The perennial underground subject of the nexus where fertility, IQ, education and religion meet gets another go-round on the avant-garde right. You can read a couple of takes here and here. Bottom (literally) line: dysgenics is real, and it’s happening right now.
I have a thought on the issue that I haven’t seen addressed in any of these discussions. Perhaps smarts and dislike of, or cold indifference to, children are intertwined at the genetic level? Hypothesis: The genes that code for smarts also contribute a suite of personality alterations that result in reduced enthusiasm to have kids.
Maybe instead of all these calculated, or emergent, trade-offs accounting for lower fertility among the SWPL class — e.g. more schooling leading to more lost prime fertility years among women — the real reason for the dysgenic trend is that smart people just don’t get as much enjoyment out of kids as dumber people do. As a result, they use the contraceptive tech and cultural memes at their disposal to actively avoid the burden of children, especially when they are younger and the world is full of delights.
Maybe this, too, would explain why there are natural evolutionary limits on selection for high IQ. In small-ish numbers, high IQ confers a group benefit, but in larger numbers high IQ becomes fitness-reducing, if by fitness we restrict ourselves to the gene’s eye view of getting more copies of itself into future generations.
Anyhow, not a sermon, just a thought. My time around smart people, and my observations of their discomfort and/or boredom when in the company of children (particularly the men) leads me to believe they don’t really have a strong internal motivator pushing them in the direction of reproduction. Pushing them in the direction of sex, yes. But thanks to rubbers, the pill, and destigmatization, they are able to thwart the end goal of their genetic programming.
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