Here's a 2007 New Zealand Herald article quoting James Flynn, of Flynn Effect fame:
Brainier mums needed to maintain future generations' intelligence, says professor
8:21 AM Sunday Jul 8, 2007
An internationally recognised expert on intelligence warns New Zealand children could get dumber in three or four generations unless women with higher education started producing more babies. Otago University emeritus professor Dr Jim Flynn was commenting on census figures that show mothers without a higher education were the anchor of New Zealand's current fertility rate.
"Everyone knows if we only allowed short people to reproduce there would be a tendency in terms of genes for height to diminish. Intelligence is no different from other human traits," he told the Sunday Star-Times. "A persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually."
Statistics show women without tertiary qualifications who had reached their early 40s had produced 2.57 babies each. In contrast, women with a higher education were producing just 1.85 babies each.
Dr Flynn said at 73 he was too old to worry about offending anyone.
Unplanned pregnancies by less educated women could be reduced, perhaps by future scientific advances. "I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote," he said. "You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child."
Commissioner for Children Cindy Kiro said Dr Flynn was getting into "dangerous territory". "Rather than talking about encouraging smart women to have babies and dumb women not to have babies, what we do need to do is make the commitment to good quality education."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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74 comments:
It's patently obvious that feminism might be good for individual women but bad for society as a whole. Advanced, feminist countries place Anglo-America and Western Europe don't replace themselves with natural fertility, so have to import people from pre-feminist places like Latin America and the Middle East.
There's no answer to this that is consistent with Western values. It is a flat-out contradiction between what's good for the individual and for society. Not enforcing a patriarchy will be the end of our civilization eventually, unless we can bring feminism to every other corner of the globe first (fat chance).
Don't worry folks, peak oil is going to put an end to this madness :) When world oil production is sinking every year, Gregory Clark's "farewell to the alms" tune will restart...
It's obvious isn't it? Smart people are too busy being smart and doing smart things to deal with children. Dumb people, on the other hand, don't have much else to do except drink themselves silly, watch sports, and screw for entertainment. Smarter people are also more likely to make use of contraception
Unfortunately, I must concur with other posters in that there's not much that can be realistically done about this, unless we start subsidizing dumb people producing fewer spawn.
Flynn hits the nail on the head.
If smart people want to win the Darwinian fitness test, they have to outbreed the dumb.
Right now they subsidize violent stupid people and their violent stupidity and breeding.
If smart people allocated no food for losers, only birth control, both groups would be better off.
In this tech era, black leaders of African countries could hire consultants over the internet to tell them how to run their countries to make them successful. We already know they are willing to ruthlessly enforce any policy.
Dr. Flynn said further, "If the less intelligent women continue to have more children, this place will soon look like Idiocracy. Just look at the U.S.A," he continued. "It is already an idiocracy!"
And some benighted folks still say there's no such thing as group selection.
Yeesh.
I like the way Flynn has succumbed to the Montaigne/Watson syndrome: as he gets a little older, he gets a little bolder. Thanks to the "Flynn effect" Flynn has been the darling of the anti-genetic-IQ crowd for a while. Now that he's been quoted saying that IQ is genetically mediated, will they rename the secular trend in test-component scores?
There is a solution that is consistent with Western values and does not require eugenics, distasteful to horrific to any committed advocate of HBD (i.e. you NEVER know what genes might be critical to survival).
That is rejiggering education. College available ONLY (as a practical matter, due to expense, age requirements, work requirements) to people who are married and have kids. HS goes two-track, vocational/vocational-higher-ed, i.e. machine shop or statistics and accounting, people are encouraged to marry early, have kids, go back to school IN TANDEM in a concentrated 2-3 year college program.
Which would REQUIRE a stable, two parent family committed to being together and supportive, not a musical chairs set of partners.
Hitting young women 18-21 right away (and young men that age too). They have to work, save money (for college later, like buying a house), they can't chase bad boys because if they want kids the time is NOW, and they have to have a stable partner to get to college at age 31 or so.
