[ExI] Why humans are dying out

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 10:44 PM, *Nym* <nymphomation at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/03/2012, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>> ### It is possible that there is a genetic component to the tendency
>> to espouse feminist views but the mode of transmission (cultural vs.
>> combined cultural-genetic) is out of context in relation to the
>> argument I presented. As you may know, the Shaker worldview was
>> transmitted culturally, and led to its own disappearance, along with
>> the bodies, minds and genes of its carriers.
>
> I suspect feminism has a much lower drop-out rate than the Shakers,
> along with a far higher take up rate (Shakers topped out at around
> 6,000 members after about a century.) Faster communications, the wider
> spread of basic education in the future and the resulting 'network
> effect' will likely more than make up for the use of effective
> contraception.

### In larger and faster networks, fads and the madness of crowds
reach greater sizes faster but they also sometimes disappear just as
precipitously. Furthermore, since there are likely to be alleles that
confer resistance to persistent severe aversion to procreation (e.g.
feminist beliefs that outlast the window of fertility and interfere
with procreation, Skopcy religious fervor, various monastic movements,
etc.), for the most part within a few generations such beliefs become
very uncommon due to biological, evolutionary processes (changes in
allele frequency) rather than due to strictly memetic processes.

My theory about the modern trend to diminishing procreation, also
known as the demographic transition, is that modern levels of
affluence interact with some psychological adaptations active
predominantly in women. In the ancestral environment females had a
choice of reproductive strategies whose success depended on their
position in the social hierarchy - women in lower levels had to mate
and reproduce early due to the precariousness of their very existence,
while women in higher strata could afford to hold out to mate with
males highest in the hierarchy, the ones who had access to multiple
females. In this situation, bearing a son of a high status male
conferred unusual fitness rewards, since this son would be able to
sire a much larger number of grandchildren than the son produced in
the union with a low status male. This tendency to search for high
status males is also called hypergamy. Modern affluence, with good
nutrition and low levels of interpersonal stress, seems to simulate
the experience of a high-status ancestral woman - and strongly
triggers the hypergamous strategy, searching for high status males,
and deferring procreation. In some individuals, a super-hypergamy may
be found - a feeling that no man is good enough which seems to be the
defining feature of radical feminism.

In this view, feminism is not the cause of non-procreation but rather
its correlate. Contraceptives add to the story but they are not
essential, since the demographic transition started long before modern
contraceptives became available. Liberal outlook is also irrelevant,
since the demographic transition has wreaked havoc in many traditional
societies, including strongly patriarchal ones (Japan, China), and is
seen in Muslim theocracies (Iran, many Arab countries). Being rich and
reducing levels of interpersonal violence seems rather paradoxically
sufficient to trigger procreation aversion in most humans.

But in evolution there is constant churn of existing alleles, and in
response to changed conditions the frequency of previously
fitness-conferring but now fitness-reducing alleles is likely to
change quickly. This is especially true of alleles that produce nearly
zero fitness - they may get weeded out in a single generation (in the
case of fully penetrant autosomal dominant traits), or in just 5 - 6
generations in the case of multigenic adaptations.

I doubt that evolution will achieve the elimination of
anti-procreative hypergamy before the singularity wipes the
existential slate clean but most likely we will see some indications
of evolutionary processes at work. Even now there is an increasing
number of high status US women who choose to have 4 - 6 children - I
personally know a few physicians who went this way.

Presumably, the memetic correlates of low procreation will also go the
way of the Shakers.

>
> Also, it wasn't just the Shakers, the bodies and minds of everyone
> around at the time of their heyday have disappeared too.

### The beliefs and genes that animated procreating humans were much
less likely to disappear. True, their bodies and most memories died
but their essence lives on, while the Shakers are merely remembered,
usually in the context of furniture shopping.

Rafal