The “birth registration area” is all of the states that sent in birth data for the survey–CA, CT, IN, KS, KY, ME, MD, MA, MN, MI, NH, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, UT, VT, VA, WA, and WI. Missouri, that “den of outlawry,” shall not feature.
“In the birth registration area of the United States in 1919 there were 1,373,438 live births, which represent a birth rate of 22.3 per 1,000 of population… Of the 1919 births, 705,593 were males and 667,845 were females, or a proportion of 1,057 males to 1,000 females.
“There is a marked excess of births over death in every state in the birth registration area. In New Hampshire the figures are lowest… A marked excess is also shown for nearly every city, and wherever the deaths outnumber the births it is usually among the colored population. The mortality rate of infants under 1 year of age per 1,000 births … is 87, ranging in the states from 63 in Oregon and Washington to 113 in South Carolina.
“The birth rates for the registration states ranged from 16.8 in California to 29.3 in Utah, and the death rates ranged from 10.5 in Minnesota to 15.3 in Maryland. The greatest excess of births over deaths–18.3 per 1,000 population–appears for Utah, and the lowest–3.1 per 1,000–for California.”
In 1919, most of the cities with the lowest birthrates were, predictably, in California, though a smattering of similarly-low cities existed elsewhere; Brookline, MA, though, had by far the lowest rate, at 8.1.
What’s up with Brookline? Was it full of priests? Shakers?
The highest birthrates were in Columbia, SC and Johnstown, PA, but several cities in Connecticut, RI, and MA had similarly high rates.
The highest death rates were Lexington, KY 25.8 and Columbia, SC 32.5. At 9.6, Flint, Michigan and Quincy MA had the lowest death rates, though several other cities were quite close, like Racine, Wis, 9.7.
This data is crying out for a map, so I made two, one showing just the per-state averages and one including the major cities + highest and lowest smaller cities:
Feel free to take and use as you please
The scan is not easy to read in places, so forgive me if I’ve confused a 4 and a 1 somewhere, or a 3 and a 2.
The town of Brookline, MA, kind of threw off the scale by having far fewer births (8.1) than everywhere else. (MA also had some very high birth rates.) Columbia, SC, has both the highest birth rate and highest death rate (I haven’t made a map of death rates, yet.) I think it is interesting how some cities are right in line with their state’s average, and some are very different.
We can pick out several trends: the West probably had more men than women, resulting in lower birthrates. Mormon Utah was serious about making babies. The Midwest and North East had overall moderate birth rates, though there are a few towns in there that look heavily Irish. Note:
“…it appears that far more births occur annually to white foreign-born married women aged from 15 to 44, proportionally to their number, than to native white married women of corresponding ages. In Connecticut in 1910 over 46 percent of white married women aged 15 to 44 were of foreign birth, but 57% of the children … were reported as children of mothers of foreign birth.”
The South, like Utah, has very high fertility rates–possibly due to high fertility rates among the black population, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Southern whites were having more babies, too.
That’s all for now, though I hope to make some more graphs/maps based on this book’s data soon.
A species may live in relative equilibrium with its environment, hardly changing from generation to generation, for millions of years. Turtles, for example, have barely changed since the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
But if the environment changes–critically, if selective pressures change–then the species will change, too. This was most famously demonstrated with English moths, which changed color from white-and-black speckled to pure black when pollution darkened the trunks of the trees they lived on. To survive, these moths need to avoid being eaten by birds, so any moth that stands out against the tree trunks tends to get turned into an avian snack. Against light-colored trees, dark-colored moths stood out and were eaten. Against dark-colored trees, light-colored moths stand out.
This change did not require millions of years. Dark-colored moths were virtually unknown in 1810, but by 1895, 98% of the moths were black.
The time it takes for evolution to occur depends simply on A. The frequency of a trait in the population and B. How strongly you are selecting for (or against) it.
Let’s break this down a little bit. Within a species, there exists a great deal of genetic variation. Some of this variation happens because two parents with different genes get together and produce offspring with a combination of their genes. Some of this variation happens because of random errors–mutations–that occur during copying of the genetic code. Much of the “natural variation” we see today started as some kind of error that proved to be useful, or at least not harmful. For example, all humans originally had dark skin similar to modern Africans’, but random mutations in some of the folks who no longer lived in Africa gave them lighter skin, eventually producing “white” and “Asian” skin tones.