This would require of course cheap housing for family formation, but Steve missed an important point. Family formation depends at least as much on the willingness of women to forgo career building and status, bad boy chasing, and Masters to Phds early, by having kids in the twenties, as it does cheap housing. Otherwise you just end up with singletons or single mothers in nice houses. No actual nuclear families.
The problem is not too many babies by poor and low IQ folk, it is too little by smart women chasing careers, status, consumerism, and bad boys.
As a practical matter this can never be addressed. Women will never sacrifice as Roissy noted, five minutes of Alpha beating five years of beta.
Hey! Maybe RandyB is right after all.
Dr Flynn said at 73 he was too old to worry about offending anyone
I wonder how many other aging scientists will now have the courage to come forward and admit that genes influence intelligence? It's a pity that Flynn did not have the guts to come forward and speak the truth years ago when it might have done some good.
Welcome Dr Flynn.
You're a few decades late, but we are willing to forgive.
A welcome surprise from Dr. Flynn. He always exhibited the least ideological rigidity amongst non-HBDers.
"Everyone knows if we only allowed short people to reproduce there would be a tendency in terms of genes for height to diminish. Intelligence is no different from other human traits," he told the Sunday Star-Times. "A persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually."
Obviously Jimbo didn't get that one cleared by Komment Kontrol.
So, RandyB, would you also claim that heroin is good for the individual but bad for society? I mean, it makes people feel REAL GOOD at the expense of some other things that are peripheral, like reproduction, love, work, etc.
"Rather than talking about encouraging smart women to have babies and dumb women not to have babies, what we do need to do is make the commitment to good quality education."
Because biology does not exist. as any fule kno.
This is not what Flynn believes, the article is a misrepresentation. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Flynn:
"Flynn later articulated his own views on the Close Up television programme in an interview with Paul Henry, suggesting that the Sunday Star-Times had grossly misrepresented his opinions. In the article, Flynn argued that he never intended for his suggestion to be taken seriously, as he only said this to illustrate a particular point.[4][5]"
@RandyB
Advanced, feminist countries place Anglo-America and Western Europe don't replace themselves with natural fertility, so have to import people from pre-feminist places like Latin America and the Middle East.
Randy, that is not true. We've been sold a bill of goods that we have to import immigrants due to our low fertility rates.
It is true are fertility rates are low, and without immigration, our population would decrease over time. However, the same thing is happening in Japan and South Korea and neither of them is importing immigrants.
It is true Japan and South Korea might be facing a future with fewer and older people who are supported by fewer workers. However, the USA, Canada and Europe have not solved this problem through immigration.
The US still faces the bankruptcy of social security and medicare. Apparently most of the new immigrants coming to the US, Canada and Europe consume more in social benefits then they pay in taxes.
As a result we face the same problems Japan and South Korea do plus we have the added benefit of having to deal with a completely new demographic.
I read a passage from Ilana Mercer who wrote that the strength of the West was never absolute population. We achieved greatness because we got the most out of our human capital. In our heyday around 1900, Europe and North America only accounted for 30% of global population.
It was never about having the most people. It's always been about destroying Western Civilization. The fact that Japan and South Korea have not emulated us on this opened my eyes. They have taken ideas and technology pretty liberally from the West in their rise to prominence. Yet they have absolutely shown no interest in mass immigration despite our elites proclaiming diversity is our strength. Evidently the East Asians don't think so.
What a dumb broad that Cindy so-and-so is. Her statement that genetic intelligence will be improved by additional schooling has gotta' be one for the ages. I am terrified, though, that it is probably par for the course among the college crowd.
Well, after all, China is investing in education ... what a forward thinking country.
