Stupid People Are Breeding

Natural selection is alive and well. What’s driving the selection, and where will this selection take us? Attractive or wealthy people are each more likely to pass on their genes than the relatively poorer and uglier. This would suggest that, as a population, humans are getting better-looking and better suited to earning wealth.

However, the people who seem to be breeding most are the poorest and stupidest.

“Evolution is a double-edged sword,” says University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending. “What evolution cares about is that I have more offspring. If you can do it by charming and manipulating, and I’m a hardworking farmer that’s going to feed the kids ten years down the road, then you’re going to win. Hit-and-run, irresponsible males are reproducing more. That isn’t good for anyone except those males, but that’s evolution.”

One of the reasons that humans have historically wanted to procreate more was the labor motive: more children meant more workers to reap the wheat fields or milk the cows. Increasing the size of your family was like expanding a business, with each incremental birth bringing additional earning power, sustenance, and stability.

Modern humans, however, utilize technology like heavy machinery to nearly automate food production and distribution. It’s a much more efficient process, and manual labor simply cannot compete on cost with mechanized business. Procreating, then, no longer adds any value to a family because adding more unskilled labor to the family unit is more of an economic burden then an economic blessing. It just doesn’t make sense to turn out 10 kids anymore.

The systems that made sense in the past (constant procreation) just don’t function in modern society. Because food and raw materials are provided at low cost by modern technology, the logical thing for humans to do is to specialize, which is exactly what humans have been gravitating toward for the past hundreds (and indeed thousands) of years. Instead of making your living by gathering food by hand, you could choose a much more valuable path: that of being trained in engineering and eventually building a thousand tractors to gather food much more effectively than by hand. Those who specialize are rewarded, and those who cling to an outdated paradigm suffer.

A small group of specialized (read: educated) people provide significantly more value than a large group of unspecialized people.

Sadly, educated people are procreating less than uneducated people. There are myriad reasons for this, one of the biggest being that getting an education and using those skills to contribute to society takes a lot of time. If you’re a constructive, contributing member in society, you might not have time to commit to raising children. Raising children only diminishes your own contribution to society because it requires a lot of your time. The only way that raising children would increase your contribution to society is if the quality of upbringing you provide is such that they grow up to be an even more specialized contributor than you, and provide more than is lost in the first place when you allocate time away from work to nurture the child. A good example of this is Einstein’s parents. Perhaps they would’ve themselves contributed more to society by working more instead of spending time raising a child. They took a chance, and society is all the better because they birthed and nurtured a genius whose contribution went far beyond theirs.

Going back to modern natural selection, there are still groups who have stuck to the outdated model of constant procreation. These people are clearly not intelligent: they prefer quantity over quality in offspring. Society does not reward them for being so backwards, yet somehow they don’t seem to see the err in their ways. If unintelligent people are having the most children, while the educated and specialized are too busy contributing to society and helping others, natural selection will favor the stupid and poor. Humans are getting less intelligent.

What can be done? There’s an easy answer, but it’s not a very politically-correct one. We should restrict the amount of children that one could have using either laws or incentives so that we can ensure quality of offspring is the norm and not quantity. I wholeheartedly prefer using financial incentives (making payments to those without children, taxing those who do) over criminalization. Using financial incentives, only the rich, successful, and educated would be obliged to procreate, while those who cannot afford the privilege because of their stupidity or lack of motivation would not procreate. This system would likely lead to better prepared people, and more importantly, a better future for humanity. Natural selection can be controlled or influenced by a new system to improve humanity over time, all that’s left to do is implement it.

Post script

(I was partly inspired to write on this subject by an article in Wired Science, “Humans Evolving More Rapidly Than Ever, Say Scientists” by Brandon Keim, which chronicles a study published this week that concludes that “the speed of human evolution increased rapidly during the last 40,000 years — and it’s only going to get faster,” and that “selective pressures are still at work; they just happen to be different than those faced by our distant ancestors.” My topic drifted so much that I only ended up referencing a quote from the article once, whereas I’d originally intended to quickly summarize the study (which can be found here: Link.)