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.
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?
I didn't read this post, but my general impression has been:
He wants a high amount of cultural feature X (which could be e.g., growth, innovation, or free speech etc.), which is correlated with low fertility but separable from it in principle. The Amish have high fertility and low trait X. The ideal thing would be to get high X with high fertility since that enables long term presense of X. He's searching for a way to get high or at least medium X with high/medium fertility by using some magic sauce Y related to cultural evolution.
That would be a reasonable view to have but he keeps insisting that he doesn't need to make a values level argument against the dominant view that we don't want cultural evolution to change our values in many aspects because those are the correct values to have. In other words somehow he thinks appeal to cultural evolution let's him avoid the usual moral philosophy debate about what the true ideal values are.
You can't have it both ways. Either we have ways of knowing what values are best independent of cultural evolution or we don't. In the former case you need to make an argument in the normal way moral philosophers do and after you've done that show that cultural evolution is good on your account. In the later case you don't get to pick and choose and say it's better if cultural evolution does this or that.
Good observation. Better to just promote the values that lead to the kind of society we want. There’s nothing wrong with that, even if you can’t say those values are objectively true.
He wants us to economize on our values, trading off some in order to preserve others that insular religious groups wouldn't preserve. Hence the poll https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/we-can-buy-new-culture about greater involvement of grandparents in raising children as something people would be willing to adopt.
Right, but at the same time he has a whole bunch of posts where he worries that we are locking in the values we currently have rather and we therefore won't have adaptive values -- ie the kind of values that would win out if we allowed continued competition over values.
But, pretty much by definition, if you surveyed everyone the values they say would be better are the ones our society holds currently so if those are the right values it is *good* to lock them in so they can't be replaced by more adaptive values.
And that's my point about having it both ways. He is arguing in many of his posts that we can infer that maladaptive values are somehow worse than other values. Yet in many other posts he is picking particular values and saying those are the ones we should preserve. If he is going to do that he can't assume that less adaptive values are worse.
For instance, you might think: the most adaptive values will turn out to be ones which tell us to care more about our group than other groups we are in competition with. If you think that the correct value is that everyone's welfare matters equally you should therefore want to freeze cultural competition and stop us from shifting to more adaptive values.
Whether or not you believe that particular argument the point is that once you start picking and choosing values you can't just assume it's a bad thing in general if we freeze cultural competition so our values don't change. It all depends on whether our current values are better than whatever competition would produce.
Did you read my link? He polled people about a number of values we have in modern society compared to traditionalist ones, and asked people how willing they would be to sacrifice or change some vs others. Not having any of our values replaced by more adaptive ones isn't an option, per Hanson, because right now we are maladaptive to the point of below-replacement fertility, so our culture would just go extinct/be replaced by more adaptive cultures. Thus, he's trying to find ways to preserve as much of our values as we can without going extinct.
Yes I did, and the problem is that the goal you think he is engaged just isn't what he has argued for.
Robin is welcome to come in a correct me at anytime but I take his position to be quite clearly that: **it would be a bad thing to try and do everything we can to freeze our current values in place consistent with not radically increasing our chance of imminent extinction**.
He has been quite clear to my mind that if he was given a button that would guarantee our current values remained in place permanently and had no effect on the chance of extinction he wouldn't want it pressed.
I haven't found this issue in Robin's posts. He thinks culture is broken, as in culture produces values and behaviors which, if followed, will eventually lead to collapse. He values some aspects of our culture, and wishes to preserve those, but finds preserving them harder in the case of collapse.
Last I asked how can we then differentiate potentially adaptive values from maladaptive ones in our culture. Robin responded: "there is no easy way. You'll have to make your bets as best you can."
So I don't think he tries to avoid the debate by appealing to cultural evolution as an end in itself, but because judging which of our values are likely adaptive is very difficult.
But notice the assumption there that it is *good* to have more adaptive values. He is explicitly concerned that we will enter a period of cultural stasis in which our values no longer evolve. Ok, why is that bad?
I mean if you start with the values you need to argue that the result of cultural adaptation is going to be better than the values we have now. There are all sorts of reasons you might think that is false -- for instance if you care about human suffering you might think cultural competition encourages us to care less about people who don't share our values. That's just one example, the point is you can't assume adaptive is better which he keeps trying to do.
"But notice the assumption there that it is *good* to have more adaptive values."
This is because Hanson hopes for our culture, technology and life to flourish, improve and grow.