"Globally one group that is deliberately over-breeding is muslims, producing low IQ and fanatics"
The highest birth rates are in black African countries, regardless of religion. Many Muslim nations have quite low birth rates.
haha. well, i suppose the one single positive effect from this dysgenic phenomenon, is that euro american liberals are making themselves obsolete. it's like they don't even see what the end game is of their own politics.
you could see how upset bill clinton was during the 2008 election, when he personally realized what the result was of modern white liberal politics. bill had previously spent 8 years saying out loud that he hoped euro americans would be displaced, and then when it happened, and his wife lost the job of president to the least qualified candidate ever, he was so mad he wasn't able to hide it.
Dr Flynn said at 73 he was too old to worry about offending anyone.
So up until now, he was lying so no one would get upset?
I dunno about NZ, but in the US we could stop the coercive practice of paying low income to have children. Here are these dim, uneducated, unmarried, marginally employable folk. They don't have many options. And the government will pay them to have babies. What kind of choice do they have? That abusive manipulation of women's reproduction has to stop.
countering this is that now smart men are more likely to meet and marry smart women, such as at college; whereas in the past smart men would meet and marry their dumb secretary. I believe Steve raised this issue before.
Every wealthy country has more or less this same pattern. It's prosperity, not feminism.
The idea of putting something in the water that sterilized everyone, so that they would have to come to the government to get an antidote to have a baby would probably lead to the extinction of the race within a hundred years. This idea was proposed decades ago by a professor at the Keene, NH campus of the University of New Hampshire, I believe. Can't remember his name.
Commissioner for Children Cindy Kiro said Dr Flynn was getting into "dangerous territory". "Rather than talking about encouraging smart women to have babies and dumb women not to have babies, what we do need to do is make the commitment to good quality education."
Kiro's comment shows that the dumbing down effect is happening faster than Flynn expected...
"countering this is that now smart men are more likely to meet and marry smart women, such as at college; whereas in the past smart men would meet and marry their dumb secretary."
Except that "dumb" secretary was a woman that today would have gone to college or possibly law school. Consider the changes in demographics mean that there were actually more smart women back then and not too many women went to college.
There's no need for scientific advances. Just have your sperm frozen and then get a vasectomy. No more unwanted pregnancies. I'm surprised more NBA players haven't thought of this.
There is no reason that woman can't have education, careers, *and* babies. I had 4 babies starting when I 21. I was a stay-at-home mom for about 16 years, then began to attend university part-time. I eventually got a master's degree and am now a lecturer (in a hard science) at a university. By the time I was 45 my children were mostly grown up and I had twenty more years to work before hitting 65.
There are 4 other women in my department. 3 of them have one child each, and the 4th has 2 children. However I know at least 2 other well educated women who have 4 children, and those children are grown up and doing well--in fact one of them is in my calculus class this semester.
Artificially mass-clone smart people. Suppose we cloned Steve Sailer a million times. We might win.
So the solution to this is that smart people should outbreed dumb people? In a kind of arms race that would result in skyrocketing population totals? Which would end (if ever) how?
Just curious.
There is much truth in these comments, and sad to see that Flynn is already trying to extricate himself.
RandyB and Art, you are right on.
Art, FYI, Molesworth is now on welfare, with 15 children by 23 different mothers.
Molesworth sa: "Wak up and ews the taks sistim to mak those kleva wimin hav babis!"
Anon.
countering this is that now smart men are more likely to meet and marry smart women, such as at college; whereas in the past smart men would meet and marry their dumb secretary. I believe Steve raised this issue before.
I believe the term used is "assortative mating".
There is no reason that woman can't have education, careers, *and* babies. I had 4 babies starting when I 21. I was a stay-at-home mom for about 16 years, then began to attend university part-time. I eventually got a master's degree and am now a lecturer (in a hard science) at a university. By the time I was 45 my children were mostly grown up and I had twenty more years to work before hitting 65.
There are 4 other women in my department. 3 of them have one child each, and the 4th has 2 children. However I know at least 2 other well educated women who have 4 children, and those children are grown up and doing well--in fact one of them is in my calculus class this semester.
