I used to joke that the only force of natural selection still at work was making dumb kids who wear shorts in the winter sick. But really - in America today - is natural selection still at play? Seems to me it's not. The infant mortality rate is historically low. The weak aren't being weeded out from the strong before they can reproduce. I'm by no means advocating eugenics. Just observing that because so few kids die (a great thing) there isn't much natural selection working (a bad thing?)

What's more concerning to me is that as income increases, the number of children per family decreases. That's opposite of historic trends. The successful (smart?) have fewer opportunities to pass their genes along, while the unsuccessful have more. What will the outcome be in 100 years?

Actually, the world has to be cautious of terrorism and the neo-Malthusians of the Neo Conservative movement. What?

First as a reference is Malthusian theory of governance and society. Basically he said shut poor and uneducated people in bad environments so they will die of disease and crime at an early age and will not repopulate. Malthus basically said natural and manmade disasters have positive effects on human society- getting rid of the sick, old, poor.

Second, my next reference is the Shock Doctrine my Naomi Klein. Called economic liberalists, aka neo conservatives of the PNAC, AEI, and other Wash think tanks, led by Milton Friedman with proteges as Woflowitz, Perle, the predecessor of Bernanke, Cheney, and others. This crowd has methodically used manmade and natural disasters to advance their economic and political models to empower and elevate the rich, powerful, elite- aka the pure capitalist- while leaving the lesser classes to fend for themselves.

Thus, the Katrina disaster exemplifies Neo Con efforts at work. The Neo Con practice was to allow the levies to fail, or to neglect to invest in replacing them because the resulting disaster would clear the way for massive investments by the rich and powerful. This has been known for years in New Orleans, but it came true in 2005. And of course the aftermath was also evident of both Malthusian thinking- blaming the poor and allowing them to suffer- as well as Neo Con practice of outsourcing rescue and recovery to enrich private clients but offering inferior or partial service.

So the idea that cultural selection is no longer relevant IGNORES the REAL effects of HUMAN WILL to shape society. And if there is human will able to shape society and cultural selection, there is the potential to do good and bad. And book Shock Doctrine reveals the amoral and bad will of the Neo Con movement to shape human society through their manipulation of cultural selection.

I would add an excellent example in the plight of the African American community in America. While there has definitely been unintended consequences of various factors involved, the African American community is dying and under siege in a way which could be considered Malthusian and malevolent, rather than consequential. Over 70% of all AA families are single parent households. 1 in 4 AA males between 15-25 die. AA males have a high school drop out rate of varying from 40-70%. Crime rates in AA communities are usually the highest nationwide. But if these are considered consequential to the trends and ideas of AA culture, several factors must be considered. Since the rise of Reagan and the GOP, criminal prosecutions have increased against blacks in disproportionate rates to their proportion of the number of crimes committed. AA community funds have been cut (remember how the GOP mocked govt funding for midnight basketball courts in Wash DC?). Hospitals, govt funded community centers, and govt funded programs such as social services were shut down in AA areas. So as the GOP came to power from Reagan, and in Congress during the 1990s through to today, these trends of cutting any funds to AA communities in terms of social services have been ongoing. Moreover, one of th most lasting image of the GOP propaganda of the AA community is a AA welfare mother with kids defrauding the govt. That, despite the Neo Con constituencies working in Iraq and taking 100s of billions in govt taxes have escaped govt oversight and are likely involved in the disappearance of over 10 billion in US tax dollars in Iraq. Not to mention elsewhere.

However, funds for law enforcement, prisons built in rural, GOP districts with mostly white ( or Euro American) communities, and judicial costs to hold, try, and convict AA defendents far exceed the costs of running social service programs in the AA community. Moreover, govt funds are allocated to EA GOP communities rather than AA DEM communities.

To make matters worse, the absence of health care, the absence of adequate education, and the deterioration of the 2 parent household in AA communities has contributed to the rise of STDs, ecspecially AIDS and HIV. With the transmission of so many AA males from prison to the AA community, they also transmit STDs and HIV into the community, further destroying its ability to reproduce. Now one might say this is all consequential. But it correlates exactly with Malthusian philosophy of goverance in society and his social Darwinian thoughts which Saletan references.