(These random mutations also happen in Africa, but there they are harmful and so don’t stick around.)
Natural selection can only act on the traits that are actually present in the population. If we tried to select for “ability to shoot x-ray lasers from our eyes,” we wouldn’t get very far, because no one actually has that mutation. By contrast, albinism is rare, but it definitely exists, and if for some reason we wanted to select for it, we certainly could. (The incidence of albinism among the Hopi Indians is high enough–1 in 200 Hopis vs. 1 in 20,000 Europeans generally and 1 in 30,000 Southern Europeans–for scientists to discuss whether the Hopi have been actively selecting for albinism. This still isn’t a lot of albinism, but since the American Southwest is not a good environment for pale skin, it’s something.)
You will have a much easier time selecting for traits that crop up more frequently in your population than traits that crop up rarely (or never).
Second, we have intensity–and variety–of selective pressure. What % of your population is getting removed by natural selection each year? If 50% of your moths get eaten by birds because they’re too light, you’ll get a much faster change than if only 10% of moths get eaten.
Selection doesn’t have to involve getting eaten, though. Perhaps some of your moths are moth Lotharios, seducing all of the moth ladies with their fuzzy antennae. Over time, the moth population will develop fuzzier antennae as these handsome males out-reproduce their less hirsute cousins.
No matter what kind of selection you have, nor what part of your curve it’s working on, all that ultimately matters is how many offspring each individual has. If white moths have more children than black moths, then you end up with more white moths. If black moths have more babies, then you get more black moths.
So what happens when you completely remove selective pressures from a population?
Back in 1968, ethologist John B. Calhoun set up an experiment popularly called “Mouse Utopia.” Four pairs of mice were given a large, comfortable habitat with no predators and plenty of food and water.
Predictably, the mouse population increased rapidly–once the mice were established in their new homes, their population doubled every 55 days. But after 211 days of explosive growth, reproduction began–mysteriously–to slow. For the next 245 days, the mouse population doubled only once every 145 days.
The birth rate continued to decline. As births and death reached parity, the mouse population stopped growing. Finally the last breeding female died, and the whole colony went extinct.
As I’ve mentioned before Israel is (AFAIK) the only developed country in the world with a TFR above replacement.
It has long been known that overcrowding leads to population stress and reduced reproduction, but overcrowding can only explain why the mouse population began to shrink–not why it died out. Surely by the time there were only a few breeding pairs left, things had become comfortable enough for the remaining mice to resume reproducing. Why did the population not stabilize at some comfortable level?
Professor Bruce Charlton suggests an alternative explanation: the removal of selective pressures on the mouse population resulted in increasing mutational load, until the entire population became too mutated to reproduce.
As I mentioned before, every time a cell replicates, a certain number of errors–mutations–occur. Occasionally these mutations are useful, but the vast majority of them are not. About 30-50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage (the percent of miscarriages people recognize is lower because embryos often miscarry before causing any overt signs of pregnancy,) and the majority of those miscarriages are caused by genetic errors.
Unfortunately, randomly changing part of your genetic code is more likely to give you no skin than skintanium armor.
But only the worst genetic problems that never see the light of day. Plenty of mutations merely reduce fitness without actually killing you. Down Syndrome, famously, is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21.
While a few traits–such as sex or eye color–can be simply modeled as influenced by only one or two genes, many traits–such as height or IQ–appear to be influenced by hundreds or thousands of genes:
Differences in human height is 60–80% heritable, according to several twin studies[19] and has been considered polygenic since the Mendelian-biometrician debate a hundred years ago. A genome-wide association (GWA) study of more than 180,000 individuals has identified hundreds of genetic variants in at least 180 loci associated with adult human height.[20] The number of individuals has since been expanded to 253,288 individuals and the number of genetic variants identified is 697 in 423 genetic loci.[21]
Obviously most of these genes each plays only a small role in determining overall height (and this is of course holding environmental factors constant.) There are a few extreme conditions–gigantism and dwarfism–that are caused by single mutations, but the vast majority of height variation is caused by which particular mix of those 700 or so variants you happen to have.
