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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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”.

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.

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.