Does the modern world 'work'? Population growth says yes - subfertility says no

The validation for many/ most things in the modern world (post-industrial revolution) is... the modern world itself; and its technological capability, material abundance, comfort and convenience.

But ultimately - the success, the 'truth' of modernity is the number of people it supports. The validity for modernity is the fact that we have seven billion people in 2019 whereas 200 year before there was one million.

Or, on a smaller and more immediate, observable, scale: for most of its history the population of England did not exceed 4 million (mostly it was a lot less) but from about 1800 it began to increase to about 50 million natives in about 1970. This increase was very obvious, and was obviously caused by big families; those with three or more surviving children.

The ability to support a much larger population was a sign of success; the much larger population was itself an agent of success - enabling the English to spread to may places around the world.

Population growth is, indeed, the most effective validation of modernity. It is the most objective measure that says: the modern world works.

So the first-glance validation, at least up to around 1970, is that modernity works.

But it was noticed even during the later 1800s that those who were most successful in modernity (highest status, riches, most educated etc) were usually the least fertile, had the fewest surviving children - and this especially applied to women. The most successful were indeed subfertile - had fewer than two children per woman.

Subfertility then extended, over the next century, to include entire national populations, then the entire Western world.

If early population growth validated early modernity; then later population decline invalidates later modernity.

The conclusion is that modernity used-to 'work'; but now does not work. 

Is this a problem? It is indeed a problem, because people have changed the rules, moved the goalposts - and are now defining the 'success' of modernity as population reduction, instead of population increase!

And matters are worse than this, because the modern world uses its technological capability and material abundance to increase the population in the non- or -less modern parts of the world. The modern world population declines, but transfers modernity to the not-modern world and expand it.

Modernity is not only declining, but hastening its own decline.

Yest surely this a a soluble problem. The power of modernity to solve problems is legendary... But this has not happened - population decline of modern populations has indeed spread to all developed countries without exception. That is the past.

And is not happening in the present; mostly because the problem of population decline is not acknowledged, is denied: indeed - the problem is redefined as success!

So, by the major and most objective criterion with which modernity judges its own success, its own superiority as a world view; modernity has failed; and modernity has been for several generations objectively a failure.

And if modernity is a failure, then the ideas, ideology, assumptions that fuelled modernity are a failure - simply by applying the exact same criteria by which they used to be judged a success.

Modern modernity is objectively a failure. That modern modernity is a dishonest failure ensures that the probems will not even be addressed, never mind solved.

Why do demographers keep under-estimating the size of peak world population?

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Why do population projections keep underestimating the size at which world population is supposed to level-off, so that maximum population keeps getting revised upwards?

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The answer is that demographic projections are typical of the social sciences in regarding all humans everywhere as interchangeable units (after controlling for age and sex differences) - and therefore the population projections have two false built-in assumptions:

1. That all populations in the world are the same in terms of psychology - and will therefore behave the same way given the same environmental stimuli.

This is false with respect to races, and also religions/ no religion.

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2. That human psychology remains constant over time - that the population-relevant behavioural characteristics are not changing over time - not undergoing 'secular changes'.

This is also false. Since both are highly heritable general intelligence is declining while heritable personality is changing due to differential fertility (only slightly modified by differential childhood mortality - which is nowadays very low) - in ways that will reduce economic productivity.

Indeed, I believe (based on historical changes in simple reaction time data) that the rate of change in human psychology is very much faster (about twice as fast) as most people have so far assumed.

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But as well as applying biologically due to natural selection, secular change in human psychology also applies at a societal level due to cultural selection - for example, secularization and apostasy have been a major reason for the collapse of fertility below replacement level in all developed countries.

Furthermore, the work of Eric Kauffmann shows that those religions, and especially traditional (anti-modern) denominations within religions, that support larger families are growing in their differential representation - which amplifies future population growth when offspring are retained within fertile denominations.

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So we can be reasonably confident that the world population will keep growing until something stops it - famine and disease probably, backed by lethal violence, and perhaps (in the West) the novel phenomenon of mass suicide.

Or maybe the ruling elites will escape mass media influence, snap-out-of their Leftist psychosis, embrace real Christianity, and take sensible action to prevent the mega-horrors to come?

Ha! Only kidding...

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While it's true that the Global Establishment want to kill c90% of the masses; don't forget that the masses have also chosen their own extinction

In this era when the world leadership class plans to kill the vast majority of the people in the world are accelerating on all fronts; it is easy to forget that - even without this external assault - there has long since been a general decision among the mass populations of the developed world to chose extinction. 