The general figure for the heritability of IQ, according to an authoritative American Psychological Association report, is 0.45 for children, and rises to around 0.75 for late teens and adults.[5][6] In simpler terms, IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics, for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. … Recent studies suggest that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores;[8] however, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease can have deleterious effects.[9][10]…
Despite intelligence having substantial heritability2 (0.54) and a confirmed polygenic nature, initial genetic studies were mostly underpowered3, 4, 5. Here we report a meta-analysis for intelligence of 78,308 individuals. We identify 336 associated SNPs (METAL P < 5 × 10−8) in 18 genomic loci, of which 15 are new. Around half of the SNPs are located inside a gene, implicating 22 genes, of which 11 are new findings. Gene-based analyses identified an additional 30 genes (MAGMA P < 2.73 × 10−6), of which all but one had not been implicated previously. We show that the identified genes are predominantly expressed in brain tissue, and pathway analysis indicates the involvement of genes regulating cell development (MAGMA competitive P = 3.5 × 10−6). Despite the well-known difference in twin-based heritability2 for intelligence in childhood (0.45) and adulthood (0.80), we show substantial genetic correlation (rg = 0.89, LD score regression P = 5.4 × 10−29). These findings provide new insight into the genetic architecture of intelligence.
The greater number of genes influence a trait, the harder they are to identify without extremely large studies, because any small group of people might not even have the same set of relevant genes.
High IQ correlates positively with a number of life outcomes, like health and longevity, while low IQ correlates with negative outcomes like disease, mental illness, and early death. Obviously this is in part because dumb people are more likely to make dumb choices which lead to death or disease, but IQ also correlates with choice-free matters like height and your ability to quickly press a button. Our brains are not some mysterious entities floating in a void, but physical parts of our bodies, and anything that affects our overall health and physical functioning is likely to also have an effect on our brains.
Like height, most of the genetic variation in IQ is the combined result of many genes. We’ve definitely found some mutations that result in abnormally low IQ, but so far we have yet (AFAIK) to find any genes that produce the IQ gigantism. In other words, low (genetic) IQ is caused by genetic load–Small Yet Important Genetic Differences Between Highly Intelligent People and General Population:
The study focused, for the first time, on rare, functional SNPs – rare because previous research had only considered common SNPs and functional because these are SNPs that are likely to cause differences in the creation of proteins.
The researchers did not find any individual protein-altering SNPs that met strict criteria for differences between the high-intelligence group and the control group. However, for SNPs that showed some difference between the groups, the rare allele was less frequently observed in the high intelligence group. This observation is consistent with research indicating that rare functional alleles are more often detrimental than beneficial to intelligence.
Greg Cochran has some interesting Thoughts on Genetic Load. (Currently, the most interesting candidate genes for potentially increasing IQ also have terrible side effects, like autism, Tay Sachs and Torsion Dystonia. The idea is that–perhaps–if you have only a few genes related to the condition, you get an IQ boost, but if you have too many, you get screwed.) Of course, even conventional high-IQ has a cost: increased maternal mortality (larger heads).
the difference between the fitness of an average genotype in a population and the fitness of some reference genotype, which may be either the best present in a population, or may be the theoretically optimal genotype. … Deleterious mutation load is the main contributing factor to genetic load overall.[5] Most mutations are deleterious, and occur at a high rate.
There’s math, if you want it.
Normally, genetic mutations are removed from the population at a rate determined by how bad they are. Really bad mutations kill you instantly, and so are never born. Slightly less bad mutations might survive, but never reproduce. Mutations that are only a little bit deleterious might have no obvious effect, but result in having slightly fewer children than your neighbors. Over many generations, this mutation will eventually disappear.
(Some mutations are more complicated–sickle cell, for example, is protective against malaria if you have only one copy of the mutation, but gives you sickle cell anemia if you have two.)
When I first ran a calculation of the infant mortality rate, I could not believe certain of the intermediate results. I recompiled all of the data and recalculated … with the same astounding result – 50.4% of the children born in Jakubany between the years 1772 and 1890 would diebefore reaching ten years of age! …one out of every two! Further, over the same 118 year period, of the 13306 children who were born, 2958 died (~22 %) before reaching the age of one.
Historical infant mortality rates can be difficult to calculate in part because they were so high, people didn’t always bother to record infant deaths. And since infants are small and their bones delicate, their burials are not as easy to find as adults’. Nevertheless, Wikipedia estimates that Paleolithic man had an average life expectancy of 33 years:
Based on the data from recent hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 0.60 probability of reaching 15.[12]
In other words, a 40% chance of dying in childhood. (Not exactly the same as infant mortality, but close.)