JVCMH:

What's more concerning to me is that as income increases, the number of children per family decreases. That's opposite of historic trends. The successful (smart?) have fewer opportunities to pass their genes along, while the unsuccessful have more. What will the outcome be in 100 years?

In 100 years, not much will have changed. The genetic differences between successful and unsuccessful people, in your usage, are not measurable. Genetically speaking, success equates with offspring, compounded over generations, not with material wealth or happiness.

and wreck his precious plans. People aren't that Machiavellian--they're just not that altruistic or generous. Don't want to pay taxes to help a group they see as strangers/different from themselves.

The original solution was to transport them back to Africa once the heavy lifting job was done. They were brought to America just for that single purpose--to serve as the fuel to power a nascent capitalism past its Commercial phase into ints R&D Industrial phase. Not really succesful except for Liberia--problems of logistics and will on the part of the liberated bondsmen.

The next practical thing was to keep them at bay with laws that were policed strictly by internal security forces such as the KKK.

But the forces of history saw to it that those laws had to come down if the fight against communism was going to be successful. But still the dilemma(see Gunnar Myrdal's classic "The American Dilemma") was what to do with them to prevent them infecting the Euro gene pool--causing the Euro civilization project to be stymied.

Ongoing Social Darwinian Solution: replace the laws of segregation with draconian applications of current criminal law as a way of keeping them permanently penned up when not half-way-house penned up in their zoned communities. It's now a slow grinding attrition in much the same way that the Tasmanians and Australian aborigines were grinded down on their own lands they had occupied for some 50,000 years. Just check the sub-caption of Darwin's "Origin of Species" to get the point. Is the selection natural or unantural?

Umm, to just state one flawed argument in your post- I doubt the Virginian planters who started importing slaves in the late 1600s were thinking, "hey, lets bring in some African slaves to serve as the fuel to power a nascent capitalism past its Commercial phase into ints R&D Industrial phase". They were thinking, "its profitable to grow tobacco and sell it for export, and its cheaper to buy slaves than keep paying for these white indentured servants, so I think I'll do that". History is not some conspiracy orchestrated by some secret cabal, its huge numbers of people doing what seemed like a good idea at the time mainly for themselves.

Well, I don't know if you'd call it "natural", but selection is still at work, in that some genes are going to have more success than others. But yeah, the pre-industrial focus of selection, favoring strength, health, and intelligence, is no longer really operating. The fact is that in today's America, unless you're actually downright mentally retarded, low intelligence is not on obstacle to survival or reproduction. If you have enough IQ to flip a burger, your survival is assured. If anything, being too dumb to use a condom is, in evolutionary terms, an advantage.

It's impossible to deny: At some point, the deterioration in the gene pool (in terms of traits most people would find desirable, anyway) is going to have to become noticeable. How soon is the question. I think it could be quicker than we'd like to think. As I mentioned earlier, significant changes in the relative frequency of pre-existing genes can take place in as little as a generation. If in this one present generation, people with under-100 IQ had more kids than people with above-100 IQ- then presto! the average IQ has gone down in one generation. Evolution in action!

So expecting some kind of effect in 100 years is not at all out of the question.

Please let there be gene therapy! Or we could pay people with low IQ not to have kids voluntarily- we'd be alleviating poverty and it would probably save the government in law enforcement costs in the long run.

Boy this subject is depressing.

Not so fast, Mr. Johnston. The situation is more nuanced. And also, beware of what you wish for. Since in almost all human endeavors, things don't turn out exactly the way people imagined them, gene therapy might bring on an unforseen society-wide calamity. We really don't know what will happen when everyone is smart. Human society relies on normally distributed intelligence. Normal intelligence distribution and gene therapy might not be compatible.

Re: "If in this one present generation, people with under-100 IQ had more kids than people with above-100 IQ- then presto! the average IQ has gone down in one generation. Evolution in action!"

There is such a thing as regression to the mean. Children of duller parents will tend to be smarter than their parents and children of smarter parents will tend to be duller. (On average, of course) So in the end, the intelligence of the new cohort will again be normally distributed.