This can be seen from observing the Fertility Rates of all the wealthier and more powerful nations; which are considerably less than the minimum replacement level of two (and a bit) children per woman, and falling. Any (apparent, slight) exceptions are due to recent mass immigration from undeveloped nations - and the sufficiently-fertile sub-groups of native 'Western' populations can only be found among minorities of most religious and most socially-disengaged. 

And the whole scenario is topped-off by the well-known observation that fertility rates go down with increasing average intelligence, conscientiousness, education, health, wealth and status - especially strongly among women.  

What all this means is that the masses of the world have all made broadly the same decision to stop reproducing to the extent that they are most able to afford children, are capable of raising children - and are capable of maintaining the world Industrial System that has allowed the population to increase for a maximum of a billion in c1800 (and through all preceding history) to more than 7 billion now. 

Of course, the overall world population itself continues to increase among those who cannot choose to limit their reproduction, and who are too feckless to do so. In other words, the data suggests that these children are unchosen, and would not be born if the fertile populations of the world could prevent them. 

These children who fuel world population growth are, in effect, kept-alive and raised by technology and subsidies from the dwindling, ageing populations of the developed world; those who have reduced their own fertility to inevitable-extinction levels. 

Consequently, the median-average age of nations has reached an astonishing degree of divergence between countries; with the average Japanese being aged 50 - which means that there are a very low proportion of women capable of having children; while the average citizen of Niger is 15 - which means that more than half the population are children. 

Neither of these population structures are biologically viable; and there are many similar (if less extreme) examples.

So, if we looked at the population structure and distribution of planet earth from the perspective of an alien naturalist; the situation is biologically non-viable. 

The human species has painted ourselves into a corner from which it would be exceedingly difficult to extract ourselves without global collapse, colossal levels of death, and immense suffering - even assuming there was general awareness and recognition of the problem, and a sincere and motivated desire to escape; neither of which is the case. 

Therefore; even if we in The West did not have a literally-demon-controlled ruling class who hate us - and desire to damn, torment, destroy and replace us; it is a fact that the mass of humans have - by their choices - shown that their self-chosen 'revealed preference' is for annihilation. 

Corruption is extreme is on both sides of the ruler-ruled divide - and this fact needs to be kept in mind. 

Coming soon - the Giga-death world of the mutants

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Note: the following is based on a speculative conversation with Michael A Woodley - and it was Michael who invented the tern Giga-death to describe the post-industrial world of collapsing population. This post continues from:
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-rise-and-fall-of-industrial.html

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The Industrial Revolution had the effect of allowing many billions of people who would have died to stay alive - this meant that genetic mutations which would have been eliminated by death during childhood instead accumulated.

The Industrial Revolution has kept the mutants alive - including (very probably) you, and me, and billions more like us!

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Indeed, for reasons which are somewhat uncertain, most people in most of the world chose not to have replacement numbers of children (the only exceptions being among the most devout members of highly traditional religions) and a combination of contraception and abortion mostly allowed them to achieve this choice.

Therefore, on the one hand mutations have been accumulating, generation upon generation, with (approx) one or two deleterious mutations being added to each lineage with each generation; on the other hand, people who exhibited traits caused by deleterious mutations - such as lowered intelligence and impaired long-termist conscientiousness, or higher impulsivity, aggression and criminality - were positively selected, were genetically favoured - simply because their pathologies meant they were either unable or unwilling to use fertility-regulating technologies.

In other words, accumulating mutations which damaged functionality actually amplify reproductive success under present conditions and for the past several generations.

Or, after the Industrial Revolution, humans have been bred for increased levels of genetic disease: we are now a mutant-enriched species.

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Thus the proportion of mutants rose from two causes:

1. Incremental accumulation of spontaneous mutation, generation upon generation.

2. A positive feedback effects whereby damage from mutations (unless lethal or nearly so) would amplify reproductive success.

So there are more mutants in the population from accumulation, plus these mutants are more successful at reproducing and thereby spreading the mutations.

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This trend is amplified further by recent and current patterns of mass population migration from areas with higher established mutations loads which have been further amplified by the effects of the industrial revolution, and various degrees of population replacement. 