I seem to be noticing a somewhat different trend. Smart people appear to be increasingly marrying within their IQ and talent group, which would lead to greater stratification and what amounts to a caste system. And this assortative mating appears to be happening FASTER among the intelligent, because dumb people don't generally care as much except for "is she bangin'?" (as in Idiocracy).
In addition, the Idiocracy Effect is definitely stronger among liberals than among conservatives, and among blacks and mestizos more than whites (albeit for different reasons). Among smart people (or whites), the portion of children with conservative parents relative to liberal ones is far higher than for dumb people (or blacks and mestizos).
Blacks and mestizos are almost monolithically liberal Democrats, and the smarter ones -- a useful proxy being married black women -- have a very low birth rate. (Think of Condi Rice, an only child with no children herself.) This is not the case for whites, who have many more smart conservatives. And these smart white conservatives crush the smart white liberals in the breeding wars. (Sorry, smart white liberals, but adopting Third World children doesn't cut it.)
"I'm surprised more NBA players haven't thought of this."
Very puzzling indeed.
Whatever could be the reason for the failure of so many NBA to undertake such an intelligent, future-oriented course of action?
Let's see... Um...
Nope, I can't think of an explanation that might possibly fit the facts.
It's a complete mystery, and will forever remain unanswerable.
This is not the case for whites, who have many more smart conservatives. And these smart white conservatives crush the smart white liberals in the breeding wars. (Sorry, smart white liberals, but adopting Third World children doesn't cut it.)
Political orientation is not a genetic trait. Smart conservatives might have more kids than smart liberals, but the smart conservatives' kids will attend school and be taught by liberals. After the kids have graduated college, the conservative parents will be lucky if half their children are still conservative. Bottom line, the liberals control education and will convert more than enough kids to keep their ranks full.
Why does he say it will have an effect in 3-4 generations? Wouldn't there be an effect by the next generation?
NZ has recently been ruled by a caste of powerful socialist women led by the childless Helen Clark.
Over years of lax welfare rules the career choice of many young unemployed teen women is to produce offspring.
There is no limit to the number a mother can have, by different fathers and still be state supported.
Most of the youngest mothers are Maori who have not taken advantage of educational oportunities that Cindy Kiro cites.
The best and brightest Maori have gone to Australia many to work in the booming mining industries.
The new conservative government is ultra cautious and can only tinker with the welfare system ....while the country slowly goes broke paying the unproductive to breed.
The only idea the government has had so far is that NZ should emulate Australia and dig up some minerals to pay the bills.
Instead of say restricting State support to one child per woman, we now have a proposal to mine conservation land.
Meanwhile Helen Clark is now head of the United Nations Development program.
Good luck with that, world.
Farmer F
I really don't understand why anyone would even want to bring a life into the world. Life is way overrated. I have no kids and am very glad about that.
"So the solution to this is that smart people should outbreed dumb people? In a kind of arms race that would result in skyrocketing population totals? Which would end (if ever) how? "
Well, if there are more smart people around, we'll be able to support a lot more people on the planet at least. Letting the dumb outbreed exponentially will just result in the world's economies collapsing and all nations reverting to Sub-Saharan Africa standards.
God damn it, something interesting was actually published in the Sunday Star Times, and I missed it completely.
"Political orientation is not a genetic trait."
Buck up, Sad American!
Actually, conservatism IS influenced by genetics:
"In 1988 a study of twins reared apart revealed the heritability of 11 common character traits. The findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reported that social potency is 61% influenced by genes; traditionalism..."
Read more: Heredity http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/301/Heredity.html#ixzz0jYRNWEyg
"Smart conservatives might have more kids than smart liberals, but the smart conservatives' kids will attend school and be taught by liberals. After the kids have graduated college, the conservative parents will be lucky if half their children are still conservative."
All too true. At the same time, the smart conservative's kids will be brainwashed by the public school system will be much less likely to be Liberal than if their parents were Liberals.
"countering this is that now smart men are more likely to meet and marry smart women, such as at college; whereas in the past smart men would meet and marry their dumb secretary."
