[swatcoder]

> 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).

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.

[dash2]

You're mistaken. Polygenic scores for educational attainment correlate negatively with fertility in the US, UK and elsewhere (in fact, AFAIK everywhere it has been tested). So it's not just because people in poor countries have more kids.

Note also that natural selection is about correlation not causality. If an lab accident blows up MIT, that will select against intelligence, even though intelligence wasn't causal.