"He is explicitly concerned that we will enter a period of cultural stasis in which our values no longer evolve."
He is explicitly concerned that we will enter a period of contraction, collapse and 'Time of Troubles' which might have a large human cost, which slow down the development of human civilization and which might be avoided. Robin has explicitly claimed he wishes humanity to reach the stars: development is a value of his. Moreover, he is concerned that those values of our culture which he cherishes - such as open inquiry - won't survive such a phase.
"The point is you can't assume adaptive is better which he keeps trying to do."
He doesn't 'just' assume it. His entire delving into culture and cultural drift began with Robin observing the fertility crisis and its logical (possible) outcomes, which he finds negative compared to fertility being higher.
The whole point of striving for adaptive values is aiming to avoid negative outcomes (lack of growth, economic stasis and contraction, possibly increased instability and violence, etc.) which he has concluded will likely follow our current trends. You can argue against these conclusions, but he doesn't 'just' assume 'maladaptive bad'.
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.
Yes, but it is not clear how they arrived at these numbers (intuition? thinking it through?), how correlated their analysis is, or what their thought process was. The variance is also quite high here. I'm skeptical that this is a useful estimate, especially because the question does not seem super well-defined.
If you ask an LLM to quantify "how much does X influence Y" they tend to give a number instead of pushing back "X doesn't influence Y". They seem to start by assuming your premise is correct. [Doesn't mean answer isn't useful - just that I'd take the LLM's numbers here with a big dose of salt.]. Be really careful with prompts.
It would be more-useful if there were a link to the AI output /and/ its internal monologue. Sadly, Google just removed user access to Gemini's internal monologue. This is a major step backwards; the internal monologue often exposes that an LLM is trying to manipulate you. One justification for it is the claim that users could design attacks meant to jailbreak AIs by discerning the RLHF-instilled rules in the chain-of-thought.
The demographic transition is explained well by the theory that memes and genes compete for (reproductive) resources - and the memes are winning. This is not a drift-based theory - selection pressures on memes remains high. Nor is it a story about a failure of adaptation - the memes are highly adapted.
A better framing invokes symbiology and epidemiology. There's a plague of memes. They hop from brain to brain via mouths, eyes and ears. Plenty of species suffer from reduced fertility due to parasites. It is a common and well-understood part of nature.
It is not that cultural evolution is weak. It is that it is strong - and getting stronger. Pete Richerson compares the process to Clifford - a big red dog that drags its humans around on a leash.
The larger process of cultural evolution is supposed to tame the memes for the benefit of meme-DNA alliances. And it usually did up until we greatly weakened cultural evolution centuries ago.
Supposed - by whom? The invention of culture likely leads to a memetic takeover.
The idea that genes keep memes on a "leash" was popularised by Edward Wilson. However, Wilson had a hard time getting to grips with cultural evolution. His book on the topic: "Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process" - was badly written, confused and not very influential. He was wrong about genes keeping memes on a leash.
AFAIK, Wilson never ackowledged this problem. His later books continued to try and reduce culture to gene fitnesses - right up to his death.
As Richard Dawkins put it: "Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection."
Can you recommend any literature on that particular idea (memes as disease, memes pushing genes towards irrelevancy)?
I'm not sure I find that at odds with what Robin writes. He views culture being in drift due to the lack of such selection pressures on values which increase human survival and reduce the risk of collapse.
You're pointing that values (memes) have selection pressures of their own, and that those pressures are at odds with or orthogonal to human survival and preventing collapse.
I'm not sure I see a contradiction here. Culture acts in ways which no longer correlate well with adaptiveness, at least partly due to being subject to selection pressures (memorability, status signaling, hedonism) which do not correlate well with adaptiveness.
When you use the term "adaptiveness" it is usually important to say what you are talking about. Who benefits? In the case of the demographic transition, the western human DNA genes are getting less well adapted, but the memes are becoming ever more numerous and well adapted.
Sometimes people want to know what the net effect is: how are the coevolving genes and memes doing overall? To that I guess I would say that averaging gene and meme fitnesses together is often unproductive and misleading - and it's often better to do a more fine-grained analysis.
This is an article by Hans Moravec. It starts out with: "This is the end. Our genes, engaged for four billion years in a relentless, spiralling arms race with one other, have finally outsmarted themselves. They've produced a weapon so powerful it will vanquish the losers and winners alike." He subsequently expanded this article into a popular book: "Mind Children".
