How Weak Is Cultural Evolution?
World fertility decline seems the clearest example of a maladaptive cultural trend, as healthy biological species just don’t decline in times of plenty, peace, and health. Two main theories help explain this trend. One is that previously adaptive habits have turned maladaptive by misfiring on cues that no longer track the adaptiveness as they once did. The other is that the cultural evolution process has become much weaker than it was up until a few centuries ago, which both slows the rate at which misfirings can be corrected, and also allows for more maladaptive changes to norms, via random walks and reversion to natural habits encoded more deeply in DNA.
Here are nine suggested misfiring stories:
Contraception allows us to satisfy usual norms re fun, mating w/ fewer kids
Pursuit of status markers induce urbanity, long education, conflict w/ kids
Freedom is a status marker, but having more induces fewer kids
Modern media shows high status in detail, raising expectations
Pensions replace kids to give old age security
Super-stimuli makes fun more engaging, distracts from kids
Loss of kin living close makes parenting harder
Urban density makes it seem like overpopulation
Indoor life messes w/ light, activity rhythms
I asked 5 LLMs to estimate the factor of how much faster such misfirings would be corrected now if our cultural evolution process for group norms was as healthy and robust as it has been through most of human history up until a few centuries ago:
So middle estimate of ~5.5. Stuff that would once been corrected in ~50yrs will now take ~275yrs. Culture is indeed broken.
I'm a bit confused since there are plenty of subgroups that have high reproductive rates. So there is no worry that the human species will go extinct -- it just might be that some groups outcompete others.
And that's exactly what you've been saying you want in all your posts worrying about cultural evolution. Isn't this exactly the kind of cultural evolution you should be celebrating?
Two observations:
1) I’m 30 and the reasons you’ve listed feel *exactly* correct. They match with my anxieties / reasons not to have kids perfectly. And I do want kids.
2) whenever you write that you asked AIs, I feel icky. And I use AIs a lot too. The kind of intellectual & original work you do feels like prime hallucination territory for LLMs.