Wikipedia gives similarly dismal stats for life expectancy in the Neolithic (20-33), Bronze and Iron ages (26), Classical Greece(28 or 25), Classical Rome (20-30), Pre-Columbian Southwest US (25-30), Medieval Islamic Caliphate (35), Late Medieval English Peerage (30), early modern England (33-40), and the whole world in 1900 (31).
Over at ThoughtCo: Surviving Infancy in the Middle Ages, the author reports estimates for between 30 and 50% infant mortality rates. I recall a study on Anasazi nutrition which I sadly can’t locate right now, which found 100% malnutrition rates among adults (based on enamel hypoplasias,) and 50% infant mortality.
As Priceonomics notes, the main driver of increasing global life expectancy–48 years in 1950 and 71.5 years in 2014 (according to Wikipedia)–has been a massive decrease in infant mortality. The average life expectancy of an American newborn back in 1900 was only 47 and a half years, whereas a 60 year old could expect to live to be 75. In 1998, the average infant could expect to live to about 75, and the average 60 year old could expect to live to about 80.
Michael A Woodley suggests that what was going on [in the Mouse experiment] was much more likely to be mutation accumulation; with deleterious (but non-fatal) genes incrementally accumulating with each generation and generating a wide range of increasingly maladaptive behavioural pathologies; this process rapidly overwhelming and destroying the population before any beneficial mutations could emerge to ‘save; the colony from extinction. …
The reason why mouse utopia might produce so rapid and extreme a mutation accumulation is that wild mice naturally suffer very high mortality rates from predation. …
Thus mutation selection balance is in operation among wild mice, with very high mortality rates continually weeding-out the high rate of spontaneously-occurring new mutations (especially among males) – with typically only a small and relatively mutation-free proportion of the (large numbers of) offspring surviving to reproduce; and a minority of the most active and healthy (mutation free) males siring the bulk of each generation.
However, in Mouse Utopia, there is no predation and all the other causes of mortality (eg. Starvation, violence from other mice) are reduced to a minimum – so the frequent mutations just accumulate, generation upon generation – randomly producing all sorts of pathological (maladaptive) behaviours.
Today, almost everyone in the developed world has plenty of food, a comfortable home, and doesn’t have to worry about dying of bubonic plague. We live in humantopia, where the biggest factor influencing how many kids you have is how many you want to have.
Back in 1930, infant mortality rates were highest among the children of unskilled manual laborers, and lowest among the children of professionals (IIRC, this is Brittish data.) Today, infant mortality is almost non-existent, but voluntary childlessness has now inverted this phenomena:
Yes, the percent of childless women appears to have declined since 1994, but the overall pattern of who is having children still holds. Further, while only 8% of women with post graduate degrees have 4 or more children, 26% of those who never graduated from highschool have 4+ kids. Meanwhile, the age of first-time moms has continued to climb.
In other words, the strongest remover of genetic load–infant mortality–has all but disappeared; populations with higher load (lower IQ) are having more children than populations with lower load; and everyone is having children later, which also increases genetic load.
Take a moment to consider the high-infant mortality situation: an average couple has a dozen children. Four of them, by random good luck, inherit a good combination of the couple’s genes and turn out healthy and smart. Four, by random bad luck, get a less lucky combination of genes and turn out not particularly healthy or smart. And four, by very bad luck, get some unpleasant mutations that render them quite unhealthy and rather dull.
Infant mortality claims half their children, taking the least healthy. They are left with 4 bright children and 2 moderately intelligent children. The three brightest children succeed at life, marry well, and end up with several healthy, surviving children of their own, while the moderately intelligent do okay and end up with a couple of children.
On average, society’s overall health and IQ should hold steady or even increase over time, depending on how strong the selective pressures actually are.
Or consider a consanguineous couple with a high risk of genetic birth defects: perhaps a full 80% of their children die, but 20% turn out healthy and survive.
Today, by contrast, your average couple has two children. One of them is lucky, healthy, and smart. The other is unlucky, unhealthy, and dumb. Both survive. The lucky kid goes to college, majors in underwater intersectionist basket-weaving, and has one kid at age 40. That kid has Down Syndrome and never reproduces. The unlucky kid can’t keep a job, has chronic health problems, and 3 children by three different partners.
