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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3877 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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I’ve heard it said we shouldn’t worry about fertility because eventually those with pro-fertile genes will even things out. But this isn’t true, isn’t it? Pro-fertile genes are just “sexual desire”. The modern world takes the people with the most fertile genes and makes them infertile through artificial sexual outlets (casual sex, porn) and artificial intimacy outlets (parasocial relationships, pity politics). So there’s no optimistic evolutionary solution to infertility, there’s only a cultural solution. Or am I missing something? There’s genes for wanting to ejaculate when seeing a woman, but no gene for “wanting to ejaculate inside a woman and wait nine months to create a child”.

There’s genes for wanting to ejaculate when seeing a woman, but no gene for “wanting to ejaculate inside a woman and wait nine months to create a child”.

There are genes for everything, if you squint hard enough. Liking children and big families can be as heritable as any typical behavioral trait, which is to say, moderately-to-strongly heritable. Then again, that's not how heritability works: the environment determines how specifically slight biases in neural wiring and biochemistry will play out, projected onto the adult behavioral repertoir. It's just that we cannot very well control environmental cues.

Some people can. Some cultures are better at this than others, more austere and accepting of paternalistic authority and explicit social engineering. What will happen in practice, I believe, is that the observed contemporary selection on traits genetically correlated with high fertility (low IQ, ADHD, high BMI, high time preference, addictions... undesirable stuff, to be blunt) will somewhat degrade the average quality of the population – and then cease, as benefits of childlessness grow, contraception becomes easier and technical surrogates of sex and companionship improve; the very traits currently making them «genetically fertile» will flip-flop into encouraging functional infertility, without any change in those traits' biological foundation.

Meanwhile, traditionalists who succeed at dodging the secularization pipeline will grow, polish their cultural and genetic adaptations to self-sufficiency, and eventually constitute the majority of humans. Then, analyzing the general population, one will see that traits promoting adherence to traditionalism – heritable too, of course – are genetically correlated with fertility, despite being orthogonal to any sex-related behavior or aspects of reproductive biology. Speculating further: it'll be stuff like rigidity of emotional attachments, tolerance for noise and cramped conditions, fascination with children, visceral distrust of strangers, perhaps even disgust and fear of companion animals, high clannishness, high agreeableness, lack of open-ended curiosity, and general mental health (whether or not contemporary P-factor amounts to a real thing).

This is, IMO, the parsimonious and conservative model which isn't discussed enough.

Incidentally, I think this is also a good example in favor of @tailcalled's Phenotypic Null Hypothesis argument, which was poorly received here.

A more systematic overview of the field can be found here.

I’ve heard it said we shouldn’t worry about fertility because eventually those with pro-fertile genes will even things out.

I think there's very little risk humanity will go extinct because of this. Evolution will find some way to keep humans alive. But we could have big problems with declining population before we get there. But I also think we'll probably perfect human cloning before that is an top level issue. For now, some more tax credits for having children and providing government funded day cares are probably fine solutions for the next ~20 years.

Pro-fertile genes are just “sexual desire”.

I would dispute this. Lots of people really want to raise children- not dogs, but specifically children, and not 'have sex' but specifically raise children- and I would be very curious to see if there's any genes or sets of genes overrepresented among the subset of parents of large families, elementary school teachers, coaches, and scoutmasters. I would also be curious to see if housewives who have prevously been teachers have a higher fertility rate.

There's lots of women who go way out of their way to get the opportunity to babysit and a smaller but still very substantial number of men who go out of their way to take youth mentorship roles, and I'd have to imagine these people are probably underrepresented among both the extremely promiscuous and among terminal coomers.

It's totally possible that outside of certain conservative religious groups society does a bad job of guiding these people into actually reproducing. But the idea that pro-fertile genes are indistinguishable from just being horny seems pre-falsified.

Saying you shouldn't worry about fertility because the fertile will repopulate the earth is like saying you shouldn't worry about a hypothetical hard eugenicism regime sterilising people, because after all they encourage other people to breed.

It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of. A sane and sensible person will dismiss such words as munitions fired in a 5th generation memetic war of genocide in all honesty.

*Edited to fix phone typos.

It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of. A sane and sensible person will dismiss such words as munitions fired in a 5th generation memetic war of genocide in all honesty.

Exactly. There's a powerful drive to remove leftist genes (yeah, yeah, I'm extremely oversimplifying it) from the gene pool, and that's a good thing that we all should support bipartisanly.

Ah but it's not so simple. Msny genes and many interactions with the environment.

Maybe you'd be removed from the gene pool too if society encouraged you to drink leaded petrol as a child, and while that's an exaggeration the selection bottleneck of people able to withstand all of society is very worrying.

It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of.

In that horrific (or funny) podcast with Tyler Cowen feminist author Srinivasan basically says the quiet part out loud: that worrying about fertility is and should be seen as right wing and therefore suspicious, and people shouldn't do that because anyways immigration is a better solution (conveniently, as you can guess by her name, Srinivasan is an immigrant herself).

So it's not a problem but, if it is, you're not allowed to attempt to fix it in the most direct way, you have to actually accelerate some of the negative features of low-fertility states you don't like. Those're your options. Convenient for the other side no?