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At some point, the proportion of mutants - who are on average significantly damaged in functionality - will become so great that the Industrial Revolution will fall-apart, collapse; the 6-7 billion excess population will be unsupportable; there will be a Giga-death (i.e. billions of deaths) scale of mortality over some period - and eventually the world will again become agrarian.

However, countries such as Europe will not return to the medieval level of agriculture but to somewhere below the mediaeval level in terms of social complexity and productivity.

We could expect something more like the Dark Ages or the Ancient British (Iron Age) agriculture at best - or maybe even back to the productivity of Neolithic (New Stone Age) agriculture if metalworking is lost. 

In other words, productivity after the Industrial Revolution will be below the levels of productivity before the Industrial Revolution - because the post-Industrial world is full of damaged mutants.

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This is important to recognize. A population of mutants whose intelligence has been dragged-down to a certain level will be much less functional than a population where selection has kept it in equilibrium at that level - the mutants will be carrying multiple pathologies in addition to their impaired intelligence. 

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But arriving at this situation will take a while.

Before then there will be the Giga-death phase: the die-off of the billions of excess population which have been sustained by an Industrial society of frequent productivity innovation, but otherwise not.

So, there will be lots of mutants of many different types, living among a contracting, collapsing, population - as the billions in excess of the earth's agrarian carrying capacity begin to die-off.

This world of mass dying will provide a new kind of selective environment - some mutants may reproduce vary rapidly under these strange (and temporary) conditions by evolving to exploit unusual resources which are (temporarily) abundant in a Giga-death world..

And if the dying-off lasts a few generations, some weird mutant 'scavengers' may come to dominate in some places.

Interesting times...

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The rise and fall of the Industrial Revolution

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Throughout recorded history, it seems that the human population of the world could not exceed (approximately) one billion.

The effects of the industrial revolution - beginning in England and spreading its benefits everywhere else - was to enable the population of the world to increase several-fold and rapidly:

Up to 1804 - world population does not exceed one billion; 123 years later (1927) doubles to two billion; 48 years later (1975) doubles to four billion; (projected) 50 years later (2025) doubles to eight billion.

It seems reasonable to infer that extra 6-7 billion people added since 1804 are a result of the Industrial Revolution.

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Or, 6-7 billion people's lives depend on the Industrial Revolution - subtract the Industrial Revolution and you subtract 6-7 billion people.

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The essence of the Industrial Revolution has been increased productivity - more production per person especially relating to food and other essentials (at least seven times as much productivity on average per person - but of course in reality it is heavily skewed, and the great bulk of the increase in productivity is mostly due to a small minority).

The major cause of the Industrial Revolution was frequent breakthroughs in the production of food and other essentials.

The reason for frequent breakthroughs was a high concentration of creative geniuses in those fields in Europe (and the European diaspora) - the benefits of these breakthrough diffused to become generally available.

Therefore the Industrial Revolution, and an extra seven billion people by 2025, was caused by a relatively small number of creative geniuses in Europe - plus the fact that societies were able and willing to use (to exploit for increased productivity) the breakthroughs which geniuses provided. 

(Subtract a small proportion of creative geniuses in Europe - and you subtract the Industrial Revolution.)

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This picture is pretty much the opposite of that which is disseminated in the West, where the standard notion is that the Industrial Revolution caused poverty, and Europe extracted resources from the rest of the planet.

In fact, if it is tracked by population changes, it can be seen that the Industrial Revolution has primarily 'benefited' the poorest people and the poorest nations - whose populations have been growing extremely rapidly since the Industrial Revolution and continuing; outstripping the richest people and nations who are actually declining - fast (material support for this population increase among the poorest being provided-by the Industrial Revolution generated by richest people and nations).

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But creative genius has dwindled to low levels in European populations and the world, and insofar as genius still exists, its output tends to be ignored rather than exploited to enhance productivity.

The rate of major productivity-enhancing innovations has apparently declined considerably since 1970.

Yet the world population continues to grow; billion upon billion...

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The life of billions of extra people all over the world depends upon the Industrial Revolution / enhanced productivity which depended on the breakthroughs provided by a very small proportion of European creative geniuses - who no longer exist...

Europe is dying and degenerating, both - subtract Europe and you subtract the Industrial Revolution, and you subtract 6-7 billion people.

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But it is worse than that, because the basis of intelligence and personality which created and sustained the industrial revolution have for several generations been under negative selection; and the opposite positively selected - indeed people carrying a high mutation load such that this impairs their intelligence and makes them short-termist and impulsive - and who either avoid education or cannot do it... these 'mutants' have been strongly positively selected-for at a global level... and continuing.

So not only are we failing to innovate - we are failing to repair and maintain what has already been invented.

Entropy (and novel threats) will do the rest: humans need to keep innovating just to stay in the same place.

Stop innovating and we will 'soon' be overwhelmed.

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Q: What will happen? A: How long can we continue to live off capital?

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Don't blame the crows! It's Not About the birdemic!

It's not about the birdemic... I have found this slogan to be a useful mantra.

Converting the entire developed world to a totalitarian police state in a fortnight isn't about the crow birdemic.

The birdemic is just an excuse - and, indeed, a very inadequate excuse; since the plague of crows is nowhere near severe enough to warrant any kind of mega-reaction in The West - let alone the actual reaction.


Reasons for knowing the fakeness of the birdemic

1. Numbers of international deaths too small by c.1000-fold to assume that this is a dangerous birdemic - European deaths are even less, proportionately.

2. Severely affecting and killing almost exclusively the very-old and/or already-sick - just like dozens of other Upper Respiratory Tract Infections. Apparently, zero people under age fifty have died in Europe thus far (and very few in China - and these may have had other medical conditions).

3. Severe effect is mainly seen among East Asian ethnicity, much less or not at all among Europeans. The mortality rates among the young seem much higher for China and S. Korea than in Italy - and mortality in the Italian national population may well have been disporportionately among the large East Asian immigrant/ migrant population - but these numbers are being withheld.


So the birdemic crisis is fake. Why then do we have a crisis?

Because of the response; which is not fake, and indeed amounts to the very-rapid and universal imposition of a bureaucratic totalitarian police state; run (because such are the people involved) on atheistic, leftist, anti-Christian lines.

Since the epidemic is fake, there is little reason to assume the new 'special powers' will be revoked; and at the least they will be claimed to have saved The West from imminent mass death.


Why do I infer the response is fake? 

1. The response is unlike the response to any previous crisis ever - there is no track record for its success; there is zero reason to suppose it will be more effective than other responses in the past (which fell short of a totalitarian coup).

2. The response is, indeed, precisely the same as was being asked for by the Climate Change/ Extinction Rebellion cartel of the Global Establishment: in other words omni-surveillance and micro-control of the population of The West - eventually The World; plus collapsing the world economy and international trade.

3. The response is destructive of the primary basis of survival of the world population - the 'Industrial Revolution' etc. - the international system of specialisation and trading which has increased the world population from c.1 billion in 1800 to c.7 billion now. This means that the Global Establishment are risking the death of billions of people (of all ages and health), in order to try and save thousands (almost all old and unhealthy).


Implications

We can't, as individuals, do anything to stop or ameliorate the Big Picture. But what we need to do is interpret the crisis spiritually.

The crisis is real, and it is a spiritual crisis.

It is, indeed, a spiritual battle, an example of Unseen Warfare. Specifically there has been a successful coup by the powers of evil.


This has already happened, it is too late to prevent. But it is vital to recognise that this is indeed What Has Happened.

It's not about the birdemic; it's a socio-political takeover by the powers of evil.

And most people in The West support this takeover - fanatically so! One aspect of the crisis is that things have come to a point; and nearly everybody has-taken sides; and the side that nearly everybody has taken is that of the evil (demonic) powers.

Having recognised what has happened, and that we are in a tiny minority; serious Christians need simply to continue as usual.

To continue (that is) to recognise this life - your and my actual lives - as tailred for our spiritual learning ('theosis'); and to recognise death as a portal to eternal life in Heaven for those who choose to follow Jesus.


And having said that; many Christians will find themselves pretty much alone, spiritually; and will need to develop their own resources to survive and thrive in a condition of Faith, Hope and Love.

That will be a big challenge because it is new territory, a novel situation for Christians who have been accustomed to regard themselves as primarily part of a church.

Many people will find that they are in a situation in which either they are an autonomous 'solo Christian'; or they will soon be no Christian at all.

That will be another 'coming to a point'.

Sheer, blind craziness and murderous evil: factual implications of demography

 The obscene vision that is Germany's population structure

 The nemesis that is Nigeria's population (note the numbers on the horizontal axis, five-fold larger than Germany)

We of The West live in societies that are much older than any that have existed in the history of our species; and getting older by every passing year. The cause is that all atheist societies without any exceptions are always grossly subfertile; as well as pessimistic, despairing and functionally suicidal in their attitudes, behaviours and policies (to the point of denying the facts of their own actually existing situation).