There are two areas of concern:

1. The average "100" of different cohorts is recalibrated for each cohort. So in that sense, it may go up or down in comparison to the previous cohort. So far, it has gone up, not down.

2. The mean in the "regression to the mean" is the mean of the group (race, ethnicity, large inbred family), 100 is by no mean the mean for all groups. So when duller groups outbreed the brighter groups, the mean of the dull group might not be down, but the whole population's mean might go down because there will be proportionally more dull people than in the previous cohort. Theoretically

In a social welfare state, the balance between population groups is hard to maintain because we don't want people to starve to death. Yet anything that could be done to connect child bearing to child rearing for hit-and-run MALES would help to alleviate poverty in the long run. One can't have children here and there, using government as a safety net, if the safety net is not very safe. Males might be forced to up their parental investment.

The litmus test for all of this has been the Scandinavian countries with their "cradle to grave" socialism. Everybody gets an almost equal chance at education and health care. Even the offspring of fathers who abscond after their children' births are not put at educational, health and material disadvantage. And the result, the world's most human friendly societies and most efficient and dynamic econmies. Notice how the Volvo declined in quality when it was sold to Ford Motors! And Nokia, etc.--from the tiny country of Finland.

Domacles makes a good point. However the Scandanavian experiences reflect varying results. And given the 3 Scandanavian nations' (homogeneous populations in resource rich, isolated nations) variations and relatively inapplicability to such a larger scale (Sweden's 11 million population does not translate well to America's 300 million population), there are many inconsistencies.

Nonetheless, there is simply too little focussed on the effect of the complete collapse of the American family in the AA community, and increasingly in all poorer communities, whether EA (Euro American), LA (Latin American), or even AS (Asian American such as in Asian refugee communities) communities. As was previously mentioned, the dire necessity to have both parents working means kids have less involvement with parents who would otherwise provide intellectual stimulation, deeper thinking, and essentially contribute to advancing IQ within a generation. Instead, if there even are 2 parents in the home, they both work and the kids succumb to various deviant cultural influences, including gangs, criminal subcultures, sexual promiscuity, and so on.

It has been mentioned by presidential candidates that eventhough America is richer than it ever has been, the average income provides less than it ever has been. And more and more people have to work longer and harder just to sustain a living. As a gallon of milk now tops $4.00 dollars, what does that say to a worker earning $7.00 dollars an hour? Or $11.00 dollars an hour? Or even $20.00 dollars an hour? The first 15 minutes of the work hour are just for a gallon of milk?

You've described the premise of Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy.

Fewer greedy people?

Dear Usama2,

Re: "As was previously mentioned, the dire necessity to have both parents working means kids have less involvement with parents who would otherwise provide intellectual stimulation, deeper thinking, and essentially contribute to advancing IQ within a generation. Instead, if there even are 2 parents in the home, they both work and the kids succumb to various deviant cultural influences, including gangs, criminal subcultures, sexual promiscuity, and so on."

This looks good on paper, but doesn't hit the target. It is better for a child to have a two-parent home. How much parents work is not as important as what kind of work they do, how much attention they pay to the child when they are at home, and how much they can influence his or her selection of a peer group. Can they afford to move the child away from bad kids either physically or mentally when things don't pan out to their liking? That's the key question.

Children don't succumb to various deviant cultural influence, including gangs, because two parents work but because the children happen to fall in with the bad crowd. A single mother lacks financial resources to change things radically. She can't move to another neighborhood.

But who has the first-line responsibility for the kids? Parents or government. Family or society. Our society can't bring up kids. It is too complex an endeavor. The current political talk about pre-kindergarten is silly. If it continues like that, we'll have school for unborn children.

Although from what I heard, IQ in Scandinavian countries has stopped rising and has even shrunk a little since the 1990s. Perhaps they've maxed out all the environmental improvements in IQ and gene decline is slowly manifesting itself?

They're not a bad test area for this, but you have to remember, they've only been welfare states for a short time in evolutionary terms, and initially the massive improvements in health, nutrition, and education would be expected to mask the more gradual decline of the gene pool.

I like my idea of paying low-IQ people not to have kids. It's win-win.