Some minds are resistant to those fertility-destroying memes. That resistance doesn't need to come in an "Amish" package. It can be a finer-grained selection not along existing group lines.
"Cultural evolution moves so much faster these days than it used to, when institutions lasted for centuries. How much faster will our culture be able to correct these misfiring stories than it was able to correct the kinds of mistakes that occured in the past?"
If you go into it with the opposite premise, and it gives you opposite answers, it probably is not making the decision on a sound basis, but just telling you what you expect to hear.
I don't know how they will respond though. If they push back with the opposite framing, they may have better reasons for their answers than I suspected.
Well, I did on GPT 5.5, but I thought you'd want to try it so that you could leave the rest of the prompt unchanged from what you entered. Here is the first part of its response:
I’d split the answer into meme speed, institution speed, and reproductive feedback speed. The punchline: we can notice and narrate the failure vastly faster than past cultures could, but we probably cannot correct fertility behavior more than a few times faster, because the bottleneck is still housing, education, mating markets, kin networks, and generation length.
My rough guess:
Layer Past correction speed Modern correction speed Speed-up
Naming the failure decades–centuries months–years 20–100×
Changing prestige narratives 1–3 generations 5–25 years 5–20×
Changing institutions centuries 20–60 years 2–5×
Demographic/cultural selection generations still generations ~1×
Here is the exact prompt I used (with better spacing):
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 Cultural evolution moves so much faster these days than it used to, when institutions lasted for centuries. How much faster will our culture be able to correct these misfiring stories than it was able to correct the kinds of mistakes that occurred in the past?
And when I say inequality, I don’t just mean earning. I’m talking about how it translates into housing, healthcare, and education. The link is still 403 forbidden error.
1) there is no peace, even though there may be little overt violence relative to prior periods, life is full of covert violence and injustice, hence stress, hence no fucking. Simple. Want thriving? Real peace. Real wellbeing.
2) health? Lmfao. Infant death mortality is low and lifespan is high, but that's not health. People are fat and mentally ill, generally. They're doing drugs to escape, chemical or technologicsl. Not sexy. Want sexy? Create real health. But we need the ssri industry , so alas, we must be sick. Sorry pal. Write to pfizer or some shit I'm sure they'll say my bad and go into cattle farming.
3) plenty? LMFAO, FOR WHO? I am below the poverty line, Ive always been below the poverty line, I'm 40 in NYC allt life. My bank reached 160 dollars yesterday and I am forced to reapply for food stamps. I get that people are wealthy, but they are hoarding narcissistic clowns who don't know how to share the meat from their hunt. Our ancestors would slit these motherfuckers throats if they behaved this way. There's never been more disparity. There's never been more injustice of "plenty". This is the polar opposite of plenty. Want sexy time? Make it fucking rain cash DOWNWARDS.
1: Yanomamo tribes fight each other all the time, but that doesn't stop them from reproducing. I've even seen studies claiming to show that war boosts fertility!
2: Obesity is finally dropping thanks to GLPs.
3: We are richer than we've been for most of history, hence the earlier rise in obesity.
NYC has one of the highest ratios of police officers to civilians in the US, as a result they have one of the lowest homicide rates among major US cities. It's thus relatively peaceful, in contrast to the Yanomamo.
You're measuring peace purely in terms of homicide, and that's why you're confused. The US is deeply violent as a function of a high degree of psychopathic and antisocial people and cultures. Peace is not a narrow singular act, it's much deeper.
Homicide is measurable (it's the most reliable crime statistic). You don't have have measures showing contemporary NYC to be more violent (on a per capita basis) than other places with much higher fertility, but you're accusing others of being confused.
No one said homicide isn't measurable. I don't give a shit if I don't have measures, I also don't have any measures for how many insect eggs there are on Earth right now yet the answer to whether it's "around 12" is very obvious. That is a similar nature to the question of "is NYC peaceful" , but strictly under the condition that one doesnt have full blown autism and thinks such a question is matter of measuring stats on physical violence. That would never be you, would it?
Re: 1) I don't think this explains decreasing fertility at all.
For example, Finland is relatively equal re: income & wealth, and has a domestic fertility rate of 1,2. The decision to try for kids doesn't correlate as well with socioeconomic status (as in wealthy people having more kids) as it does with culture: in Finland, where immigrants usually don't fare as well as the native population, immigrants lift the total fertility rate somewhat.