From Infogalactic, a sample of Median Ages for nations:

Germany - 46
Japan - 46
Italy - 45
Finland - 43
Canada - 42
UK - 41
France - 41
Russia - 39
Australia 38
US - 38
China - 37
...
Brazil - 31
Turkey - 30
Indonesia - 29
Iran - 28
India - 27
...
Egypt - 25
Bangladesh - 24
Kenya - 19
Nigeria - 18
DR Congo - 18
Afghanistan - 18
Somalia - 18
Ethiopia - 18
South Sudan - 17
Uganda - 16

To see the significance of these numbers, see the population sizes bearing in mind that the youngest countries will have grown and the native populations of the oldest countries will have shrunk since 2010. 

The crude numbers are very bad indeed - but underestimate the problem, firstly because things are still getting worse and secondly because they are distorted by the presence of massive and increasing numbers of much younger recent arrivals of migrants and immigrants in The West (for example, in the UK an excess of 10 million - about 15% of the population? (not accurately measured by our 'government') - has been replaced in the past couple of decades - at a rate of between 0.5-1% p/a).

The dupes and demons who govern us say that these recent arrivals are necessary for our future survival - but clearly this is false, since (obviously) a large majority never do productive work and are indeed a colossal resource drain; but mainly because they have zero interest (quite the reverse) in supporting the aged natives.

The extremes occur because-of the developed world; since development is associated both with population decline in The West and population growth in the third world. e.g. Population growth in Africa is wholly-dependent on decades of Western medicine and 'aid'. Until the past few generations, sub-Saharan Africa was thinly populated due to its level of disease. It was essentially hostile to human survival. Consequently, among disease-survivors, pre-modern Africa had a much higher standard of living per person than pre-modern Europe or Asia.

Sometimes people will speculate, albeit dishonestly, about the economic consequences of these massive and unprecedented extremes of old and young populations. However, the psychological consequences are more fundamental than the effect on the economy. A society in which half the population are in their late forties or older is something new under the sun; and a very different thing from a society when more than half the population are children.

Considering The West; the most important question is how we got here. The simple answer is atheism - the secular society. This demonstrably leads to an existential despair manifest across the board but most objective in sub-replacement fertility (a sign of terminal environmental stress in captive animals).

The second most important question concerns the implications of being so very, very old; of having so grossly distorted a 'population pyramid'.

If our Western populations contained the historically-usual proportion of youth and vigour, perhaps sheer biological self-interest would provide sufficient drive to do something about our desperate situation. But the massive, inertial, top-heaviness of our disaffected, despairing, secularised, materialistic, burnt-out hedonistic elderly population has paralysed us.

However, as a society we don't just do 'nothing' - instead, we actively work to hide the truth and make matters worse even more rapidly. 

When you start thinking about this, and assuming your head does not explode, you will soon realise that (spiritual questions aside, which underpin all-the-above) demography is the single most important material fact of the world today.

The fact that this fact is merely ignored or lied-about, is evidence of a degree of mental malaise that amounts to insanity. And this is not really a matter of opinion. So that insanity is the single most important material fact of our world: sheer, blind craziness.

Unless the single most important fact is that this whole subject is made taboo, with severe sanctions for broaching it. That goes beyond insanity into the realms of murderous evil.

So, the most important spiritual fact is that we in The West are ruled by purposive, deliberate, strategic evil. 

Happy New Year!

The big problems (usually) cannot be averted - but that does not mean we should continue to make them worse

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Yesterday's post was an attempt to describe the problem of overpopulation - which is not something that can be understood by focusing purely on population: indeed the bulk of the problem arises from the mind-set which sees 'population' statistics (numbers of people) as as isolate-able concept.

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But over-population is linked to differential population reproduction - such that the average individual in The West is in the mid forties, while in other parts of the world in their late teens.

(Just think about that! Some places where half the population is above 44; others where half the population is below 18!)

And differential population growth/ decline is related to massive recent and current population migrations.

And both population growth/ decline and movements are linked to massive cross subsidies from developed places and people to undeveloped places and people.

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The general perception of this whole thing is embedded in the weird world view of the New Left secularism - so that in the first place people are unaware of what is happening, in the second place they are not allowed to discuss what is happening, in the third place insofar as they have any opinions on what is happening they are either wrong or irrelevant...