Given that I see similar tendencies elsewhere on the Left, I'm not inclined to trust that "don't worry about fertility" is something people only come to after hardcore, objective analysis.

We know this isn't true because fertility is about 30% heritable, which means there has to be some genotypes that increase fertility unless the studies that have found this result are wrong.

More important than sexual desire is probably just liking children. There are genes for liking being around taking care of children, as anyone who has seen a young woman around small children knows.

no gene for “wanting to ejaculate inside a woman and wait nine months to create a child”

Sure but there are genes for personality traits that, in the current social and cultural environment, make you more inclined to make babies. And who knows, maybe they are the basis for future adaptations that will eventually evolve into direct utilitarian urge to maximize one's inclusive genetic fitness.

The personality traits that used to lead to fertility in the past, like a love for cute /neotonous things, a desire to be a “parent”, all now have cheaper and most accessible satisfactions, like watching anime and owning a stuffed animal or pet. I don’t know of a personality trait that leads to fertility as its most expedient satisfaction

I do. And I'll demonstrate with a personal example.

My sister has wanted a baby very, very badly for as long as anyone can remember(I would expect her to have about 4 children and have well founded reasons that I don't think need to be explained in any significant detail to be considered reasonable). My parents thought getting her a cute dog would be a good way to scratch that urge at the beginning of adolescence but no, she regularly got mistaken for being the mom of, say, little cousins or occasionally kids she was babysitting... even in the presence of that cute dog.

Having 3+ children is not the done thing in her social circle and she went against her in-laws pressure, and to a lesser extent, our mom's, to take actions which militate in the direction of having 3+ children, largely because that is what she wants to do. If this personality trait is genetic(and, anecdata, but one cousin decided to practice his French by moving to Louisiana and getting a job at a Cajun-French revival preschool, turning down an internship in his chosen field to do so, and I occupy a volunteer position coaching fundamentalist boys, and mom's an elementary school teacher, and one aunt will nearly get into knife fights to hold the baby at social gatherings).

Yes, it's an anecdatum. But I don't know that anyone has actually done any high quality studies, so YMMV.

I don't think having stuffed animals and pets comes close to satisfying the maternal instinct.

the desire to feel a family would be a gene governing in-group preference, and corporations are already adept at finding ways to give consumers this feeling without having a real family.

Notice how everyone is now part of all sorts of "communities" (either tied to their immutable characteristics or online fandom) that aren't actual communities?

We already have the horny gene. But we could have higher time preference or a stronger paternal love for children or greater disgust for gamers and wine aunts. Or maybe just a stronger proclivity to religious thinking.

The selection process can be cultural too, e.g. subpopulations with memes resisting modern anti-fertility technology, such as the Amish or fundamentalist Christians/Jews/Muslims out breeding all the atheists and feminists.

The latter totally exist. We dress them up as socially acceptable proxies like "reliability" and all the other traits which make for an attractive mate.

Think of it as an economics problem. If most of the human race is leaving $20 bills on the ground, someone gets to pick it up. It doesn't require a specific gene to be flipped--if there is any reasonable combination that will help, it will naturally be selected for more representation in the next generation.

I'm still grappling with this body of issues myself. I think declining fertility, increasing male sexlessness, worsening gender relations are all serious issues that the mainstream is just burying their head in the sand in the face of. And it seems to affect just about all countries above a certain affluence threshold.

I suppose the steelman of the idea you are talking about is that;

Pro fertility memes can outbreed pro fertility genes. In a very low resolution view, the sex-negative Christian right might outbreed sex-positive left, regardless of how much drive you have to have sex, you still need to have and raise children.

Human societies compete on genes and memes (or inversely genes and memes are both competing evolutionarily and sometimes they butt heads). It doesn't matter if your tribe has the strongest warrior genetics if the other tribe invents gunpowder before you.

What ultimately scares me is that for a variety of reasons, I don't think a pro fertility society can be returned to (sans massive upheaval). The sex positive meme can just capture the minds of your children. It's encoded in almost literally all of pop culture.

A pro fertility society is easy in theory. Just ban abortion, contraception, LBGT, and pornography. Not going to happen without a totaliatarian regime with the current technology level, but if that's what would be required then it's tautological that the low fetility in modernity peoples will only survive in such a regime.

Not going to happen without a totaliatarian regime with the current technology level

The bigger problem is cultural.

illiberal is not synonymous with totalitarian. Many societies maintained and maintain bans and taboos against all of those things without totalitarianism. For example: I think it would be very bad for the cause if you simply removed any ability to sue for anti-LGBT discrimination. I think the lack of that protection alone disincentivizes a lot of activism in less progressive countries.

The issue is whether Western societies are willing to tolerate such actions.

I don’t really think there are pro-fertility genes except for “sexual desire” and “potency”. Sex negative is in fact more culturally fertile because such people tie sex to family formation through propaganda. So in this sense, yes, the conservative memeplex can outbreed the progressive one. But once they have children they lose some large percentage to the progressive memeplex, and conservatives don’t produce enough children to cancel this effect (unlike the Amish).

I agree on sex positive mind virus point.

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