216 comments on DrumBeat: April 6, 2008
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216 comments on DrumBeat: April 6, 2008
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www.childfree.net
Average cost of raising a child to 18 in the USA in 2007 - $200,000
Average cost of a vasectomy - $500
Happiness a child can give you and your loved ones - Priceless
Then aren't you just using the child for your own benefit, consequences be damned?
To say nothing of the futureless existence you grant a new child, given what the world will look like in a few scant years.
Seems rather selfish.
You are right 710. Let's force all the males in the world to have vascetomies. We are so doomed anyway lets go ahead and ensure that we cause our species to go extint.
He didn't say anything about forcing anyone. There's a big difference between encouraging people to have fewer children and forcing them to have vasectomies.
Of course, if you do go child-free, what will you do when everyone else is practicing "swap children, then eat"?
If the intelligent people on this site don't have kids, who will keep the human race going? (This is just a funny video I thought I would share)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upyewL0oaWA&e/
I don't find that a very compelling argument. Even assuming intelligence breeds true, which is highly controversial to say the least, it's our kind of intelligence that has gotten us into this mess in the first place.
OTOH, well loved children raised by two intelligent and involved parents are a likely source of "problem solvers".
Alan
But assuming that people here are 1) married and 2) would be involved parents is a big jump, wouldn't you say?
I'd like to think 'humanity' has something to do with it. Those oddball emotions like love and compassion and caring and hope. Comparing a child to a vasectomy on the basis of cost hits me as sort of creepy. Have we all just sort of descended into little calculators and cost/benefit machines??
But you don't have to have your own child to experience those things.
And you don't actually need a child at all to experience those things.
Except for hope, but I'll quiet down on the hope-bashing today.
Darn right. "intelligence" may or may not roughly breed true, but what the inheritor does with it is in any case not usefully predictable. Popping out kids as a basis for changing the world for the better has nearly always been a thin rationalization at best, hypocrisy at worst.
My wife and I did NOT have kids, though able. Instead, we have done our best to pass on our rational conclusions, methods and ethics to the children of others. Having one's thoughts and values 'inherited' in that way is perhaps more satisfying in a sense, and certainly doesn't make the problem worse.
"yi zi er shi-- swap children, then eat"... good link, L, and it's not fiction. It's what a policy of outbreeding the resources can lead to, and the world is currently heading for famines that will make the historic chinese ones look like fad diets. The fact that "children are our future" doesn't mean "more is better".
I would be quite sad now if I'd had kids, for their sakes.
Exactly. If you want to have kids because you love kids, fine. But telling people it's their duty to have kids because the world needs their genes...uh, no. The world does not need anyone's genetic contribution that bad.
Similair conclusions - and my wife is a teacher! We may have one in due course, but we would both draw the line there. Her school holidays are fairly occupied 'helping' with her sisters' kids [all nice ones thankfully].
Well, many things in our society are rated by their cost/benefit ratio.
e.g. shitloads of money vs. an inhabitable planet
Tough decision, isn't it?
"Fck the planet! I take the money and buy me a new one!"
- some idiot
Exactly. I was saying my goodbyes to the folks at the post office, where I'd mailed so many packages out over the years while my business was going OK, and one Indian lady there said, "But don't you have children, to help you?" And I said "No, no children, American children don't help their parents." and that is the actual truth in this country. Everything's a cost-benefit analysis. It's probably one of the most atomized societies ever to exist. So, the idea of having kids to take care of you in your old age or in hard times has no meaning in the US.
I'm only stating a fact backed up by plenty of evidence, not looking for sympathy, when I say neither of my parents were involved, and the only people they ever really cared about were themselves. Heavily narcissistic, and physicians, too, to boot.
The point is that I have the emotional awareness and empathy that both of them lacked, and I'm a much better problem solver than the two of them put together. I had to be in order to survive.
You need to read "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection" (1930) by R. A. Fisher. This classic book is probably the second most influential work in evolutionary biology, besides the "Origin" itself. As an actuary I'm sure you've heard of Fisher. He's considered the "father" of modern statistics, as well as one of the three founding fathers of population genetics. Fisher devotes the entire second half of his book to exploring mathematically the implications of intelligence (IQ) and fecundity being rather strongly negatively correlated. BTW, the heritability of IQ is ~.7.
