The Romeo & Juliet Revolution:

A reader replies:

The problem with your reader's statement about Western love having eugenic effects is twofold:

1. If smart women don't have to marry stupid men, stupid women have to marry stupid men. So you actually get assortative mating, and the standard deviation increases. (The effect on the mean depends on reproductive rates of the various IQs. I suspect this is actually dysgenic, a la Charles Murray, as the higher classes reproduce less and IQ improves earning potential up to about 130 or so.)

2. Who's to say arranged marriages didn't do the same thing? Let's not forget the West did this too. A whole family's much more effective at investigaitng a potential partner than one woman by herself, and you don't have the effect of smart women being misled by their hormones into marrying a dashing but violent and moronic lout. (The effect of hormones on men of any intelligence...well, like you said, do you really think Bill Gates went after Melinda because she was the smartest lady at Microsoft? Or Arthur Miller and Marillyn Monroe. Or Einstein and...it's actually kind of interesitng that Einstein's first girlfriend was more of an intellectual equal and his next one was just kind of pretty, as I recall. Recalls your statement about men moving from masculine to feminine women as they mature. Someone needs to make a list of all the Sailer aphorisms.)

3. Expanded roles for women have an effect of decreasing the fertility rate, a la Philip Longman. That's good or bad depending on who you are and where your society is at the present time. From the conservative point of view, both Sweden and Arabia are to be avoided, both culturally and in terms of fertility rate. So if you want a consevative society that reproduces itself, you want to be patriarchal, but not too patriarchal. (Encouraging women to be homemakers, good. Locking them up in the house and making them wear sheets when they go out, bad.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer