In the last two days I read Richerson & Boyd (2004) Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, by two of the founders of modern cultural evolution theory. It is very good. (I’ve also been reading their classic 1985 book
I am precisely reading “cultural evolution” by Alex Mesoudi, that reviews the literature several years after. He describes the same idea, while Susan Blackmore defended it in the 90s, in a less specific fashion (less vertical transmission implies less transmission of high fertility)
The memetic explanation of the demographic transition is not only the most likely, also blends culture and technology in a very elegant way.
The solution can never be to embrace oppressive cultures that suppress freedom of thought. Each person has a right and a duty to be informed of many viewpoints, think critically about them, and make up their own mind. That is the one cultural value that can never be dispensed with.
Anyway, as usual, you neglect the role of genetic evolution. If our genes push us to imitate high status people, and imitating high status people results in lower fertility, then those people with genes that don't drive them *as much* towards imitating high status people, will have higher fertility. Over generations this will result in people who don't imitate high-status people as much and have high fertility. Assuming technology doesn't render all this discussion obsolete with cloning vats and AI tutors/nannies.
"The context [Roger Scruton's gap-filling earnestness] is that the home that the leftist-liberal-unsouled-revolutionaries are destroying, bastards, is actually being ruined by demography and a likely population bust, but instead of indigenizing robots like Japan is doing, what we should do is make rich people have lots and lots of children, at least one child per one million dollars. There is no reason Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Gina Rinehart cannot have hundreds of children, if not thousands, thousands I say!
They could get extra wombs attached like butt implants.
I'm not sure if is meant to be obvious or not (or even if accurate) that new technology changed cultural transmission, with broadcast tv, the internet, social media, travel etc transmitting culture further and faster than before. Then global elites out-competed local elites in broadcast, and so people have further to climb to get to a similar position.
I disagree that "Amish and the Hutterites … these subcultures are the exceptions that prove the rule. Despite substantial wealth, people in these societies have not gone through the demographic transition, because Anabaptist baptist customs block those same features of cultural evolution that make almost all modern societies susceptible to it.".
I know you are quoting. However these cultures to experience a great deal of modern life. Most (not all) of the youth go into the world. There is little imposition among those youth within the community even if before that, or even if they do not. Premarital sex is not forbidden and parents allow young couples to experience sleeping in same bed. It is only if they choose to be baptized into the religion that they are expected to obey the "cultural" strictures of the faith.
Therefore I would suggest two alternatives.
One is that the "freedom" permitted before baptism permits conscious decisions to join the faith rather than trying to force compliance which would probably create more dissension and less retention.
Secondly, I might suggest rather than blocking cultural demographic transitions, the reason nearly 90% of the youth who do return do so because they have found the "culture" more stable within the community than without.
Likewise many native American groups also permitted members to transverse communities and find the most suitable community to be a part of.
The key might be that from early on we are "taught" that the other is the expert. First in school it is the teacher, then the professor. Then they find the "experts" don't always agree and it may be that experts do more to create instability and contention within society. So perhaps the study should have offered competing experts on the Ming dynasty and I imagine the study's results would have been quite different.
there's massive ongoing genetic selection for those who actually WANT to have kids now, as opposed to just sex. i suspect in 100 years developed populations that have gone through the fertility crunch will emerge hyper natalist.
If the fertility fall is caused by an overemphasis on prestige, you can expect religious traditions which regard all believers as equal children of God to be relatively immune.
An annoying possibility: Secularism may have been less harmful to fertility back when it was socialist.
As for fertility declines, the prestige explanation given by B&R should really only hold for college-educated folks. It seems to me that successful professionals would tend to *not* be seen as prestige models for working class folks. I believe fertility declines in this population have more to do with economics, specifically the economic cultural change mentioned above:
If prestige got us into this problem, maybe it can also be used to get us back out.