It's our kind of STUPIDITY, not intelligence, that's gotten us into this mess in the first place. The ape is crafty, cunning, clever perhaps... but NOT intelligent, and even less wise.
"intelligence" is not a scalar.
Intelligence and wisdom are two very different things. Perhaps Leanan was thinking of the latter.
Actually, I was thinking of anthropologist Marvin Harris' claim that only technology that has actually been beneficial to man in the long term is birth control.
Voluntary birth control is exponentially self-extinguishing and therefore makes the birth rate higher long term.
Evolution shows this result.
Only universal population policy, or random selection of fertility are safe for the gene pool.
People seem to find this simple logic hard to visualize.
Sorry, I don't see that at all. It's not like desire to have children is a genetic trait. It's a lot more complex than that. (Example: it's looking more and more like homosexuality is genetic. How does that work, in your world of "simple logic"?)
Most people, given the choice (and the economic ability), have kids. Just not as many as they would have otherwise.
I don't think Leanan is an actuary. I think she's an engineer. Gail's an actuary. I used to be an actuarial student.
And what is an actuary, exactly? It's where thespians and performing artists go to die, a mortuary for actors.
Sorry Leanan but you are dead wrong here. If intelligence is not heritable then there is no such thing as evolution. In the eighties there were a few who, out of their deep commitment to political correctness, objected to the heritability of intelligence. They were namely Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould, but their arguments on the subject have since been totally discredited by Richard Dawkins, EO Wilson, Matt Ridley, Mark Ridley, John Maynard Smith and at least a dozen others.
Intelligence is simply a Darwinian adaptation. It is Homo sapiens one tool that gives them a great advantage over other animals. In our evolutionary past, when we first split off from other great apes, intelligence was our main survival tool. Only the smartest survived, and the smarter the individual the greater chance they had of surviving and reproducing. And in that way the average intelligence kept increasing over time until we arrived at our current level a few centuries ago.
On average, smarter parents have smarter kids and vise versa. But of course there is always variation. After all, natural variation, or what others may call small mutations, are the driving force of evolution.
Ron Patterson
What if intelligence is not a heritable trait, but the developmental capacity for intelligence is, and in order to fill that capacity there need to be adequate external environmental modifiers?
My mother's IQ was in the 130s, my father's in the 140s, and my IQ at last test was 169. Of course, both of my parents were also sociopaths, and I attribute my higher IQ to having to piece together critical survival skills at a very early age.
Most heritable traits need environmental triggers. The capacity for intelligence and intelligence, in this case would be exactly the same thing.
Ron Patterson
I beg to differ, as I don't think that it is intelligence per se that gave us a major advantage over all other animals.
Intelligence can manifest itself in many ways, which is likely the reason, why there are many, more or less different definitions of it, and the intelligence of man is a very technological one, as our anatomical features allowed us to use items as tools to solve, in a quite efficent manner, whatever problems we encountered. Thus, I think, evolution has not only favored the development of our technological way of thinking, but made it likely an innate behavior to find solutions in the creation and use of tools.
Accordingly the development of a mind that searches for solutions in technology would be completely useless, without the hand, as a species without the physical capabilities to use tools wouldn't benefit from the mental ability to do so.
I don't doubt that the development of hand and brain were reinforcing each other, but I want to note that our way of thinking would be a evolutionary dead end without the hand to perform and that the evolution of our intelligence might have gone a completely different way, if we weren't furnished with that little multi-purpose tool, as we couldn't manipulate things in the way we can now.
This would also explain, why so many people are so stubbornly clinging to the faith that technology will be the solution of our problems, even if they should know better.
I have severe doubts that it is that easy. Even an intelligent specimen would have to have a minimum of physical strenght to survive and dominate his male rivals.
Okay, I'll bite, what was it that gave such a major advantage over other animals? Was it our sense of smell? Was it our strength? Was it our ability to run extremely fast? Was it our our super sense of hearing? Or was it our ability to fly???
Clearly FalloutMonkey, we have one weapon and one weapon only, our brains. Otherwise we would have been toast. To claim that it was not our intelligence that gave us an advantage then it would behoove you to tell us what was. Everything we have not, technology, finding solutions to complicated problems and sophisticated tool use it the result of our superior intelligence!