Your consanguineous couple migrates from war-torn Somalia to Minnesota. They still have 12 kids, but three of them are autistic with IQs below the official retardation threshold. “We never had this back in Somalia,” they cry. “We don’t even have a word for it.”
People normally think of dysgenics as merely “the dumb outbreed the smart,” but genetic load applies to everyone–men and women, smart and dull, black and white, young and especially old–because we all make random transcription errors when copying our DNA.
I could offer a list of signs of increasing genetic load, but there’s no way to avoid cherry-picking trends I already know are happening, like falling sperm counts or rising (diagnosed) autism rates, so I’ll skip that. You may substitute your own list of “obvious signs society is falling apart at the genes” if you so desire.
Nevertheless, the transition from 30% (or greater) infant mortality to almost 0% is amazing, both on a technical level and because it heralds an unprecedented era in human evolution. The selective pressures on today’s people are massively different from those our ancestors faced, simply because our ancestors’ biggest filter was infant mortality. Unless infant mortality acted completely at random–taking the genetically loaded and unloaded alike–or on factors completely irrelevant to load, the elimination of infant mortality must continuously increase the genetic load in the human population. Over time, if that load is not selected out–say, through more people being too unhealthy to reproduce–then we will end up with an increasing population of physically sick, maladjusted, mentally ill, and low-IQ people.
If all of the above is correct, then I see only 4 ways out:
Do nothing: Genetic load increases until the population is non-functional and collapses, resulting in a return of Malthusian conditions, invasion by stronger neighbors, or extinction.
Sterilization or other weeding out of high-load people, coupled with higher fertility by low-load people
Abortion of high load fetuses
Genetic engineering
#1 sounds unpleasant, and #2 would result in masses of unhappy people. We don’t have the technology for #4, yet. I don’t think the technology is quite there for #2, either, but it’s much closer–we can certainly test for many of the deleterious mutations that we do know of.
From the evolutionist point of view, the point of marriage is the production of children.
Let’s quickly analogize to food. Humans have a tremendous variety of customs, habits, traditions, and taboos surrounding foods. Foods enjoyed in one culture, like pork, crickets, and dog, are regarded as disgusting, immoral, or forbidden in another. Cheese is, at heart, rotten vomit–the enzyme used to make cheese coagulate is actually extracted from a calf’s stomach lining–and yet the average American eats it eagerly.
Food can remind you of your childhood, the best day of your life, the worst day of your life. It can comfort the sick and the mourning, and it accompanies our biggest celebrations of life.
Eh, I’d be happy giving him a microstate and seeing how he does running it.
We eat comfort food, holiday food, even sacrificial food. We have decadent luxuries and everyday staples. Some people, like vegans and ascetics, avoid large classes of food generally eaten by their own society for moral reasons.
People enjoy soda because it has water and calories, but some of us purposefully trick our taste buds by drinking Diet Coke, which delivers the sensation of drinking calories without the calories themselves. We enjoy the taste of calories even when we don’t need any more.
But the evolutionary purpose of eating is to get enough calories and nutrients to survive. If tomorrow we all stopped needing to eat–say, we were all hooked into a Matrix-style click-farm in which all nutrients were delivered automatically via IV–all of the symbolic and emotional content attached to food would wither away.
The extended helplessness of human infants is unique in the animal kingdom. Even elephants, who gestate for an incredible two years and become mature at 18, can stand and begin walking around shortly after birth. Baby elephants are not raised solely by their mothers, as baby rats are, but by an entire herd of related female elephants.
Elephants are remarkable animals, clever, communicative, and caring, who mourn their dead and create art:
But from the evolutionist point of view, the point of elephants’ family systems is still the production of elephant children.
Love is a wonderful, sweet, many-splendored thing, but the purpose of marriage, in all its myriad forms–polygamy, monogamy, polyandry, serial monogamy–is still the production of children.
In the Southwest United States, the Apache tribe practices a form of this, where the uncle is responsible for teaching the children social values and proper behavior while inheritance and ancestry is reckoned through the mother’s family alone. (Modern day influences have somewhat but not completely erased this tradition.)
Despite the long public argument over the validity of gay marriage, very few gay people actually want to get married. Gallop reports that after the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, the percent of married gay people jumped quickly from 7.9% to 9.5%, but then leveled off, rising to only 9.6% by June 2016.
Even this number, though, is in sharp decline: in 1960, 72% of adults were married; by 2010, only 51% were.