More assortive mating doesn't make the average person any smarter.
Also, the smart women these smart men are marrying have very low fertility.
So actually it would be more eugenic for smart men to marry secretaries, so long as the secretaries popped out a lot of children.
The elephant in the corner of the room is why do so many "smart" people have to go to university in the first place?
If an university education wasn't used as an expensive and politically correct substitute for an aptitude test, the intelligent people who are more likely to go to college wouldn't delay child bearing as long, and have higher fertility.
So universities really are making society dumber.
*** ben g said...
This is not what Flynn believes, the article is a misrepresentation. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Flynn:
"Flynn later articulated his own views on the Close Up television programme in an interview with Paul Henry, suggesting that the Sunday Star-Times had grossly misrepresented his opinions. In the article, Flynn argued that he never intended for his suggestion to be taken seriously, as he only said this to illustrate a particular point.[4][5]"***
Ben G,
Flynn clarified that the point about putting contraceptives in the water was not serious (there were a number of moronic people at the time who were outraged at the suggestion of having their water interfered with). Flynn's point about the long term demographic trends was pretty clear.
***Anonymous said...
Why does he say it will have an effect in 3-4 generations? Wouldn't there be an effect by the next generation?***
Seymour Itzkoff's book 'The Decline of Intelligence in America' documents that this trend started some time ago.
"Rather than talking about encouraging smart women to have babies and dumb women not to have babies, what we do need to do is make the commitment to good quality education."
How about, "Rather than talking about encouraging sober pregnant mothers to reman sober, and alcoholic pregnant mothers to quit drinking, what we need to do is make a commitment to good quality special education."
Surrogacy looms large in this topic.
The rate of reproduction of mainline Mormons is much grater than the national average and overall contributes greatly to our nation.
"Veracitor" and "ben g" ??
Will the real Jim Flynn stand up?
Whatever--- The initial report
mentioned by Veracitor would be an interesting study in how many mainline US media gave any regard to it at all. R J. Herrnstein (THE BELL CURVE senior author ) wrote an Atlantic Monthly article in about 1982 or so concerning
"IQ and the Media" that became the seminal inspiration for the great research reported by Synderman and Rothman. It is far more interesting and basic to look at how the media morphs and mistreats and buries such items as this than it is to focus upon the topic itself. This process of distortion is virtually macro-psychotic.
If education is the solution to everything, what is the solution to overeducation?
"countering this is that now smart men are more likely to meet and marry smart women, such as at college; whereas in the past smart men would meet and marry their dumb secretary. I believe Steve raised this issue before."
Goofy.
Secretaries in the 50's were smart women.
Their families just weren't going to waste money on college for a daughter who was going to get married and have kids not a career. Remember these are families with more sons than people now have kids.
Ray Sawhill - So the solution to this is that smart people should outbreed dumb people? In a kind of arms race that would result in skyrocketing population totals? Which would end (if ever) how?
The idea is to change the rate of births relative to each. So at the very least getting dumb people to breed less than they do now while smart people carry on spawning at the current rate would be a relative improvement.
Getting the smart to increase their output while getting the dumb to reduce theirs would be even better.
What you outline is only one of several sceanrios.
Btw Ray, has anyone ever said you look like James Woods?
"So the solution to this is that smart people should outbreed dumb people? In a kind of arms race that would result in skyrocketing population totals? Which would end (if ever) how?"
It ends with fewer dumb people as we stop exporting food aid to the poor. We only give them birth control as aid to the poor.
"Political orientation is not a genetic trait. Smart conservatives might have more kids than smart liberals, but the smart conservatives' kids will attend school and be taught by liberals."
There is a definite counter culture working, however. Those Duggar folks have to be at least average intelligence and there are more where they come from. There is a natalist movement within the Christian homeschool movement and when you have that many kids who go straight into business without college, there is a reasonable probability that a fair number will not turn lefty. The philosophy is to learn independent of institutions and use their own networks. Just for reference, the Amish used to lose about 25% of their young people. That has dropped to about 10%. A substantially different group with a strong identity that is self reinforcing can remain separate. Any pro natalist movement can grow quickly as a percentage of the population when the rest of the population has fertility below 2.0.
