Fred Reed: Pre-Darwinian Idiocrat

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.

I cared more about the characters than about the powers...

Speaking of the X-Men, this memory came up because I was asked today, "What was your first same-sex crush?" and I said, "Kurt Wagner. You know, Nightcrawler. From the X-Men. Why is everyone looking at me like that?"

Twenty-eight years ago, I worked in a comic bookstore. It was just a short summer gig, and it gave me an opportunity to make some cash and buy books at price, so it was a pretty good gig for a teenager.

As I was putting a new shipment on the shelves, I heard two other kids, easily within my age range, talking adamantly about a new Marvel comic of... something. It sounded interesting, but nothing I was familiar with. The characters had the typical superhero names: "Cannonball," "Psyche," "Sunspot," "Wolfesbane," "Cypher." I couldn't see what they were holding in their hands.

It wasn't until I gone back to the counter that it hit me: they were talking about the new Chris Claremont / Bill Sienkiewicz series, The New Mutants.

I had followed the first two years of that series quite faithfully, and yet never bothered to memorize the characters' "code names." They rarely used them in the series. I always wondered what made the difference between readers who used the names above, and the ones who just said "Sam, Dani, Roberto, Rahne, and Doug"?

The Years Go By, and The Memories Fade, and These Are The Good New Days..

Roger Ebert asks, and answers, the question, "Would you want to live to be 500 years old?"

"Oh, no," he quotes an elderly woman approvingly. "That would be too long." Ebert adds:

What would I do with all the accumulating memories? How would it feel to remember my best friend of four centuries ago? If everyone could live to 500, would we grow tired of one another? How many centuries do I really want to listen to Justin Bieber? How many Presidential debates do I need?

The idea that we fill up, or run out of, ourselves is so depressing I don't know where to begin. Despite the fact that I blogged about a teenage memory recently doesn't mean that I remember every factoid from my personal history.

A striking example: I'm 45. In my 20s I sowed my wild oats and, like lots of people, ended up in bed with quite a few. Let's say somewhere between 10 and 20^[1]. Although I know that, at the time, I knew the names and email addresses of everyone I slept with, I can't recall those names or addresses now. They've faded, leaving only vague impressions of hurried scrambling for condoms in fold-away beds in darkened dens, and sneaking desperate fumblings in cars under bridges, neither one of us able to convince our roommates to give us space.

Memories fade. Even moreso, when we revisit memories, we build memories about remembering, coloring, modifying, mutating those memories into something else. In the process, my self builds a new self, daily, out of the machinery of yesterday. I hope that self is a better person, for some personal definition of "better," and if it is I can rejoice, and if it isn't, I can take notes on what I'll do tomorrow to make progress. There is no destination, only the journey.

People who treat death as the fitting end to the journey don't appreciate sightseeing enough. The future is going to be messy. Humanity is always a work in progress. I am a work in progress. But I'd like to see both.

^[1] Let me note that being bisexual didn't double my chances of getting laid, and that even though guys are supposedly easier than girls, they're not that much easier. The legendary gays who bedded a thousand men the right wing loved to trot out during the height of the AIDS crisis must have been truly heroic in their pursuit of sex.