FalloutMonkey, we are not talking about what gave us an advantage over our male rivals of our own species, we are talking about what gave us such a huge advantage over other animals! Please try to understand what the subject is man. Then explain how we, the only great ape without an opposing big toe, who could not climb very well, or run very fast, or no huge teeth or claws, and not very strong, could have had such a huge success in surviving and reproducing. What gave us such a great advantage over other great apes?
That being said, all other things being equal, a high intelligence would always give a man the advantage over other males in any tribe. There is no law that says smart men would be weaklings while dumb brutes would be large and muscular. The smart ones would be just as likely to possess brawn as the dumb ones. And of course cunning and stealth would usually win out over brute strength in any case. In this never ending battle for survival, that we lived in for the first few million years of our existence as a species, we needed to use every item in our arsenal, brains and brawn. It was never either this weapon or that weapon, it was every weapon we possessed.
Just answer that question FM, then tell me again that our intelligence gave us no advantage over other animals in general and other great apes in particular?
We have one weapon FM, one huge advantage over all other animals on earth, that is our brains, our ability to think, to plan for the future, to make tools that trap or kill other animals, to plant crops, and to pass on this knowledge to our children that they may have a far better chance of survival.
Damn man, to say that our brains gives no advantage over other animals is just down in the dirt dumb!
Ron Patterson
Darwinian I agree with you 100%, and humans' ability to work together, language to converse with and come up with strategies, to all occupy pretty much the same "mindspace" as we plot how to get the baby mammoth away from the herd, etc that is a huge advantage for us. If I go out and chase lizards, forget it, I can't catch one - they're fast enough to deal with kestrels and roadrunners, it's a piece of cake for one to run away from me. But if a friend and I go out, and team up, we can catch 'em all day. And come up to them, and even keep their little mental computers jammed up to the extent that my friend's reached his hand out and gently rubbed the lizard under the chin! Hilarious! Needless to say we were able to get some great photos of the little fellows. Now, animals *can* work together. Wolves, falcons, etc. but not to the fine degree that we can. We're kinda good runners, kinda OK climbers, can swim, actually the best throwers in the animal kingdom, but we're classic generalists - kinda good at a lot of things, not super-good at any. But our intelligence is a sort of uber-skill, where we can become a super-organism that can encircle prey, coordinate running a camp (some stay and take care of the kids, some go out one way and gather, others go the other way and hunt) and this is a HUGE advantage.
More hard science and less PC, I say.
Well, I have to assume that you didn't even try to read my post, because I gave you the answer already and you prefer to give me that drivel without even mentioning it. But here we go again.
It was our hand that gave us the significant advantage over all other beings. Should I be more clearly?
The HAND! <-Look here!
How did you manage to read over that one in my first post?
You might disagree with me, but first cut off your fingers and show me what you can do then with all your intelligence. You couldn't use or make a single tool, and thus, you would be easy meat for every predator out there. All your intelligence wouldn't help you a lot.
And to spin this further, if all our ancestors hadn't been equipped with the hand, no tool would've ever been invented, as it would've been utterly pointless, simply because we couldn't use them.
Is it so hard for you to imagine how difficult it would've been for us smarty smarts to make those first tools out of stone without our petty little fingers?
No matter how intelligent we might be, we would certainly not be where we are now, if we had paws or claws or fins instead of hands.
I don't doubt that we do pretty well in using our hands, but to be so adamant that our intelligence is the dominant, even sole feature that gave us an advantage over all other animals is leaving out the fact that you have to have the ability to use this intelligence.
Evolution favours those who make the best out of their physical capabilities. So what you call intelligence, I call adaption.
And where is this intelligence anyway?
The one who took a stone back then and thought "Hey, I can make something out of that" was intelligent, all the others who adopted his crafting of tools, did nothing more than imitating. And imitating has, as far as I know, not a lot to do with intelligence. And look around you, what most people do is imitating, only few are really creating.
And if it was intelligence that made us so superior, how did that work out? You state yourself that the most intelligent specimen are those who are more likely to survive, so this must be true for all beings and not only for us. So why aren't we dominated by species who had much more time to evolve their intelligence?
I wouldn't mind if you'd say that it was our ability to manipulate our environment that made us the dominant species on this planet, because this is actually true, but to say that it was solely and only our intelligence is just crap.
No, actually we were talking about reproduction and evolution.
You said:
"Only the smartest survived..."