THE most significant work on the causes of fertility decline comes from the little-noticed work of the little-noticed John Mueller (he is proud to say that he is not 'Dr.' John Mueller), which is apparently only publishable in an obscure journal put out by Notre Dame. That his simple logistic regression equation accounts for tremendously more of the variance in fertility decline worldwide than any other model is apparently not especially important. Go to this link:
http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2671/pub_detail.asp
Then click on 'View as pdf' at the top, download it, and read the whole thing. It is a remarkable paper in so many ways: a re-starting of the entire field of economics, to include, for example, the insights of St. Augustine; and using this more complete view of human economic nature to tease out factors that can account for variance in fertility decline worldwide. Just by the way, Mr. Mueller found that a recent history of having lived under totalitarianism, as a simple on-off variable, accounted for as much of the variance as any of the other models out there, including those by a Nobel Prize economist.
A more recent talk by Mr. Mueller clarifies the analysis a little further.
Actually feminism is a self-correcting mechanism
Women get feminist and under-breed, meanwhile the overbreeding muslims take over and these feminist women get put in a burkha and made to breed 5 kids
For all death is inevitable,
for women , 5 kids is inevitable, either now as a free woman or later inside an islamic harem
The actual discovery of the now-called 'Flynn Effect':
Human abilities in cultural context
Read a few pages - it's pretty interesting.
Dr Flynn said at 73 he was too old to worry about offending anyone
IOW, he was 'worried' previously - implying ...?
"Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities." - S. Pinker
Sad American said: "Smart conservatives might have more kids than smart liberals, but the smart conservatives' kids will attend school and be taught by liberals."
The key word here is "smart". I was relieved and glad the day I dropped in on my smart conservative neighbor and mother of 5 to find her going through her teen-aged daughter's history textbook for signs of left-wing bias. (She can't home-school because she needs a paying job to help out with medical bills not covered by insurance.)
Smart conservative people are aware of the attempted left-wing indoctrination of their children and do everything in their power to counteract it, including having frank discussions with their children. And contrary to what the left would have you believe, the children of such parents tend, in my observation anyway, to be bright, inquiring, imaginative and lively.
I tell my neighbor if her kids were any cuter, they'd be bulldogs.
Push a leftist and they'll admit individual differences in IQ are genetic, at least for the purposes of argument.
It's the racial differences they refuse to accept as genetic, and Flynn said jack shit about that.
countering this is that now smart men are more likely to meet and marry smart women, such as at college; whereas in the past smart men would meet and marry their dumb secretary. I believe Steve raised this issue before.
Doesn't counter it if the smart couples aren't breeding.
I really don't understand why anyone would even want to bring a life into the world. Life is way overrated. I have no kids and am very glad about that.
It's not something anyone will be able to explain to you.
All too true. At the same time, the smart conservative's kids will be brainwashed by the public school system will be much less likely to be Liberal than if their parents were Liberals.
It's very unlikely (IMO) that susceptibility to brainwashing has no genetic component.
Dumb people, on the other hand, don't have much else to do except drink themselves silly, watch sports, and screw for entertainment. Smarter people are also more likely to make use of contraception.
Richard, you're a howl!
New Zealand children could get dumber in three or four generations unless women with higher education started producing more babies.
What puzzles me is this. If intelligence is biological and passes down the genes, what has formal education via manmade institutions got to do with it? Naturally, intelligence will be enhanced through formal education, and a genetically intelligent person will learn some skills he didn't come here knowing, but such activities can't make him "intelligent."
So, if a biologically dumb woman reads lots of books and takes lots of courses (as measured through "higher education"), will she give birth to biologically intelligent children? Won't she give birth to dumb kids, anyway? Will all those books affect her genes?
