisely average intelligence and precisely average levels of rationality. There’s a reason the normal distribution tapers at both ends.
This may not be true depending how much we’ve changed our selection pressures with this “civilisation” palaver. That said, I too would like a citation please.
From what I know people of below average intelligence have higher fertility than people of average intelligence. I think modern civilization has changed the selective pressures massively from the ones that produced the current averages.
The pattern though it holds overall obviously isn’t uniform for all groups, Black males for example do seem to in the US to be enjoying slight positive selection for a higher mean IQ (I need to crunch the numbers to see if this is so) or at least have peak fertility at about the US mean IQ, which is good. What concerns me however is the gender difference in these pressures (graph from the paper I link to). I fear that we will be selecting for gender dimorphism in abilities until we hit better reproductive technology. Prolonged education in a meritocracy is bound to eat up more female than male fertility due to the lost peak years of reproduction. Also we have the problem of men caring less about the socio economic status of the partners they choose to reproduce with than women. Extra status buys men more reproductive options later in life than it does for women in the same age bracket. This sucks quite a bit.
The artificial uterus can’t come quick enough. Thought I think life extension and rejuvenation tech could also help if we could make pregnancies in the 50s and 60s healthy and convenient.
Mutation-selection equilibrium. We get dozens of new mutations each generation, and it takes generations of selective pressure to expunge new deleterious ones.
If this is true for all memplexes, values and natural personality variations and the singularity doesn’t come in the next 30 years humans are pretty screwed.
Nevertheless, fertility is inversely correlated with most measures of intelligence and rationality.
Citation?
You can look at the wikipedia article Fertility and intelligence and its references for starters.
The labour involved in raising kids has a higher opportunity cost for more competent people. Also due to regression to the mean, very intelligent people are unlikely to have children smarter than them so this may reduce rewards.
Intelligent, rational people not having kids is basically a tragedy of the commons. Everyone is better of (including the unintelligent and irrational) if this group has more children, but for each individual it is a pretty burdensome undertaking (even when taking into account selfish reasons to have kids) And our whole modern status system is unfortunately built in such a way that it exacerbates the problem rather than alleviating it.
I would guess that fertility would correlate most strongly with precisely average intelligence and precisely average levels of rationality. There’s a reason the normal distribution tapers at both ends.
This may not be true depending how much we’ve changed our selection pressures with this “civilisation” palaver. That said, I too would like a citation please.
From what I know people of below average intelligence have higher fertility than people of average intelligence. I think modern civilization has changed the selective pressures massively from the ones that produced the current averages.
One of the sources off the top of my head
The pattern though it holds overall obviously isn’t uniform for all groups, Black males for example do seem to in the US to be enjoying slight positive selection for a higher mean IQ (I need to crunch the numbers to see if this is so) or at least have peak fertility at about the US mean IQ, which is good. What concerns me however is the gender difference in these pressures (graph from the paper I link to). I fear that we will be selecting for gender dimorphism in abilities until we hit better reproductive technology. Prolonged education in a meritocracy is bound to eat up more female than male fertility due to the lost peak years of reproduction. Also we have the problem of men caring less about the socio economic status of the partners they choose to reproduce with than women. Extra status buys men more reproductive options later in life than it does for women in the same age bracket. This sucks quite a bit.
The artificial uterus can’t come quick enough. Thought I think life extension and rejuvenation tech could also help if we could make pregnancies in the 50s and 60s healthy and convenient.
Mutation-selection equilibrium. We get dozens of new mutations each generation, and it takes generations of selective pressure to expunge new deleterious ones.
I wonder how much fertility varies with beauty?
If this is true for all memplexes, values and natural personality variations and the singularity doesn’t come in the next 30 years humans are pretty screwed.