Exchange smartest with fittest and you got a point, because this would actually include mental and physical abilities, but smartness alone won't get you very far. This was the point I wanted to make.
You know that I don't agree with you on that one. Our big advantage is our ability to manipulate (you see the word "manus" in there?) the environment. And that is mostly possible, because of our hand and not our brain. I don't say that the adaption of our brain doesn't play a role, but this adaption would've never occured without the hand in the first place.
You are assuming that only humans are able to think. I'm sure you won't find a lot of credible scientific papers that will underpin your claim. On the other hand I fear this ability isn't very prevalent in our species, when I look at all those sheeple out there who are still thinking that BAU can go on indefinitely.
Yeah, we do a lot of planning for our future? Not that it is very effective though, otherwise we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.
No hand, no traps 'n tools, I dare to say.
Whoever found out the connection between the planting of seeds and growing of plants, must've been one hell of a smart individual. But as soon as it was known how it worked, all what was needed for further use was imitation.
And though it has certainly helped us to dominate the planet, it has also helped a great lot in severly overpopulating it.
The development of a sophisticated language required that people had to pass on complex issues. Most animals don't have to teach their cubs many complex things, so simple forms of communication are fairly sufficent.
On the other hand, to teach your children how to craft a huge variety of tools, language is almost a necessity. So one leads to another.
You can say things really nice, can you? Especially things that I have never, not with a single word mentioned in my post. Either you didn't understand what I wanted to say and thus jump to whatever conclusion you like, or you didn't even try to read my post.
So, here again: Evolution granted man the favour of the hand and he started to use it. Those humans who used their hands more efficently than others survived. Of course this process shaped our brains!
And I have said before that the development of hand and brain reinforced each other!
So both, our hand and the ability to use it, made us the dominant species on this planet.
But if you prefer to believe that man could dominate this world with his current intellect alone, even if it would be placed in the body of a Paramecium, well, then go on and do so.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about this Ron.
Doesn't regression to the mean actually predict that the children of highly intelligent parents are more likely to be less intelligent than their parents?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
Seems to me that intelligence is both highly complex and poorly understood, and likely to be the product of a number of factors, many of which are social and environmental.
bados
Then pray tell Bados, how did we get so smart? How did intelligence evolve. Was it just an accident?
I am well aware of regression to the mean. I think it is better referred to as regression toward the mean. But regression seldom, if ever, reaches the mean. If it did then there would be no such thing as evolution, as change over time.
Ron Patterson
Intelligent Design
Response to environmental triggers resulting in selection bias.
bados
Bados, you have said nothing. If intelligence is not heritable then it could not possibly evolve. WHAT responds to environmental triggers? Genes? Then that IS heritability .
But your response is really confusing. I really don't think you are sure of what you think you might be saying and are perhaps totally unaware that you are not really saying anything. ;-)
Ron Patterson
Aliens.
Even assuming intelligence breeds true,
Its possible that while the genes 'breed true' - the diet of the grandmother can effect how the expression will happen in the child.
The amount of the unknown in how genes work is staggering.
"The amount of the unknown in how genes work is staggering."
No kidding! And the hubris of people who think they are doing genetic "engineering" is mind-boggling.
Epigenetic influences, pleiotropic effects, structural vs. regulatory genes, etc., etc., on and on. It's very, very complicated.
(I worked for some time doing population genetics research.)
Yes, most people have no idea how crude the methods used are - which is why Europeans and others are letting the genetically engineered foods be tested on the US population - good luck.
For example how is knowing how to build a nest from the appropriate materials coded into a bird's DNA - there is much we do not know!
Exactly. The general consensus is that intelligence is about half heredity and half environment. Which means trying to breed for it is problematic at best.
I see little reason to believe that people here have more innate intelligence than the general population. We're probably self-selected for a certain technerdal bent, but that's not the same thing as being "more intelligent." Maybe we're just more privileged.
And hey, "The Bell Curve" guys say Asians are smarter than whites. So if IQ can save the world, why not leave it up to a billion Chinese?
Ha ha, nice one Leanan. Of course the guy had to say that as a cop-out against the accusations of racism: 'Hey I didn't say white people were the smartest, so it must be objective!'
Asians, or at least the ones he is talking about, put immense effort into academic work and spend much of their early lives learning to defeat tests. Of course they look smart.
