Fred Reed: Pre-Darwinian Idiocrat

[elfs]

Fred Reed, over at Lew Rockwell's website (yeah, I read something from somewhere deeply south of GlenBeckistan), asks the following stupid question, and claims to get no answer:

Yet now we have whole societies which by choice are not having babies. Japan, Italy, Spain, Russia, Germany and so on are breeding at below replacement. In Mexico the birth rate falls like a rock, even though nutrition has improved and health is better. The drop is easily explained in human terms. Why do you, the reader, not want fifteen children? The same answers apply in Mexico. Interestingly, the drop in procreation is steepest among the most intelligent , educated,and wealthy – that is, among those most able to support large families. There is no evolutionary explanation. When I ask, I encounter silence or vague mumblings.

Actually, Fred, there is an evolutionary explanation. It goes like this:

In times of environmental or cultural stress, when the probability is low that any one child will survive to adulthood, the human animal has a tendency to go into overdrive making more children. We actually see this in our near relatives, the chimps. This increases the likelihood that our genes will make it into future generations in the face of the threat of death by accident or violence.

In times of low environmental and cultural stress, when food is plentiful and life is relatively easy, there is instead a tendency to produce fewer children but to put more resources into them. This increases the likelihood of our genes making it into future generations in the face of competitition for the ephemeral resource known as quality. Improving the next generation's quality leads to better resource acquisition, especially health.

So, yes, evolutionary psychologists have a hypothesis for why wealthy societies have fewer children. It's even a testable hypothesis. No mumbling or magical X-men style mutations required.

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

On an even more base level, he makes a bad presumption which is that intelligence is an evolutionarily desirable trait.

Certainly it helps one adapt and that's useful for the continuation of a species but we're clever enough to engineer viruses that could wipe out nearly an entire species. We've exploited resources that have the potential to make the planet rather inhospitable to us. He makes a huge mistake in understanding evolution. Sharks and crocodiles are HIGHLY evolved organisms that have survived for hundreds of millions of years because they are able to adapt.

He also ignores that religion preys upon the poor and tells them they should breed so they will have more peasants to fill their coffers.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

There is also the agrarian vs. urban dichotomy based on a child's contribution to the support of the family -- a family on a farm can put an additional child to chores that help support the family at a relatively young age, continuing to adulthood, so the incremental cost of an additional child is lower. To a lesser degree, this used to be true for lower-class urban families as well, but as child-labor laws were put into place, the opportunities for children to contribute to the support of the family dwindled, increasing the incremental cost for each child. As a result, given two families, one agrarian and one urban, with the same total resources available for raising children, the rural family will tend to have more children than the urban family.