The situation is similar throughout the Western world. Only 51% of Brits are married. In Italy, the crude marriage rate (the number of new marriages per 1,000 people), has fallen from 7.35 in 1970 to only 4.21 in 2007. Only 58.9% of Japanese are married.
Declining marriage rates across the developed world have been accompanied by declining fertility rates and rising illegitimacy rates:
In other words, the Japanese welfare state, while generous, does not encourage single motherhood. Wikipedia also provides a discussion of the causes of declining Japanese marriage rates:
The annual number of marriages has dropped since the early 1970s, while divorces have shown a general upward trend.[29] …
The decline of marriage in Japan, as fewer people marry and do so later in life, is a widely cited explanation for the plummeting birth rate.[29][30][31][32] Although the total fertility rate has dropped since the 1970s (to 1.43 in 2013[33]), birth statistics for married women have remained fairly constant (at around 2.1) and most married couples have two or more children. Economic factors, such as the cost of raising a child, work-family conflicts, and insufficient housing, are the most common reasons for young mothers (under 34) to have fewer children than desired. …
Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of 50-year-old people who had never married roughly quadrupled for men to 20.1% and doubled for women to 10.6%.[41][42] The Welfare Ministry predicts these numbers to rise to 29% of men and 19.2% of women by 2035.[43] The government’s population institute estimated in 2014 that women in their early 20s had a one-in-four chance of never marrying, and a two-in-five chance of remaining childless.[44]
Recent media coverage has sensationalized surveys from the Japan Family Planning Association and the Cabinet Office that show a declining interest in dating and sexual relationships among young people, especially among men.[44][45][46] However, changes in sexuality and fertility are more likely an outcome of the decline in family formation than its cause.[47][48] Since the usual purpose of dating in Japan is marriage, the reluctance to marry often translates to a reluctance to engage in more casual relationships.[30]
In other words, marriage is functionally about providing a supportive way of raising children. In a society where birth control does not exist, children born out of wedlock tend not to survive, and people can easily get jobs to support their families, people tended to get married and have children. In a society where people do not want children, cannot afford them, are purposefully delaying childbearing as long as possible, or have found ways to provide for them without getting married, people simply see no need for marriage.
“Marriage” ceases to mean what it once did, reserved for old-fashioned romantics and the few lucky enough to afford it.
Mass acceptance of gay marriage did change how people think of marriage, but it’s downstream from what the massive, societal-wide decrease in child-bearing and increase in illegitimacy have done to our ideas about marriage.
Last week, I referenced the idea that Progressivism is a meme virus, rather than a meme mitochondria, an idea I want to explore in a bit more detail. How do we know Progressivism is viral rather than mitochondrial?
Simply put, because Progressives do not reproduce themselves. Mitochondria can only reproduce themselves by being passed on to your offspring, and thus are incentivised to maximize your reproductive success. (Or that of close relatives of yours who also carry your mitochondria, like siblings.)
By “reproduce themselves,” I mean “have enough children to keep their population from declining,” or about 2 kids per couple. (Technically, the average has to be slightly higher than 2 just because occasionally, terrible tragedies do occur, and kids die.)
This is the point in the conversation where Progressives jump in and insist that they really do reproduce themselves. Maybe not personally, of course, but they totally have some gay friends who are going to get on that IVF and have a whole bunch of children now that gay marriage is legal.
I have actually seen this argued.
Of course, any common idiot on the street has noticed by now that there’s no atheist equivalent of the Duggers, and that Mormons have a lot of kids. But if you can’t believe your own lying eyes, maybe statistics will help:
Only conservatives are above replacement. Everyone else, especially the extreme liberals, is being replaced by the children of conservatives.
If you don’t believe Jayman, because he’s too conservative or liberal or whatever for your ad hom tastes, here’s data from NY Mag, which definitely takes a liberal slant:
Afghanistan (TFR around 7) is not known for its progressive views on women’s rights or homosexuality. In Nigeria (one of the purpleist on the map,) homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death. In the slightly less purple Democratic Republic of the Congo, same-sex marriage is banned by the constitution.
At least currently, all of the “nice” countries that people want to live in or move to have below-replacement fertility.)
But lest I be accused of comparing apples to oranges, let’s go back to our own countries.
What happens when conservatives outbreed liberals? The simple answer is that liberals get replaced.