But as you have pointed out already, there are many different types of 'smart', and IQ alone ain't gonna save the world. This supposed intelligence didn't stop the Chinese getting stomped by the Mongols, and then by the Europeans, did it?
We might also remember that intelligent people are sometimes startlingly stupid in some very important respects.
This supposed intelligence didn't stop the Chinese getting stomped by the Mongols, and then by the Europeans, did it?
Now I'm not sure about the mongols, but the Europeans had drugs to give to the masses.
Feel good drugs.
Homebrew, thanks a million. Best damn video I have watched all year. This is exactly what is happening and this is exactly why it is happening! I have been trying to explain this phenomenon to people for years and this YouTube video does it far better than my explanations ever did.
In times of plenty natural selection eases its grip and things can regress. And in this case, things are definitely regressing.
Ron Patterson
We are Devo.
http://www.subgenius.com
"You'll pay to know what you really think."
This is the intro to a full length feature film. So you have plenty more to enjoy if you rent it Ron!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
"Of course, if you do go child-free, what will you do when everyone else is practicing "swap children, then eat"?
Borrow a kid from somebody with too many and eat him.
What's yer favorite recipe?
lets go ahead and ensure that we cause our species to go extint.
Yup, I should think the rest of
the universe would be quite grateful !!
And if forced vasectomies didn't result in homo sapien extinction, then it would seem reasonable to
expect a more advanced and enlightened species.
Disclosure: My father had a vasectomy in ~'63, thus my bias.
I think the merits of the argument stand quite well on their own, though :)
I guess the rest of the universe couldn't care less about what's going on on that watery planet somwhere in the outer skirts of the milky way.
But many of the non-human inhabitants of Earth might actually be quite cheerful when the great oppressor is gone for good.
Or at least left alive, if they're lucky. "Intelligence" is a slippery term even within a single human culture; but one of the things I've done is study nonhuman cognition, and in the process gotten to know a number of dolphins and similar critters. They have quite complex "intelligence" analgous to our own in some convergent-evolution ways and in some ways different. They don't have thumbs, hydrodynamics has shaped them, and they could never discover fire or work metals. This shows, among other things, that it's not 'intelligence' per se which is toxic to the earth and its owner, but the confluence of our sort of intelligence with the random and coincidental opportunities which have been provided.
The dieoff of the dolphins, the other apes, the elephants, the whales, the (fill in the blank with other probably self-aware thinking species) has been ongoing for some time now, and there's no doubt as to the cause. This is not our world or our universe, we just have a hard time getting beyond our monkey hardwiring. I like humans fine, but we're a plague species even upon ourselves. For those looking for a possibly brighter side of peak oil, look beyond short-term monkeybusiness and at where the world could be in a million years, or even 50,000. The world of that time is as real as the world of Monday, and we are greatly limiting its options.
Yikes! Not a shred of compassion in about the last 30 posts to this thread. Genetics and cost benefit. I don't see any human beings here.
Anyone got a good relationship out there that really means something to them?? Connected, supportive, loving. Anyone love their kid even though they are not a Supergenetic marvel? Does anyone in this thread HAVE kids?
Sorry, its all just hitting me really wrong.
Good thread topic to scroll past. Brings out the worst around here.
My wife and daughter and I went and sang songs in a friend's living room tonight. Homemade food, acoustic entertainment, no internet required.
Telling this bunch not to over-reproduce is about as productive for world population as telling Buster Keaton to stand further from the microphone.
The post you're replying to is full of compassion, just not as you (apparently) narrowly define it.
I gave up the joy of having a family because it wouldn't be fair to force extra kids into a world of famine, and because it would negatively impact all the other kids who didn't ask to be brought into a dieoff. I regret that necessity a LOT, as does my wife, and we currently care for my disabled mom and help her ill dad. So please, screw your condescention very much. If you have kids, they have a slightly better chance due to our sacrifice.
You really expect compassion from specimen of a species that kills animals and his own kind for pleasure and profit, a species that is on the way to destroy its own habitat for a little bit of fun and an easy life and doesn't even show the slightes signs of remorse?
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that everybody who posted here feels compassion for those who are close to them. This doesn't change the fact though that we are choking this planet to death by our sheer numbers and every child that is born increases the preassure on the already fragile system.
If you don't mind that your children and grandchildren might live a horrible and miserable life in a devastated ecosystem, well go forth and breed.