1) would imply that people's living standards, experienced stress and inequality has in fact worsened through the industrial age. This is the opposite of what has happened.
What did happen in the late 1900s was that women joined the workforce. This is an achievement in equal treatment, but took a severe toll on resources for having and raising children. You're implying that women faced less stress when not allowed to join the workforce.
At the risk of coming across as callous, the "the economy is good/bad because I personally am having an easy/hard time" argument is about as meaningful as "global warming is false because it is cold right now where I am".
I think if you compare to people in most other times and places at a similar relative level of social status, you'd find that you're much better off then they are/were.
Its not callous and I'm not at all offended because you're just picking at the obvious assumption which is that I must be biased. But it's sort of like telling someone who says "hey guys, torture is actually pretty terrible, morally speaking" that they're biased because hey, what about the torturer? You're just biased against torture, bud.
I don't agree that Im better off but that's a bit of an essay. Long story short quality of life assessment tends to be very narrow and autistic types(not necessarily saying you, although I'm getting mild rationalisg community vibes) only look at narrow metrics like "hey youre not getting stabbed as much, be grateful!" while missing the big picture(this is because autism is literally a kind of tunnelvision detail pathology, it's why they love trains and memorizing licence plates so much)
The reality is human misery is more complicated and life was better for the bottom before, imo. Top too, for that matter.
For most people, including you. Extreme poverty has decreased and life expectancy has grown dramatically. "Plenty" doesn't necessarily mean everyone's a millionaire - it can mean poor people don't die of poverty by default.
As for you, I'm sorry to hear of your troubles, but you aren't starving. A hundred years ago poor people in relatively developed countries might die of starvation in times of economic recession or instability.
Life expectancy is meaningful. After all, if you're being tortured, and only live to 60, but find out later that youll live to a hundred, that's an improvement. That's just one element in your confusion. There's much more but I only have the energy to point one out for you.
The overwhelming majority of people whose life expectancy has grown aren't tortured for an extra 40 years. By all means, save your energy for whatever hurdles you have to deal with.
You appear to not understand the difficulty of life yet but it'll come at some point, alas. Notice how you can't state the contrapositive? That's an interesting hint here
Re: 2) You're implying that Big Pharma keeps people miserable to make profits pushing medication people don't want. This is absolute tin foil garbage.
Health - agreed that too many people disregard their health too much. This goes hand in hand with culture not pushing adaptive values. As for most people being unhealthy or mentally ill ("people generally"), that's simply not true relative to periods with higher fertility rates. Life expectancy has grown compared to times with high fertility, such as 100 years ago.
I have recently been thinking about female intrasexual competition- suppressing other females’ fertility via signalling that men are not worthy, slut-shaming etc.
Signalling between women on social media could plausibly explain the sharp rise in negative opinions that young women express about men. The fertility decline however started much earlier.
Fertility decline seems basically impossible for cultural evolution to change. Populations are still growing in most countries with below-replacement birth rates, I think, because these are mostly high-wealth countries where immigration can compensate. The demographic impact falls on other countries. Would cultural evolution even have selected against practices that didn’t hurt the practitioner country itself, but only imposed costs on other countries?
The timing of the collapse of fertility in the Global North corresponds pretty clearly to the perfection of "the pill" and increased access of women to career paths more financially, and (for many women) far more psychologically rewarding than motherhood.
To put it another way, fertility rates have collapsed because the industrialized world has run out of women willing to work for free.
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?
I didn't read this post, but my general impression has been:
He wants a high amount of cultural feature X (which could be e.g., growth, innovation, or free speech etc.), which is correlated with low fertility but separable from it in principle. The Amish have high fertility and low trait X. The ideal thing would be to get high X with high fertility since that enables long term presense of X. He's searching for a way to get high or at least medium X with high/medium fertility by using some magic sauce Y related to cultural evolution.
That would be a reasonable view to have but he keeps insisting that he doesn't need to make a values level argument against the dominant view that we don't want cultural evolution to change our values in many aspects because those are the correct values to have. In other words somehow he thinks appeal to cultural evolution let's him avoid the usual moral philosophy debate about what the true ideal values are.
You can't have it both ways. Either we have ways of knowing what values are best independent of cultural evolution or we don't. In the former case you need to make an argument in the normal way moral philosophers do and after you've done that show that cultural evolution is good on your account. In the later case you don't get to pick and choose and say it's better if cultural evolution does this or that.