If you still don’t believe me, I’ll run through it step by step. (If you do believe me, you can skip this part.)
Let’s suppose we start with a town of 10 liberals and 10 conservatives. The liberals have a TFR of 1 (1 child per woman,) for 5 total children. The conservatives have a TFR of of 3, for a total of 15 children. The second generation is therefore 5:15 liberals:conservatives. In the second generation, Liberals have 2 or 3 kids (it’s hard to actually have 2.5 kids,) and conservatives have 22 or 23 kids. Fourth generation, 1 liberal kid, 33 conservatives.
And yet, a quick glance at voting trends in the US over the past 70 years indicates that the country has been moving steadily more liberal. Take, for example, the shift over the past few decades in favor of gay marriage.
Liberals remaining 50% of the electorate isn’t just an artifact of having a 2-party system; liberals have been convincing people to become more liberal. Conservatives, meanwhile, haven’t been convincing people to become more conservative.
Meme mitochondria propagate vertically–from parent to child–not horizontally, and are unattractive to people who weren’t raised with them. Meme viruses propagate horizontally–from peer to peer–and so must be attractive to others.
Progressivism is therefore propagating virally.
To be fair, ideas that began virally can become mitochondrial. Christianity in its early stages was viral, but later became mitochondrial. For an idea to become mitochondrial, it has to confer greater survival benefits on people who hold it than on people who don’t. Right now, Progressivism isn’t doing that.
The interesting question, therefore, is what Progressivism will do over the next 50-100 years. Remember that this situation of liberals not reproducing themselves is (most likely) a novel result of recent technological innovations. Will society keep moving leftward as Progressivism keeps spreading successfully to the conservatives? Or will future conservatives, having been born to the conservatives least susceptible to Progressivism in the first place, become, essentially, “immune”?
Or will the immigration of people with much higher birthrates and very different values render the whole business moot?
“Today, the Sierra Club announced its support for an equitable path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“The Sierra Club Board of Directors, made up of elected volunteer leaders, has unanimously adopted the position:
“‘Currently at least 11 million people live in in the U.S. in the shadows of our society. Many of them work in jobs that expose them to dangerous conditions, chemicals and pesticides, and many more of them live in areas with disproportionate levels of toxic air, water, and soil pollution. To protect clean air and water and prevent the disruption of our climate, we must ensure that those who are most disenfranchised and most threatened by pollution within our borders have the voice to fight polluters and advocate for climate solutions without fear.
“‘… America’s undocumented population should be able to earn legalization and a timely pathway to citizenship, with all the rights to fully participate in our democracy, including influencing environmental and climate policies. ‘”
Here, you might need this:
Normally I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I’ve heard enough people on the left lately explicitly saying that their organizations favor increased immigration because they believe those immigrants will vote Democrat/otherwise support their organizations that I’m starting to think that “import voters” is actually a Democratic strategy.
Which is cheating, BTW.
(Also, the Republican leadership wants more immigrants to keep wages down. Both sides are terrible.)
As logic goes, this is dumbass logic.
1. If the problem is that illegal immigrants can’t protest unhealthy work conditions without getting deported, then this is a good argument in favor of preventing illegal immigration, not encouraging more of it.
2. What makes them think Hispanic immigrants are suddenly going to start advocating for environmental protections, anyway? (I mean, do I have to drag out statistics here to prove that tree-hugging hippies are overwhelmingly white?)
Mexican citizens in their own country created one of the most polluted cities in the world:
Mexico City
Mexico city manages to top the list of the world’s most polluted major cities:
Somehow, I don’t think lack of legal citizenship is the issue.
3. Population growth is one of the worst possible things you can promote if you give a shit about the environment. The Sierra Club used to understand this, back when their official policy favored population stabilization.
In other words, the Sierra Club is now explicitly advocating policies that result in environmental destruction.
Ultimately, I actually think the “they’ll vote for us!” justification is just that: a flimsy justification for doing what they want to do anyway, whether it actually squares with their other goals or not.
Which is to say, I don’t actually think the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors is delusional enough to think that increasing immigration will actually help the environment. Rather, I think the Board consists of liberals who buy into the pro-unlimited immigration propaganda that moving anywhere you want is a basic human right, and are especially interested in proving how much they love POCs, despite (or perhaps because of) working for one of the most overwhelmingly white organizations in the US. But since unfettered immigration => population growth is actually bad for the environment, some justification must be made to reconcile the two positions.