But then I may ask: Where is your compassion?
pain caused by an unwanted child who becomes drug-addicted or violent -- measureless
I knew someone whose vasectomy gave him happiness; but worryingly so did black rubber and whips.
Unhappiness, grief and sadness provided by a pair of unloving, uncaring and worthless leeches that were brought into this world by my neighbor who will not admit it to us or herself: unbelievable.
For many it seems that they assume that children will grow up to be loving and caring and will take care of them when they get older. There's no guaranty.
I don't have kids for one huge reason. Never had stable employment due to physical disability. I decided a long time ago that if I could not afford them, despite trying for 30+ years to do so, that I would not have them.
Selfishness works both ways.
Same here - I looked at how things were growing up, generally one parent gets stuck raising the kids, on a steadily - decreasing wage, and in general having kids meant you were on Welfare. I decided no kids unless I could afford to raise them decently, no Welfare, all on my own since that's the social norm in the US now.
Hence, no kids!
In our society, the chance of anyone in your family giving a damn about you is remote anyway. You may find a few, a very few, people who'll give a damn, and they'll be no relation to you - they're much more likely to share experiences than genes. Being the 14-year-old breadwinner. Having worked in similar fields or having similar interests. Things like that.
We are also the most class-ridden of the industrialized nations, and if you make more or less money than someone else, that can be an unscaleable wall between you. Lose your job, and you'll find, if you're lucky, maybe one or two people out of many you may know, who won't tell you to go to hell because you're now poor. We have to have this kind of class-hatred to run a proper Empire, after all. (I think this increasing class-bias in the US is interesting, as we head into Depression; the working-class really doesn't hate those richer than themselves in the US, not nearly as much as they should, so it seems the Haves are doing their best to shit on the workers to make sure the working-class will be ready to storm their McBastilles with torches and pitchforks when the time comes.)
So there's really much more to argue against having kids in the US than for it. I'm reminded of how the Hawaiians coped with the invasion of the whites, and everyone else, to their islands and the topsy-turvy world they found themselves in. They tended to practice birth control, infanticide, or just plain old suicide. The dieoff rate was 90% and this is found all through the Pacific.
why create a new one when there are literally millions who want but don't have loving parents?
How about enforcing ongoing education at all levels that drums in the fact that WE LIVE ON A FINITE PLANET, with finite resources, only able to support a finite population at a certain level of existence.
How is it that this message gets removed from our education and understanding of the world?
Is it because then we would then have to look closer at the huge discrepancy in lifestyle between rich and poor? 99% just existing, 1% living large?
Is this, dare I say it, a conspiracy by the rich? Nawwwwwwwww
This is an excellent fact that can't be stressed enough. Too bad if people don't like the implications this sort of cost-benefit analysis raises. It's the truth. And no, having children is not a sacred obligation that can't be critiqued by a monetary analysis or something, however much certain religions might like to argue otherwise.
Human society has two options:
*A high birth/high death society.
*A low birth/low death society.
For most of human history, humans have lived in a high birth/high death society, arguably because there was no other way for human civilization to stay alive (high death was an incontestable fact of life, and a low birth/high death combination would have led to gradual extinction).
Then during the industrial revolution, the possibility of some sort of low death society became a reality. We stuck to our old ways of high births, though, so we ended up with this high birth/low death society. This is unsustainable. Either we will rationally and consciously change our ways by getting vasectomies and slapping on condoms when we have sex (it's not like we are asking people to deny their biological, instinctual imperative to have sex! This shouldn't be biologically impossible!), or we don't change our ways and nature transforms our society, against our will, back into a high birth/high death society. That means dieoff.
If it is impossible to become a low birth society, then a dieoff at some point is assured, and all this fiddling around with the peak oil issue is pointless because even if we somehow temporarily mitigate the shortage of this resource, we will very soon come up against other, even more severe resource limits.
