At a Commonwealth Club lecture in San Francisco, Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow made a startling statement about evolution. An audience member asked a question that presumed evolution was continuing nowadays as it always had throughout earth’s history. Mlodinow seemed surprised by the premise and said something to the following effect.

Human evolution more or less stopped when civilization began. In order to have evolution, people have to die because of their stupidity before they reproduce, or live but refrain from reproducing because of some defect.

Dying because of your stupidity before you reproduce

In the 21st century, who dies of their stupidity before they reproduce? In U.S. society, that would be teenage boys who kill themselves with drugs and/or alcohol, or by being passengers in cars driven by such people, reckless use of motor vehicles especially motorcycles, or choosing dangerous jobs or hobbies. Also young people of both sexes who frequent dangerous places like bad neighborhoods and alcohol-drug events even when they use neither.

Our society is probably getting a little smarter about such things because those who aren’t are more likely to die before reproducing. Those little crosses you see leaning against trees along your local curvy roads are rare examples of evolution still at work.

I’m not saying everyone who ever died before reproducing in the above circumstances was dumb or deserved to die. Rather, I am saying that these are choices that are likely to increase your chances of dying before reproducing. As such, the percentage of the population likely to make such bad choices will very slowly decline because those who do not make such choices are more likely to reproduce.

Biological clocks and feminism

Women’s lib opposed the traditional housewife. They wanted more women to go to college and have careers. Mission accomplished. There are now more women than men in U.S. colleges.

But college women postpone marriage and pregnancy. In many cases, they found that postponement turned out to be elimination. By postponing marriage and pregnancy, many who intended to get married and have children ended up doing neither. They did not change their minds. They simply cut it too close and found it far harder to attract a mate at the age when they scheduled it. And those who got married, often found it harder to deliver a healthy baby at the age to which they postponed pregnancy.

My wife and I did all that, but we were fortunate to have three healthy sons after we both got MBAs. 60 Minutes did a show about female Harvard MBAs who intended to have kids but ended up not doing so for various reasons generally related to it being harder to get married and have kids than they thought when they rather cavalierly decided they could postpone both.

How does this relate to evolution? These women did not kill themselves because of their stupidity before they reproduced. But they did miscalculate marriage and fertility ignorantly. They failed to reproduce not because they were dead, but because their biological clock ran out. Same evolutionary result.

In one dimension, this is increasing the IQ of the population with regard to those who are smart enough to reproduce when their ability to do so is optimum. It is decreasing the population of those who are smart enough and ambitious enough careerwise to postpone marriage and/or pregnancy in order to go to college and grad school and become established in their profession first.

Stating it starkly, the plan of Gloria Steinem (no children) and Betty Friedan (three kids—she was born into the traditional housewife era, complied with it, then renounced it) has been successfully carried out. But in terms of generations after the one they influenced, it was suicide. They burned their bras, and their fertility and genes.

Put simply, the Phyllis Schlafly’s (6 kids) and Sarah Palin’s (5 kids) of the world have been reproducing. The feminists have not. Like the Reverend Jim Jones they persuaded their followers to drink Flav-R-Aid laced with cyanide—figuratively speaking. The result is the percentage of people who see the world as the feminists wanted and advocated has decreased—precisely because of the way they see the world.

Ironic, no? The meek—when it comes to refraining from rebelling against a child-rearing focus for women—and the fertile, shall inherit the earth.

Family size

Evolution says that the fittest shall survive.

Fittest at what?

Reproducing, baby. Those who are best at reproducing the most and raising their children safely until they, in turn, reproduce will survive and dominate the earth.

And who might that be?

Would you believe Niger? Afghanistan is third. The G-20 are more or less at the bottom. Click here to see the fertility rates of all the countries in the world. Generally, the most poverty-stricken, least developed countries are reproducing at the highest rates and vice versa.

 

Financial suicide

The “smartest,” most developed, people on earth are committing financial suicide which is hastening their evolutionary downfall. How so?

They are so enlightened, you know, about universal health care, unemployment compensation, avoiding the population explosion, saving the environment, and all that. Bottom line, they are all heading for the last roundup financially because of skyrocketing entitlement benefits, skyrocketing populations of elderly, and falling birth rates. The ratios of working people to retired people are falling precipitously and to a point where there are not enough working people to pay the taxes to support the seniors. This is a worldwide problem, not just in the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. is better off in this regard than most developed nations. The nations in the most trouble are Russia, China, Korea, and Japan, followed by Western Europe.

