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If you look at the complete collapse of fertility rates in the developed world, that is probably the strongest evolutionary pressure humans have faced for millennia. It is a bit weird to me that the scientific press doesn't talk more about how evolutionary pressure applies here. I think that people are wary to talk about this because it can end up sounding like social Darwinism, or that they believe "Idiocracy" was a scientific documentary. But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility. While "level of education" is obviously not inherited genetically, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to hypothesize that genetic factors play a role in someone's educational attainment. And, currently, the more education you get, the less likely you are to reproduce (statistically, of course). Sex evolved to feel really good because for most of human history having sex would usually, eventually lead to babies. Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link. Similarly, when a major factor preventing you from reproducing was starving to death, being smarter or cleverer was an evolutionary advantage. I'd argue that advantage no longer exists. Another simple anecdote: I recently went to my uncle's funeral, and his family was very religious (Catholic). My father, on the other hand, rejected religion and raised us all atheists. My father has 6 descendants, my uncle 24. Again, "religiosity" is not a genetically inherited trait, but I think it would be foolish to believe genetic predisposition plays 0 role. I say all this just to highlight that, eventually, the "collapse in birthrates" will take care of itself - people with a strong desire and ability to procreate will outcompete, at least in terms of offspring survival, their peers. This will have a huge, profound effect on world society that most academics are too scared to talk about. |
Far from inescapable, this is just a phantom of noisy data.
It's easy to find statistically communicative population slices where family size is quite high and so is level of education (ignoring that "level of education" is a culturally specific and disputable measure in the first place).
What we really see is that integration into the modern US/EU-inspired "universal middle class" urban culture, which now spans the globe, seems to correlate with lower birth rates and family sizes. But there are countless factors contributing to what makes that culture unique and that could easily be playing a role in the birth rates and family sizes.
That said, it does suggest that the this "modern" culture needs to induct outsiders in order to maintain its scale since its proving relatively poor at growing its own population among insiders. What that means for the future is unclear, and if you're personally all in the on the "modern", it can easily look concerning or even bleak in the way you describe.