But I don't think it is impossible to become a low birth society. Many societies in Europe, as well as some developed Asian countries, have already done so. They just need to stay on this course with fertility below replacement level, and promote economic development (not necessarily the same as "growth") in order to bring about demographic transitions in those countries and in order to lessen the incentive for immigration...and then after the populations of Europe, Russia, Asia, etc. have declined to maybe 50% of their current levels, people can rationally take stock of their situation and just remove some of their condoms and have a few more kids to bring the fertility rate right up to the replacement level, and they will be fine. If population goes too low for a time, people can rationally figure out that they need a short period (a generation or two) of above-replacement-level fertility, and bring things back to a healthy, prosperous, sustainable level. I don't know where some people get this alarmist idea that since Europe is currently below replacement level, that it will stay that way until the very point that the last human being in Europe dies out. That is clearly an irrational extrapolation that people formulate in order to foster alarmism and promote their own narrow economic or religious agenda.
The one instinct that I could see as getting in the way is the alleged "maternal instinct." However, we're not asking everyone to go childless. Those who really really want kids can have a clean conscience in having only two kids, as the small numbers of natural pre-reproductive deaths in that new generation, as well as the people who inevitably won't want to have any kids, will ensure that the overall fertility rate stays below replacement level. And if a person has an instinctual drive to have more than two kids...they can get a dog. Or three. Or ten. Or a cat. Whatever. Just no more humans!
Because we can't just kill humans (at least not according to current laws and morality). If the dog population really goes out of control, I could see us coming to grips with euthanizing a portion of the dog population, as awful as that would seem. But we have agreed that we won't do that with humans. So once a human is born, that human is here to stay, and either suffer or prosper, but either way use tremendous resources, until that human's natural death. The birth of a human is almost like the construction of a coal plant--that single event locks in an estimated 60 years of resource use and carbon emissions. Think carefully before engaging in such an action!
As for the economic incentives against voluntary below-replacement-level fertility...well, just pose people with these two economic alternatives:
*Have 5 kids now, and have those kids help you on the farm and in the house and on the job market...and contribute to a dieoff in which you and your kids are likely to suffer or die (especially if it is socially known that you have a family of 5 kids and have contributed so much to the dieoff problem...you will be first on the dieoff chopping block, unless you are particularly skilled with firearms)
OR
*Have 2 kids now, and have those kids help you on the farm and in the house and on the job market...and not contribute so much to a dieoff. Maybe there will still be a dieoff, in which case you will be more socially favored because you didn't contribute to the problem so much, and you will be more likely to survive. But if this sort of attitude becomes a mass paradigm shift, then you won't have a dieoff, and you'll be much better off economically, not to mention in many other ways.
As for me personally, I'm going to try to get a vasectomy this summer. I just hope I can find a doctor willing to perform it (I'm 20 years old and have not had kids yet...but believe me, I've thought this issue over for the last 5 years and have always come to the same conclusion). If a "paternal instinct" suddenly strikes later in life...I'll adopt a kid. Or get a dog. Dogs are nice. I like dogs. A dog would make me pretty happy. And so many fewer obligations (both socially and monetarily)!!!
This thread is laugh-out-loud funny at a nest of would-be hardcore sociobio types such as the TOD readership.
Er, folks ... organisms have evolved TO BREED. That includes humans, who are not immune from such elementary facts of evolution. By and large, people ARE going to want to have kids ... it's actually their f**** raison d'etre for heaven's sake. What is an adult human being for? To make a child. That's Darwin, and the rest is commentary.
Another thing to remember is this: many people that harp on about the importance of not having children will eventually have them. I've seen this with my own friends, who swore blind they would never brings kids into a world such as this, it was environmentally irresponsible etc. ... now the proud parents of five!
There is no basis for complaining about people that have children. Yeah too bad about the problems it causes. No one has the right to tell anyone else that they can't breed. Breeding is what people are for.
"A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe." - Robert Heinlein. ;)
So you're saying, basically, dumb as yeast? Guess that answers that question.
And no organism has "rights" to do anything in the real world. That's Darwin, and the rest is hubris.
Not really. We like to have sex. We like to have social connections, including nurturing those who need us. But those two elements need not be connected. Nature intended them to be, of course, but it doesn't have to be that way for us.
It appears to be too late for many in this thread, who, judging from what they've said here and elsewhere, are well above the age of usual first parenthood.
The fact is, people are having fewer kids. In Japan and in some European countries, the birthrate has dropped below replacement level. Without any government coercion. Indeed, to the distress of the government. How did that happen, if it's so natural for humans to breed?
And the complaints, near as I can tell, are about people who don't have kids, not about those that do have them. As Greenish said...be grateful to those who don't have kids, because they've given your kids a better chance.