Surely, we know that just about everyone who wants to, will graduate from college. So what does the fact of a college educated woman tell you? Not much.
Sorry, smart white liberals, but adopting Third World children doesn't cut it.
An illusion of citizenship
Woman adopted as an infant from Mexico didn't have paperwork done to get her citizenship.
MIKE ARCHBOLD; staff writer
Published: 03/29/1012:05 am | Updated: 03/29/1011:13 am
thenewstribune.com
Tara Ammons Cohen doesn't speak Spanish.
She hasn't lived in Mexico since she was 5 months old.
For nearly all her 37 years, she thought she was a U.S. citizen.
Turns out she was wrong, and now she faces deportation to her native country, where she knows no one, doesn't speak the language and fears for her life...
And though Cohen is not a citizen, she is a felon - and that set up her deportation with no chance of returning to the United States.
In 2007, she pleaded guilty to theft and drug trafficking for stealing a purse that contained two bottles of prescription pills. Under federal law, because the charges are aggravated felonies, pleading guilty to them means she must leave the country...
good point jody. i've long come to the conclusion that the decline of the west is only going to stop once the western elite have their asses kicked too.
It's a shame the government will not provide monetary incentives for college-educated parents to have children. Either that or start offering small sums of money to dumb men to get vasectomies after they father one child (I think this would be even more effective even than the dumb/poor women getting their tubes tied). Of course you'd have to put such program under some other name like "empowering yourself through choice" or some other liberalspeak to get the anti-eugenics crowd off your back.
And btw, it isn't feminism that causes a low birth rate, it's a higher standard of living coupled with a relatively intelligent population. Japan, South Korea, and Iran all have birth rates below replacement and not one of those countries are "feminist" in the Western sense.
"So, if a biologically dumb woman reads lots of books and takes lots of courses (as measured through "higher education"), will she give birth to biologically intelligent children? Won't she give birth to dumb kids, anyway? Will all those books affect her genes?"
New studies in epigenetics say that yes, one can effect genetic, cellular level change by his Life choices, amongst other things
"n biology, epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence, hence the name epi- (Greek: επί- over, above) -genetics. These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations."
Thanks Truth, for showing us the next liberal argument: Lamarckism.
Svigor,
It isn't a question of susceptibility to brainwashing.
It's a question of having an innate tug toward conservatism that will make them less likely to buy into Liberal Brainwashing.
They’d be great at being brainwashed into being conservatives.
"Mother Nature" solution to such conundrums is mass extinction of the unfit.
Could we reformulate the question as: How can smart people keep apart from the dumb ones, society wise?
"There is a natalist movement within the Christian homeschool movement and when you have that many kids who go straight into business without college, there is a reasonable probability that a fair number will not turn lefty."
Yeah but how big is this natalist movement? I'd be surprised if it numbered more than 50,000. Even assuming that the children of today's natalists are natalist themselves, which is by no means certain (one does not have to be left wing to use contraception) it will be a long, long time before the Christian homeschooling natalists become a demographic force.
As for the high retention rates of the Amish, the Amish have erected far higher barriers between their subcommunity and the outside world than pro-Natalist Christian homeschoolers would likely be comfortable with.
New studies in epigenetics say that yes, one can effect genetic, cellular level change by his Life choices, amongst other things
Lamarckism is dead, long live Lamarckism!
Epigenetics as the reason for low black intelligence seems contradicted by the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Education2.png
Well, seeing as how that's a link to a page that does not exist, it may provide evidence to someone's low intelligence.
Okay, let's try this link again, darn it.
IQ is largely inherited.
"I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote," he said. "You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child."
Any reason why we can't do this? I have more confidence in scientists and engineers than politicians and policy wonks in solving any particular problem.
It isn't a question of susceptibility to brainwashing.
Yeah my response was a non-sequitur. I don't know what I was thinking at the time, so don't ask, but I do think the statement stands and is worth thinking about.
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