Good observation. Better to just promote the values that lead to the kind of society we want. There’s nothing wrong with that, even if you can’t say those values are objectively true.
He wants us to economize on our values, trading off some in order to preserve others that insular religious groups wouldn't preserve. Hence the poll https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/we-can-buy-new-culture about greater involvement of grandparents in raising children as something people would be willing to adopt.
Right, but at the same time he has a whole bunch of posts where he worries that we are locking in the values we currently have rather and we therefore won't have adaptive values -- ie the kind of values that would win out if we allowed continued competition over values.
But, pretty much by definition, if you surveyed everyone the values they say would be better are the ones our society holds currently so if those are the right values it is *good* to lock them in so they can't be replaced by more adaptive values.
And that's my point about having it both ways. He is arguing in many of his posts that we can infer that maladaptive values are somehow worse than other values. Yet in many other posts he is picking particular values and saying those are the ones we should preserve. If he is going to do that he can't assume that less adaptive values are worse.
For instance, you might think: the most adaptive values will turn out to be ones which tell us to care more about our group than other groups we are in competition with. If you think that the correct value is that everyone's welfare matters equally you should therefore want to freeze cultural competition and stop us from shifting to more adaptive values.
Whether or not you believe that particular argument the point is that once you start picking and choosing values you can't just assume it's a bad thing in general if we freeze cultural competition so our values don't change. It all depends on whether our current values are better than whatever competition would produce.
Did you read my link? He polled people about a number of values we have in modern society compared to traditionalist ones, and asked people how willing they would be to sacrifice or change some vs others. Not having any of our values replaced by more adaptive ones isn't an option, per Hanson, because right now we are maladaptive to the point of below-replacement fertility, so our culture would just go extinct/be replaced by more adaptive cultures. Thus, he's trying to find ways to preserve as much of our values as we can without going extinct.
Yes I did, and the problem is that the goal you think he is engaged just isn't what he has argued for.
Robin is welcome to come in a correct me at anytime but I take his position to be quite clearly that: **it would be a bad thing to try and do everything we can to freeze our current values in place consistent with not radically increasing our chance of imminent extinction**.
He has been quite clear to my mind that if he was given a button that would guarantee our current values remained in place permanently and had no effect on the chance of extinction he wouldn't want it pressed.
I'm embarrassed that I didn't notice that.
I haven't found this issue in Robin's posts. He thinks culture is broken, as in culture produces values and behaviors which, if followed, will eventually lead to collapse. He values some aspects of our culture, and wishes to preserve those, but finds preserving them harder in the case of collapse.
Last I asked how can we then differentiate potentially adaptive values from maladaptive ones in our culture. Robin responded: "there is no easy way. You'll have to make your bets as best you can."
So I don't think he tries to avoid the debate by appealing to cultural evolution as an end in itself, but because judging which of our values are likely adaptive is very difficult.
But notice the assumption there that it is *good* to have more adaptive values. He is explicitly concerned that we will enter a period of cultural stasis in which our values no longer evolve. Ok, why is that bad?
I mean if you start with the values you need to argue that the result of cultural adaptation is going to be better than the values we have now. There are all sorts of reasons you might think that is false -- for instance if you care about human suffering you might think cultural competition encourages us to care less about people who don't share our values. That's just one example, the point is you can't assume adaptive is better which he keeps trying to do.
"But notice the assumption there that it is *good* to have more adaptive values."
This is because Hanson hopes for our culture, technology and life to flourish, improve and grow.
"He is explicitly concerned that we will enter a period of cultural stasis in which our values no longer evolve."
He is explicitly concerned that we will enter a period of contraction, collapse and 'Time of Troubles' which might have a large human cost, which slow down the development of human civilization and which might be avoided. Robin has explicitly claimed he wishes humanity to reach the stars: development is a value of his. Moreover, he is concerned that those values of our culture which he cherishes - such as open inquiry - won't survive such a phase.
"The point is you can't assume adaptive is better which he keeps trying to do."
He doesn't 'just' assume it. His entire delving into culture and cultural drift began with Robin observing the fertility crisis and its logical (possible) outcomes, which he finds negative compared to fertility being higher.
The whole point of striving for adaptive values is aiming to avoid negative outcomes (lack of growth, economic stasis and contraction, possibly increased instability and violence, etc.) which he has concluded will likely follow our current trends. You can argue against these conclusions, but he doesn't 'just' assume 'maladaptive bad'.
