Why are we not faithful servants of our genes? Instead, the defenses our genes built against parasitic memes are breaking down, resulting in entire societies falling below replacement fertility rate even as we enjoy unprecendented riches in technology and material resources.
Have you looked at Calhoun’s experiments with rats and mice associated with NIMH? The same thing happens with rodents if you keep them in luxury at high population densities. This leads me to suspect this has nothing to do with memetics or birth control.
Fascinating reading! Thanks, I had only read the popular accounts, and have now updated.
Nevertheless, even in the few reproduction experiments, while several of Calhoun’s more peculiar reported observations were not seen again, they did repeatedly see fertility rates dropping to around the replacement rate and stabilizing the population (mostly due to infant mortality/adult cannibalism of infants). So I think my basic point stands, that even in the absence of memetics, in mammals high population densities can cause fertility rates to drop to around or even a little below replacement levels. Particularly in cities, we are living at population densities far higher than we were adapted for.
I actually think modern urbanites have a lower effective social population density than the ancestral environment. Most hunter-gatherers have very little privacy, with entire entended families huddled in the same single-room dwellings. This level of density is very rarely present in developed cities (other than pubic transit). Most people in, say, Tokyo have their own room and thus few far less crowded than the average hunter gatherer, if you polled them throughout their day. Lowering the number of people encountered per day doesn’t seem to greatly increase fertility, otherwise COVID would have resulting in a big fertility bump. Maybe the problem is the opposite—modern technology allow us to have fewer undesired social encounters, which is a high-priority desire for most people, but those same undesired encounters were the main force behind the formation of romantic relationships.
It is possible that the easiest way to increase the fertility rate is a legal mandate for dinner with co-workers.
Isn’t living in cities itself driven at least in part by memetics (e.g., glamour/appeal of city living shown on TV/movies)? Certainly memes can cause people to not live in cities, e.g., the Amish or the meme of moving out to the suburbs to raise kids.
I think the main reason people move to cities isn’t because cities are charming. It’s because cities are objectively better places economically, you could say it’s a kind of Keynesian beauty contest. If you’re a business, you want to be located somewhere with many job seekers and potential clients nearby. So people who want jobs and services will also want to live nearby, and so on.
If teleportation was invented tomorrow and people could blink around at low cost, I expect that people would instantly spread out to live on their own patches of land, and cities would become mostly just places to visit and maybe work. The city charm wouldn’t keep anyone living in a cramped apartment with neighbors above and below, if the economic reason for that disappeared. When I first imagined this scenario, I thought to myself that maybe we’re lucky teleportation hasn’t been invented yet :-)
Living in cities is primarily driven by economics: lots of people close together makes shipping/logistics/transportation/infrastructure cheaper. City centers are cheap from a logistical point of view but usually suffer from high real estate costs (except where these are depressed by crime or neglect), suburbs are often a good compromise between logistical costs and real estate costs, and rural living tends to involve the nearest store being 10 miles away, pricey, yet still having a poor assortment, plus difficulty with access to utilities and public transport. (FWIW, I used to live on a dirt road in a forest in the mountains above Silicon Valley, so I’m rather familiar with the upsides and downsides of both.)
Have you looked at Calhoun’s experiments with rats and mice associated with NIMH? The same thing happens with rodents if you keep them in luxury at high population densities. This leads me to suspect this has nothing to do with memetics or birth control.
I have a lot of doubts about Calhoun, and there are also serious doubts about Rat Park (which I assume is your second reference).
Fascinating reading! Thanks, I had only read the popular accounts, and have now updated.
Nevertheless, even in the few reproduction experiments, while several of Calhoun’s more peculiar reported observations were not seen again, they did repeatedly see fertility rates dropping to around the replacement rate and stabilizing the population (mostly due to infant mortality/adult cannibalism of infants). So I think my basic point stands, that even in the absence of memetics, in mammals high population densities can cause fertility rates to drop to around or even a little below replacement levels. Particularly in cities, we are living at population densities far higher than we were adapted for.
I actually think modern urbanites have a lower effective social population density than the ancestral environment. Most hunter-gatherers have very little privacy, with entire entended families huddled in the same single-room dwellings. This level of density is very rarely present in developed cities (other than pubic transit). Most people in, say, Tokyo have their own room and thus few far less crowded than the average hunter gatherer, if you polled them throughout their day. Lowering the number of people encountered per day doesn’t seem to greatly increase fertility, otherwise COVID would have resulting in a big fertility bump. Maybe the problem is the opposite—modern technology allow us to have fewer undesired social encounters, which is a high-priority desire for most people, but those same undesired encounters were the main force behind the formation of romantic relationships.
It is possible that the easiest way to increase the fertility rate is a legal mandate for dinner with co-workers.
Isn’t living in cities itself driven at least in part by memetics (e.g., glamour/appeal of city living shown on TV/movies)? Certainly memes can cause people to not live in cities, e.g., the Amish or the meme of moving out to the suburbs to raise kids.
I think the main reason people move to cities isn’t because cities are charming. It’s because cities are objectively better places economically, you could say it’s a kind of Keynesian beauty contest. If you’re a business, you want to be located somewhere with many job seekers and potential clients nearby. So people who want jobs and services will also want to live nearby, and so on.
If teleportation was invented tomorrow and people could blink around at low cost, I expect that people would instantly spread out to live on their own patches of land, and cities would become mostly just places to visit and maybe work. The city charm wouldn’t keep anyone living in a cramped apartment with neighbors above and below, if the economic reason for that disappeared. When I first imagined this scenario, I thought to myself that maybe we’re lucky teleportation hasn’t been invented yet :-)
Living in cities is primarily driven by economics: lots of people close together makes shipping/logistics/transportation/infrastructure cheaper. City centers are cheap from a logistical point of view but usually suffer from high real estate costs (except where these are depressed by crime or neglect), suburbs are often a good compromise between logistical costs and real estate costs, and rural living tends to involve the nearest store being 10 miles away, pricey, yet still having a poor assortment, plus difficulty with access to utilities and public transport. (FWIW, I used to live on a dirt road in a forest in the mountains above Silicon Valley, so I’m rather familiar with the upsides and downsides of both.)