[tharne]

These types of movements never really go anywhere, in large part because their proponents remove themselves from the genepool.

It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates.

The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. That could be a bad thing or a a good thing depending on how you see yourself.

[mikewarot]

>The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself.

The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit.

How well have you been able to convince your friends of something? Yeah, you'll have slightly better odds with kids, because in the beginning you have full control over their environment, until school starts.

[tharne]

> The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit

People will do what they want, but most people end up with values fairly similar to those of their family. We tend to focus all of our attention on the differences because those are more interesting and gossip worthy. But most of us are products of our genetics and our environment to a greater extent than we'd like to admit.

[HKH2]

> nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit.

So brainwashing doesn't work?

[mikewarot]

Fortunately, it doesn't.

[bwestergard]

At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist? At what rate do the children of haredi Jewish parents remain haredi? What about grandchildren?

I'd be curious to see some of the demography here. My intuition is that in the U.S., these subgroups are growing their share of religiously identified persons (e.g. a larger fraction of Catholics are traditionalists today than in 1970) but they are not growing as a share of the general population.

[bckr]

> At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist?

Also, at what rate do apostates produce other apostates?

Living a happy life outside the mold of what you grew up with sets an example for others. Making babies is not a surefire way of producing like-minded people, nor is it the only way.

[goodpoint]

This is absurd. The "gene pool" has nothing to do with people's sense of ethics around having kids or not.

We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.

[rsj_hn]

> This is absurd. The "gene pool" has nothing to do with people's sense of ethics around having kids or not.

To think that fertility -- one of the key issues in evolution -- would not be influenced by genetics requires a massive detachment from reality as well as lack of awareness of current knowledge about genetics and human behavior.

Note that we have data on this, and a good rule of thumb is that most everything is about half genetic. This includes likelihood to have kids. Why? well, things like sperm counts, and personality traits are influenced by genetics, as are things like tendency to be religious[4]. Values are also strongly influenced by genetics, as is income and intelligence[5], all of which is correlated with decisions to have or delay having children. Similarly the duration of the reproductive lifespan of females is influenced by genetics[2] - something very important as women delay childbirth:

The most recent GWAS conducted in ∼370,000 women of European ancestry identified 389 independent signals explaining ∼7.4% of the population variance in age at menarche (Fig. 1), corresponding to ∼25% of the estimated heritability[2]

And even the decision to delay childbirth is influenced by many factors that have a genetic component.

> We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.

An international research team, including the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, has found twelve genes that may help determine why some people have children at an early age, while others remain childless.[3]

See also [1] for an overview and discussion.

- - -

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK97281/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-018-0068-1

[3] https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2016/twelve-genes-influence-ferti...

[4] https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/beliefs

[5] https://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/1000H/BouchardRev.pdf

[goodpoint]

You are confusing ability to have children (which has genetic components) with the decision of doing so. Then you make a mishmash of claims around other aspects. Then you cherry-pick some random articles, some of which not linked to papers from reliable journals.

Anybody could cherry-pick articles in the same way to make any claim. E.g. that norwegians make better programmers because of some obscure genes potentially related to hand dexterity that might potentially help typing...

[rsj_hn]

> You are confusing ability to have children (which has genetic components) with the decision of doing so.

No, I'm not. Please re-read the sources I mentioned, as well as the text I wrote. I listed both factors and focused on the second - indeed I emphasized this point repeatedly.

> Then you cherry-pick some random articles

None of the points I raised are controversial in the literature, and the journals and textbooks I cited are quite mainstread -- e.g. Nature, NIH, etc. You are welcome to cite even a single paper. I'll wait.

> Anybody could cherry-pick articles in the same way to make any claim.

You know what is even easier that "cherry picking" articles? Not being able to provide even a single scientific paper for any of your claims, because they have no scientific basis.

[errcorrectcode]

Low intelligence, low income, and poor self control are associated with greater teen pregnancies and larger families. Smart, high income kids are rarely teenaged moms.

[thefz]

> The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself.

Who cares? I'll be dead!