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.
humans make mistakes too
Yes, but it is not clear how they arrived at these numbers (intuition? thinking it through?), how correlated their analysis is, or what their thought process was. The variance is also quite high here. I'm skeptical that this is a useful estimate, especially because the question does not seem super well-defined.
If you ask an LLM to quantify "how much does X influence Y" they tend to give a number instead of pushing back "X doesn't influence Y". They seem to start by assuming your premise is correct. [Doesn't mean answer isn't useful - just that I'd take the LLM's numbers here with a big dose of salt.]. Be really careful with prompts.
It would be more-useful if there were a link to the AI output /and/ its internal monologue. Sadly, Google just removed user access to Gemini's internal monologue. This is a major step backwards; the internal monologue often exposes that an LLM is trying to manipulate you. One justification for it is the claim that users could design attacks meant to jailbreak AIs by discerning the RLHF-instilled rules in the chain-of-thought.
The demographic transition is explained well by the theory that memes and genes compete for (reproductive) resources - and the memes are winning. This is not a drift-based theory - selection pressures on memes remains high. Nor is it a story about a failure of adaptation - the memes are highly adapted.
A better framing invokes symbiology and epidemiology. There's a plague of memes. They hop from brain to brain via mouths, eyes and ears. Plenty of species suffer from reduced fertility due to parasites. It is a common and well-understood part of nature.
It is not that cultural evolution is weak. It is that it is strong - and getting stronger. Pete Richerson compares the process to Clifford - a big red dog that drags its humans around on a leash.
The larger process of cultural evolution is supposed to tame the memes for the benefit of meme-DNA alliances. And it usually did up until we greatly weakened cultural evolution centuries ago.
Supposed - by whom? The invention of culture likely leads to a memetic takeover.
The idea that genes keep memes on a "leash" was popularised by Edward Wilson. However, Wilson had a hard time getting to grips with cultural evolution. His book on the topic: "Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process" - was badly written, confused and not very influential. He was wrong about genes keeping memes on a leash.
AFAIK, Wilson never ackowledged this problem. His later books continued to try and reduce culture to gene fitnesses - right up to his death.
As Richard Dawkins put it: "Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection."
Can you recommend any literature on that particular idea (memes as disease, memes pushing genes towards irrelevancy)?
I'm not sure I find that at odds with what Robin writes. He views culture being in drift due to the lack of such selection pressures on values which increase human survival and reduce the risk of collapse.
You're pointing that values (memes) have selection pressures of their own, and that those pressures are at odds with or orthogonal to human survival and preventing collapse.
I'm not sure I see a contradiction here. Culture acts in ways which no longer correlate well with adaptiveness, at least partly due to being subject to selection pressures (memorability, status signaling, hedonism) which do not correlate well with adaptiveness.
When you use the term "adaptiveness" it is usually important to say what you are talking about. Who benefits? In the case of the demographic transition, the western human DNA genes are getting less well adapted, but the memes are becoming ever more numerous and well adapted.
Sometimes people want to know what the net effect is: how are the coevolving genes and memes doing overall? To that I guess I would say that averaging gene and meme fitnesses together is often unproductive and misleading - and it's often better to do a more fine-grained analysis.
Lots of people have written about memetic epidemiology. Richard Dawkins is an example: https://bactra.org/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html
For a book length treatment, perhaps try:
Contagious Ideas: On Evolution, Culture, Archaeology and Cultural Virus Theory by Ben Sandford Cullen (2000)
The 1988 article: "Human Culture - A Genetic Takeover Underway" is an early and clear exposition of the idea that culture is likely to displace genes. It is available online at: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1988/takeover.ltx
This is an article by Hans Moravec. It starts out with: "This is the end. Our genes, engaged for four billion years in a relentless, spiralling arms race with one other, have finally outsmarted themselves. They've produced a weapon so powerful it will vanquish the losers and winners alike." He subsequently expanded this article into a popular book: "Mind Children".
Some minds are resistant to those fertility-destroying memes. That resistance doesn't need to come in an "Amish" package. It can be a finer-grained selection not along existing group lines.
Try asking it this way:
"Cultural evolution moves so much faster these days than it used to, when institutions lasted for centuries. How much faster will our culture be able to correct these misfiring stories than it was able to correct the kinds of mistakes that occured in the past?"