China is growing like crazy, right? True. But they are also the geniuses who imposed a one child limit on their families for decades. Ouch! Do the math on going from a country where families have lots of children because they are your social security in a country that has no such program—to a country that has only one child per family. After a generation or two, you have one hell of a lot of senior citizens and hardly any young workers. Hell, the men in China cannot even find a date for the prom, let alone a wife, because Chinese favored male children and when they could only have one, they aborted or killed the female babies in large numbers. China will have up to 40 million more men than women by 2020. The 40 million odd men out will not reproduce. Speaking in evolutionary terms, their “species” will become extinct.

Replacement rate

Here is a paragraph from the Wikipedia article on fertility:

The replacement fertility rate is roughly 2.1 births per woman for most industrialized countries (2.075 in the UK for example), but ranges from 2.5 to 3.3 in developing countries because of higher mortality rates. Taken globally, the total fertility rate at replacement is 2.33 children per woman. At this rate, global population growth would trend towards zero.

In other words, if the females in your country average 2.33 babies each, your country’s population will not change (ignoring net immigration). Once again, here is the list of countries ranked by fertility rates. You can see which ones are above and below 2.33. No developed country is above 2.33. Only developing (poor) countries are.

Survival of the fittest and the fittest are—surprise!—the poorest

Like I said, the definition of fittest from an evolutionary standpoint is those who reproduce the most are the fittest. What current evolution is doing to the human race is Third Worldizing it.

And you thought continuing evolution was increasing the percentage of people like the “Most Likely to Succeed” boy and girl from your high school class. Nah. Current evolution is increasing the percentage of people who are like the 16-year-old girl who had to drop out because she got pregnant and the 21-year-old guy who got her pregnant.

Here in an excellent email I got from a reader who asked me not to use his name:

As usual, it is great to see controversial ideas expressed in your articles. I have a brief expression I like to use to sum up this argument:

"The people most likely to believe in evolution are the people least likely to practice it."

Along these lines, the power of religion as a group strategy for evolution seems a significantly underappreciated blind spot in modern consciousness. It is also an interesting irony that religious groups practice evolutionarily sound behaviors while opposing attempts to acknowledge or teach about evolution.

Perhaps religious groups would get comfortable with the teaching of evolution if secular thinkers cease to view evolution as a repudiation of religion, and instead embrace religion as an example of successful evolution in practice.

Here is another email I got and my answer to it:

On 11/11/09 2:14 PM, "Joseph Gorski" wrote:

Dear John Reed,

 I couldn't help but notice a few conceptual mistakes in your article. Physicists, alas, are not evolutionary biologists and as such I'll grant some room for error. It was, however, irresponsible for someone of his position to tell an audience of people that evolution has "more or less stopped when civilization began." The mechanism he is referring to is natural selection, and only one of the processes by which evolution occurs, and NOT is not exclusive, nor as simple as described in your article. There are many other processes, such as genetic drift and sexual selection, which are affect our genes. "Survival of the fittest" is also NOT a scientific concept anymore than Social Darwinism. Most disturbingly of all, your article suggests that evolution equates competition between groups of or individual people. This is simple not true. It matters little if Nigeria is reproducing more than the United States, as we are ALL the same species. Again, evolution is NOT a competition to see which group of people will pass genes on to the next generation. This email is, perhaps, a bit hasty. I'm a teacher and tend to get antsy when I see what I observe to be a misconception. Please email me back with any questions or comments you may have.

Best,
Joseph Gorski

I did not write a scientific treatise.
The questioner in the session was referring to natural selection, not every possible variation of the word evolution.
The session was also not scientific. It was a popular book, not a scientific one that was being discussed.
Evolution is about the nature of the average human race going forward. I do not recall using the word competition as you suggest. You are beating up a straw man to make yourself look good. When feminists cause their followers to reproduce less or not at all, the percentage of feminists in the resulting population will be decreased. That is not the goal of advocates but in this case, it was the ironic result.
Niger is a different country from Nigeria. If I were as pedantic as you, I could do a long paragraph on how “disturbing” it was that you confused the two.
You science teacher profession does not own the word evolution. That word is widely used in many different contexts.
Generally, we advocate democracy and democracy has generally been spreading. In democracies, where each person gets one vote, and where governments collect data on races and ethnic groups and create programs targeted at certain ethnic groups, the birth rates of the various races and ethnic groups presage their political power and the policies that they will seek and get.
Jack Reed