On the biological side, is there any evidence that we have reached an equilibrium? (I’m asking genuinely)
I’d say the negative correlation between education and fertility has been established pretty firmly. As a simple demonstration: if you sort the information here by fertility rate in descending order, you’ll find that the countries with <2 children per woman are mostly first-world countries. There are more than a few countries in Europe, for instance, where immigration is the only thing keeping the population growth positive, and let’s not even get started on Japan. And it goes deeper than country-to-country comparisons; within a given country, the poor and less educated tend to have more children than the other guys. (China might be an exception to that, I’m not sure.) From what I know of population trends in recorded history, this has always been the case.
This doesn’t look good from an evolutionary point of view, if one is concerned with the long term instead of immediate x-risks and bioengineering etc. On the surface at least high education doesn’t seem to be an evolutionarily valid tactic. Whether this applies for raw, general intelligence… Dunno. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we’d reached an evolutionary equilibrium or a downswing.
the poor and less educated tend to have more children than the other guys. [...] From what I know of population trends in recorded history, this has always been the case.
I can’t find the quote now, but I distinctly remember reading that before recent times (20th century or so), the number of children surviving to reproductive age and lifetime expected reproductive value were much higher among the wealthy elite than the vast majority of the population. It was said there that wealthy women hired poor nursemaids to suckle their babies, enabling them to give birth every 12-18 months instead of every few years (after weaning) like the poor women did. And of course infant and general mortality was much higher among the poor, especially during epidemics.
Looking at it another way, world population multiplied during the last hundred years because average global wealth rose drastically. Poor means malthusian constraints on population size, so even if you have high birthrate, in the end most of them die without reproducing because the population growth rate is vastly below the birth rate.
I’d say the negative correlation between education and fertility has been established pretty firmly. As a simple demonstration: if you sort the information here by fertility rate in descending order, you’ll find that the countries with <2 children per woman are mostly first-world countries. There are more than a few countries in Europe, for instance, where immigration is the only thing keeping the population growth positive, and let’s not even get started on Japan. And it goes deeper than country-to-country comparisons; within a given country, the poor and less educated tend to have more children than the other guys. (China might be an exception to that, I’m not sure.) From what I know of population trends in recorded history, this has always been the case.
This doesn’t look good from an evolutionary point of view, if one is concerned with the long term instead of immediate x-risks and bioengineering etc. On the surface at least high education doesn’t seem to be an evolutionarily valid tactic. Whether this applies for raw, general intelligence… Dunno. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we’d reached an evolutionary equilibrium or a downswing.
I can’t find the quote now, but I distinctly remember reading that before recent times (20th century or so), the number of children surviving to reproductive age and lifetime expected reproductive value were much higher among the wealthy elite than the vast majority of the population. It was said there that wealthy women hired poor nursemaids to suckle their babies, enabling them to give birth every 12-18 months instead of every few years (after weaning) like the poor women did. And of course infant and general mortality was much higher among the poor, especially during epidemics.
Looking at it another way, world population multiplied during the last hundred years because average global wealth rose drastically. Poor means malthusian constraints on population size, so even if you have high birthrate, in the end most of them die without reproducing because the population growth rate is vastly below the birth rate.