If you go into it with the opposite premise, and it gives you opposite answers, it probably is not making the decision on a sound basis, but just telling you what you expect to hear.
I don't know how they will respond though. If they push back with the opposite framing, they may have better reasons for their answers than I suspected.
Why don't you do this exercise, instead of suggesting that I do it?
Well, I did on GPT 5.5, but I thought you'd want to try it so that you could leave the rest of the prompt unchanged from what you entered. Here is the first part of its response:
I’d split the answer into meme speed, institution speed, and reproductive feedback speed. The punchline: we can notice and narrate the failure vastly faster than past cultures could, but we probably cannot correct fertility behavior more than a few times faster, because the bottleneck is still housing, education, mating markets, kin networks, and generation length.
My rough guess:
Layer Past correction speed Modern correction speed Speed-up
Naming the failure decades–centuries months–years 20–100×
Changing prestige narratives 1–3 generations 5–25 years 5–20×
Changing institutions centuries 20–60 years 2–5×
Demographic/cultural selection generations still generations ~1×
Here is the exact prompt I used (with better spacing):
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 Cultural evolution moves so much faster these days than it used to, when institutions lasted for centuries. How much faster will our culture be able to correct these misfiring stories than it was able to correct the kinds of mistakes that occurred in the past?
So the framing really does influence what its response is in this case, it looks like.
Culture isn’t broken. Fix rising inequality first.
Inequality has dropped very recently. https://finance-commerce.com/2025/09/census-income-inequality-diversity-2024/
And when I say inequality, I don’t just mean earning. I’m talking about how it translates into housing, healthcare, and education. The link is still 403 forbidden error.
The link is broken. Can you send me the pdf? Download and save from your browser.
I just checked the link, and it still works for me. Nor is it a pdf, rather it's an html page.
Oh well. Just wondering if I could get the pdf link since the html is not working for me.
1) there is no peace, even though there may be little overt violence relative to prior periods, life is full of covert violence and injustice, hence stress, hence no fucking. Simple. Want thriving? Real peace. Real wellbeing.
2) health? Lmfao. Infant death mortality is low and lifespan is high, but that's not health. People are fat and mentally ill, generally. They're doing drugs to escape, chemical or technologicsl. Not sexy. Want sexy? Create real health. But we need the ssri industry , so alas, we must be sick. Sorry pal. Write to pfizer or some shit I'm sure they'll say my bad and go into cattle farming.
3) plenty? LMFAO, FOR WHO? I am below the poverty line, Ive always been below the poverty line, I'm 40 in NYC allt life. My bank reached 160 dollars yesterday and I am forced to reapply for food stamps. I get that people are wealthy, but they are hoarding narcissistic clowns who don't know how to share the meat from their hunt. Our ancestors would slit these motherfuckers throats if they behaved this way. There's never been more disparity. There's never been more injustice of "plenty". This is the polar opposite of plenty. Want sexy time? Make it fucking rain cash DOWNWARDS.
1: Yanomamo tribes fight each other all the time, but that doesn't stop them from reproducing. I've even seen studies claiming to show that war boosts fertility!
2: Obesity is finally dropping thanks to GLPs.
3: We are richer than we've been for most of history, hence the earlier rise in obesity.
Yanomano feel relatively low socioeconomic disparity while in NYC many people feel like a fucking cockroach
NYC has one of the highest ratios of police officers to civilians in the US, as a result they have one of the lowest homicide rates among major US cities. It's thus relatively peaceful, in contrast to the Yanomamo.
You're measuring peace purely in terms of homicide, and that's why you're confused. The US is deeply violent as a function of a high degree of psychopathic and antisocial people and cultures. Peace is not a narrow singular act, it's much deeper.
Homicide is measurable (it's the most reliable crime statistic). You don't have have measures showing contemporary NYC to be more violent (on a per capita basis) than other places with much higher fertility, but you're accusing others of being confused.
No one said homicide isn't measurable. I don't give a shit if I don't have measures, I also don't have any measures for how many insect eggs there are on Earth right now yet the answer to whether it's "around 12" is very obvious. That is a similar nature to the question of "is NYC peaceful" , but strictly under the condition that one doesnt have full blown autism and thinks such a question is matter of measuring stats on physical violence. That would never be you, would it?
Re: 1) I don't think this explains decreasing fertility at all.