I am precisely reading “cultural evolution” by Alex Mesoudi, that reviews the literature several years after. He describes the same idea, while Susan Blackmore defended it in the 90s, in a less specific fashion (less vertical transmission implies less transmission of high fertility)
The memetic explanation of the demographic transition is not only the most likely, also blends culture and technology in a very elegant way.
The solution can never be to embrace oppressive cultures that suppress freedom of thought. Each person has a right and a duty to be informed of many viewpoints, think critically about them, and make up their own mind. That is the one cultural value that can never be dispensed with.
Anyway, as usual, you neglect the role of genetic evolution. If our genes push us to imitate high status people, and imitating high status people results in lower fertility, then those people with genes that don't drive them *as much* towards imitating high status people, will have higher fertility. Over generations this will result in people who don't imitate high-status people as much and have high fertility. Assuming technology doesn't render all this discussion obsolete with cloning vats and AI tutors/nannies.
from Feb 2023:
"The context [Roger Scruton's gap-filling earnestness] is that the home that the leftist-liberal-unsouled-revolutionaries are destroying, bastards, is actually being ruined by demography and a likely population bust, but instead of indigenizing robots like Japan is doing, what we should do is make rich people have lots and lots of children, at least one child per one million dollars. There is no reason Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Gina Rinehart cannot have hundreds of children, if not thousands, thousands I say!
They could get extra wombs attached like butt implants.
This is how we can eradicate poverty."
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/mark-dooleys-roger-scruton-and-my
I'm not sure if is meant to be obvious or not (or even if accurate) that new technology changed cultural transmission, with broadcast tv, the internet, social media, travel etc transmitting culture further and faster than before. Then global elites out-competed local elites in broadcast, and so people have further to climb to get to a similar position.
I disagree that "Amish and the Hutterites … these subcultures are the exceptions that prove the rule. Despite substantial wealth, people in these societies have not gone through the demographic transition, because Anabaptist baptist customs block those same features of cultural evolution that make almost all modern societies susceptible to it.".
I know you are quoting. However these cultures to experience a great deal of modern life. Most (not all) of the youth go into the world. There is little imposition among those youth within the community even if before that, or even if they do not. Premarital sex is not forbidden and parents allow young couples to experience sleeping in same bed. It is only if they choose to be baptized into the religion that they are expected to obey the "cultural" strictures of the faith.
Therefore I would suggest two alternatives.
One is that the "freedom" permitted before baptism permits conscious decisions to join the faith rather than trying to force compliance which would probably create more dissension and less retention.
Secondly, I might suggest rather than blocking cultural demographic transitions, the reason nearly 90% of the youth who do return do so because they have found the "culture" more stable within the community than without.
Likewise many native American groups also permitted members to transverse communities and find the most suitable community to be a part of.
The key might be that from early on we are "taught" that the other is the expert. First in school it is the teacher, then the professor. Then they find the "experts" don't always agree and it may be that experts do more to create instability and contention within society. So perhaps the study should have offered competing experts on the Ming dynasty and I imagine the study's results would have been quite different.
there's massive ongoing genetic selection for those who actually WANT to have kids now, as opposed to just sex. i suspect in 100 years developed populations that have gone through the fertility crunch will emerge hyper natalist.
If the fertility fall is caused by an overemphasis on prestige, you can expect religious traditions which regard all believers as equal children of God to be relatively immune.
An annoying possibility: Secularism may have been less harmful to fertility back when it was socialist.
I'm a big fan of Boyd and RIcherson and cultural evolution in general. I use it here to explain inequality changes in the US since 1913
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
I employ it here as a possible explanation for IQ difference between groups:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-novel-take-on-group-differences
As for fertility declines, the prestige explanation given by B&R should really only hold for college-educated folks. It seems to me that successful professionals would tend to *not* be seen as prestige models for working class folks. I believe fertility declines in this population have more to do with economics, specifically the economic cultural change mentioned above:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/two-visions-of-america-bedford-falls
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/seven-and-a-half-cents