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Notes -
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 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.
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