For example, Finland is relatively equal re: income & wealth, and has a domestic fertility rate of 1,2. The decision to try for kids doesn't correlate as well with socioeconomic status (as in wealthy people having more kids) as it does with culture: in Finland, where immigrants usually don't fare as well as the native population, immigrants lift the total fertility rate somewhat.
1) would imply that people's living standards, experienced stress and inequality has in fact worsened through the industrial age. This is the opposite of what has happened.
What did happen in the late 1900s was that women joined the workforce. This is an achievement in equal treatment, but took a severe toll on resources for having and raising children. You're implying that women faced less stress when not allowed to join the workforce.
At the risk of coming across as callous, the "the economy is good/bad because I personally am having an easy/hard time" argument is about as meaningful as "global warming is false because it is cold right now where I am".
I think if you compare to people in most other times and places at a similar relative level of social status, you'd find that you're much better off then they are/were.
Its not callous and I'm not at all offended because you're just picking at the obvious assumption which is that I must be biased. But it's sort of like telling someone who says "hey guys, torture is actually pretty terrible, morally speaking" that they're biased because hey, what about the torturer? You're just biased against torture, bud.
I don't agree that Im better off but that's a bit of an essay. Long story short quality of life assessment tends to be very narrow and autistic types(not necessarily saying you, although I'm getting mild rationalisg community vibes) only look at narrow metrics like "hey youre not getting stabbed as much, be grateful!" while missing the big picture(this is because autism is literally a kind of tunnelvision detail pathology, it's why they love trains and memorizing licence plates so much)
The reality is human misery is more complicated and life was better for the bottom before, imo. Top too, for that matter.
Re: 3) plenty? LMFAO, FOR WHO?
For most people, including you. Extreme poverty has decreased and life expectancy has grown dramatically. "Plenty" doesn't necessarily mean everyone's a millionaire - it can mean poor people don't die of poverty by default.
As for you, I'm sorry to hear of your troubles, but you aren't starving. A hundred years ago poor people in relatively developed countries might die of starvation in times of economic recession or instability.
Life expectancy is meaningful. After all, if you're being tortured, and only live to 60, but find out later that youll live to a hundred, that's an improvement. That's just one element in your confusion. There's much more but I only have the energy to point one out for you.
The overwhelming majority of people whose life expectancy has grown aren't tortured for an extra 40 years. By all means, save your energy for whatever hurdles you have to deal with.
You appear to not understand the difficulty of life yet but it'll come at some point, alas. Notice how you can't state the contrapositive? That's an interesting hint here
Re: 2) You're implying that Big Pharma keeps people miserable to make profits pushing medication people don't want. This is absolute tin foil garbage.
Health - agreed that too many people disregard their health too much. This goes hand in hand with culture not pushing adaptive values. As for most people being unhealthy or mentally ill ("people generally"), that's simply not true relative to periods with higher fertility rates. Life expectancy has grown compared to times with high fertility, such as 100 years ago.
I have recently been thinking about female intrasexual competition- suppressing other females’ fertility via signalling that men are not worthy, slut-shaming etc.
Signalling between women on social media could plausibly explain the sharp rise in negative opinions that young women express about men. The fertility decline however started much earlier.
Couples are not being formed. Just listen to young women harshly judge their female friends’ potential boyfriends and you can see why.
Fertility decline seems basically impossible for cultural evolution to change. Populations are still growing in most countries with below-replacement birth rates, I think, because these are mostly high-wealth countries where immigration can compensate. The demographic impact falls on other countries. Would cultural evolution even have selected against practices that didn’t hurt the practitioner country itself, but only imposed costs on other countries?
The timing of the collapse of fertility in the Global North corresponds pretty clearly to the perfection of "the pill" and increased access of women to career paths more financially, and (for many women) far more psychologically rewarding than motherhood.
To put it another way, fertility rates have collapsed because the industrialized world has run out of women willing to work for free.
I only half understand 9 - could do with more explanation
I don't understand it either, but there are suggestive correlations.
masks
These seem like interesting things to try to measure via actual data (surveys, etc), not asking LLMs
I encourage you to try.
Typos: "cues that [no] longer track", "Freedom is [a] status markers^H"
Both theories can be true . Pinning down the knee of the curve chronologically/geographically would be a clue re cause.
Peace and liberalism (both of which I value) could explain weaker social evolutionary pressure. Re 8, did cities always have lower fertility?
Fixed; thanks