There is a film called Idiocracy. It isn’t very good but it does run with the idea that, in America, the dumb white trash outbreed the educated and in the future there will be only white trash. (Was originally titled The United States of Dumb.) I personally think it more likely that, unchecked, it would lead to a two tier society much like the film Metropolis.

I agree with almost everything you said in terms of women’s rights, healthcare and education being crucial in dropping birth rates. The only thing I have to add is that in many countries like China the population has soared because of an increase in life expectancy and quality of life.

But the way you phrased it made it sound a bit like “help, the poor are coming with their superior breeding skills”.

We need to work as hard as we can to lift the standards of living across the world (including our own developed countries) to the point where people don’t feel the need to have so many children — but without imparting some sort of value judgement on how many children various people are having. From your comments I think you’d agree.

To clarify: birth rates drop as societies become more advanced. This is shown both across countries now and also over time within any of the western democracies.

One driver for this is improved healthcare, as infant mortality rates drop people need to have less children to ensure an heir. A side effect of the west exporting basic western healthcare is that societies that traditionally had lots of kids due to high infant mortality are still having lots of kids (takes generations for that to slow down) most of which are surviving, hence China’s 1 child policy.

Another driver for population growth are a lack of careers for women, societies where women are mothers and home-makers will tend to have more children than one where women go out to work. Third world and Muslim countries tend to have non-working women (not that looking after a house and children isn’t incredibly hard work, but they do not reduce the number of children women have.) Likewise with poor, uneducated women in the west, they tend to have many more children than educated professional women.

So natural selection doesn’t play a part in this, but this is unnatural selection. So looking even at just a western country (the others will fall into line with this when their economy gets more advanced…) the most effective reproductive strategy is for poor, under-educated people. While much of this is not genetic, a little part may be and it is that part that will thrive as anyone who escapes poverty will resort to the slower breeding strategy of the more wealthy, leaving the faster reproductive members in poverty and that gene pool more concentrated with the active genes.

What you have to remember about this is we are democracies. If the majority of the population are under-educated and poor they may not have much of an economic say but they have a massive political voice.

(As for the Chinese, no they don’t have a genetic predisposition for having more children, but most of them are rural and there isn’t much else to do in the evening… much like an non-industrialised country – China is industrialised, but still has a sizable rural population.)

are you suggesting that say the chinese have some specific genetic predisposition for having more babies? because that’s what’s needed for the situation as you described it (granting your assumptions) to be a case of natural selection. anything else is more likely a matter of culture influencing how many children someone has — which is not natural selection and is much more variable over the course of even a single century.

And Indians aren’t doing too bad either.

It is only rich, well educated people (of any race) that tend to concentrate more on their work and leave children until later in life that are not being successful. And gay people.

To a certain extent these subsets of the species have certain genes in a greater concentration than the rest of the population and so we can expect to see those genes, in the shape of the offspring, crowding out the rest of the genes.

Look at the incursion of grey squirrels in the UK and what happened to the red squirrels for an example. Although there seems to be some mutant black squirrels appearing on the scene now.

Actually it’s only natural selection that has all these features, so doesn’t really work for any other causes.

I guess the nature-is-good ideology is everywhere, hard to resist.

You know, I still can’t find that article. And I’m sure I didn’t dream it.