But aside from a few people placidly saying they’re concerned about global warming, and a few people vocally responding, where is our leadership on the issue?
Al Gore seems to have had some things to say on the environment, but since he lost the Supreme Court vote, the Democratic base has turned increasingly toward more “people” oriented issues like racism, immigration, and gay marriage. And the kinds of people who care deeply about immigration, racism, and gay marriage may not happen to overlap with the kinds of people who think we should give serious thought to long-term global sustainability.
“I got into an argument with a friend of mine who is a person of color. They were mad at me because I feel very passionately about protecting the ocean and they said that made me a bad person because I should only care about is social justice. I do care about social justice and I stand up to racism where I can, but how do I reply to that?”
From the response:
“Is client change real? Hell yeah! Is the ocean becoming a mass of plastic? Of course. But right in front of you is your friends pain.”
It’s almost like people who tend toward high time discounting don’t understand the logic of people with low time discounting.
“Since I don’t know you I also want to make sure to offer up that white people have a horrible track record of racism when discussing climate change. I am not saying this is you personally, just the system that we have created around climate issues has become its own thing and often is very racist in its approach. The way people talk about “food deserts” for example (which are almost always lower income communities of color) implies that there is not a food culture in those communities.”
Remember, if you’re concerned about the availability of fresh food in inner city communities, you’re a racist.
BTW, the presence or absence of a grocery store in downtown Detroit is not an environmental issue.
“One of the tricks here though is to keep fighting for climate justice and protecting the oceans while not ignoring your friend, and people of color, here on land. All of this shit is interconnected. The same system that is oppressing people is oppressing the ocean. … If we center black lives in our work then we will have to discuss climate issues, and the ocean. Listen to your friend and maybe what they are saying is that this type of centering in your work around oceans is needed. Maybe it is their not so subtle way of saying that they feel ignored in the larger climate and ocean movement?”
There’s been talk recently about how Europe (with its negative fertility rates) needs to do more to assist immigrants from countries where women have been having 7 children apiece and are suddenly running out of room. (These countries haven’t had enough food for decades.)
Perhaps I’m missing something, but why should Swedish citizens have their taxes raised to build more housing for non-swedes who chose to come to Sweden? Why should Brits have to send people down to fish boatloads of migrants out of the Mediterranean when their boats collapse? Shouldn’t the people who sent the boats be responsible for the people in them? If I have children, aren’t I responsible for my children? Why does all of this suddenly become Europe’s responsibility?
Ethiopia had 38 million people in 1983, at the beginning of the famine. By the end of the famine, in ’85, they had 41 million people. Today, they have 94 million people. No, they have not simultaneously doubled their ability to feed their people.
Where will those people go? Where will the food come from?
You cannot double the population of Ethiopia without expecting disaster. Yet this is what the Ethiopian people have chosen to do. Who will pay for it? The French?
The usual excuse here for self-destructive behavior is “colonialism.” Ethiopia was never colonized.
Next door, in can-totally-afford-it Somalia, women are having an average of 6 and a half children each. In Nigeria, 7 and a half. The DRC, one of the most dysfunctional, impoverished countries in the world, the kind of place where cannibalism still happens and you can’t even buy Coca Cola,* comes in at a modest 6 children per woman.
*You can buy Coca Cola almost anywhere on the planet except the DRC, because the roads there are just so bad that even capitalism cannot triumph.
Europe is, of course, already massively over-populated. Negative fertility rates are perfectly sensible until Europe, India, China, Japan, and the US populations drop to sustainable levels (unless you really like the idea of living in a post-apocalytic global wasteland.)
The planet cannot handle exponential growth. Even accepting all of the excess people from the places that cannot handle their own current growth levels will not solve the problem in either location. More food will not suddenly appear in Europe anymore than it will suddenly appear in Africa; we will not destroy the planet any slower by shipping people around–this will just speed it up.
We don’t need to stop having children. But we must be sane; countries cannot go having more than 3 per woman. The first step to preventing worldwide famine is birth control. Countries that have not been acting in good faith to not produce more children than they can feed have no basis to ask for international aid or to send out massive numbers of migrants and expect anyone to accept them.
Europe did not create Africa’s overpopulation problem and Europe cannot solve it. At best, Europe might solve Europe’s problems, but I haven’t a ton of hope for that.
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