At the end of the day - if the reality of the world situation can be communicated - then it is simply too much for people to take on board; because the problems are so vast, and probably - very probably - some kind of vast crisis seems unstoppable.

So often this is the case: the people who advocate looking at the Big Picture are either dishonest about what they see; or if they are honest, their heads explode.

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My angle is that it is not up to us to look at the Big Picture and solve all problems before they arise; but to try and be sensible and prudent - in particular to try and stop making things worse.

What is happening nowadays, in terms of population, is very bad indeed; not just because of over-population, but because of the changes in the composition and distribution of over-population; because of what fuels over-population - the unrealism, the inability to acknowledge the consequences of short term action, the inability to make tough decisions which are worse in the short term in order to be better in the longer term - and an hysterical perspective which has it that dumb, selfish, short-termism is the only compassionate way to behave...

The current situation is that people continue to do almost everything possible that makes the population problem worse - now and into the future; and they do this (in a sense) because they cannot see a way of curing the problem.

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Because we cannot altogether prevent disaster, people continue making the situation worse; in effect people refuse to stop behaving badly, because to behave properly would not be a complete answer.

We thus have a public, and increasingly private, ethic of helplessness; based on dichotomous thinking of an all or nothing kind - characterized by the set-up that because 'all' is impossible, therefore we must chose nothing; because behaving as sensibly as we can does not solve all the problems and may not avert disaster, then we might as well do nothing - indeed, the reasoning goes that we therefore might as well continue to make matters worse...

I don't think this is a caricature: I think this is how people so things nowadays; how people excuse themselves from even trying to behave sensibly.

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Across the board we see a pattern of denying that there is a problem until the point when it becomes so big as to be undeniable; at which point its size becomes a reason for doing nothing - not even changing the direction of our efforts - because 'it is too late'.

This is a sickness, a state of sin, at the heart of our secular hedonic Leftist civilization - it is a product of profound existential despair, and the cowardice of demotivation - it is permeating a lot of people, right into their hearts - and it will be fatal unless cured.

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World population - Four numbers that explain why this current catastrophe will be By Far the biggest in history

World population (rounded)

1804 (and all human history up to this time) - 1 billion (usually much less)

1927 (123 years later) doubles to 2 billion

1975 (48 years later)  doubles to 4 billion

c.2024 (50 years later) doubles to 8 billion.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the world population could not rise about approximately 1 billion. It is the increase in productivity that began in Britain in the late 1700s - and was initially driven by the European/ descended industrialising nations - that allowed the eightfold increase since that time.


The extra 7 billion people that the world carries currently, is a consequence of the Industrial Revolution; with its vast and complex infrastructure of specialisation and trade sustained by a vast infrastructure of functional human capability and work.

In turn, that vast infrastructure depends on growth in production of essentials fuelled by growth in productivity - that growth in productivity is just-as essential as food, water, medicines etc. But productivity has now been locked-down on a global scale, into a sudden and massive reversal (with size unknown and sequential consequences unknowable).   

History is therefore no guide to our present situation. For example, the crucial difference between the world during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s and the world now, is an extra 6 billion people.


When The System goes down, most of the people in the world will die - since they absolutely depend on The System for supporting that extra 7 billion.

And when most of the people in the world die, that fact also will have (ahem) many knock-on effects.

History is no guide: there is no guide. Our situation is unprecedented and the outcome cannot be predicted, beyond such broad-outline realities as described above.


Yet there is nothing to be gained in worrying about what's coming.

We are each and all standing in the path of a tsunami/ comet/ pyroclastic flow in a real-life mega-disaster movie; and there is nowhere to run. 

As WmJas says https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2020/04/to-those-in-despair.html: our primary (minimal) task here-and-now is to learn Not to be scared.

Could we be living in an era where average intelligence is declining at *two* IQ points per decade

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/intelligence-declined-one-sd-since.html
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/cognitive-dissonance-in-intelligence.html
  
I have been surprised at the combination of hostility and lack of interest in the intelligence community, regarding the discovery that reaction times have apparently slowed substantially over the past 150 years in England; and the implication that this represents a substantial decline in intelligence - amounting to roughly one standard deviation, or 15 IQ points, or the idea that the average intelligence of about 150 years ago would now in in the top 15 percent of modern intelligence. 

Having lived with this knowledge for two years:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/convincing-objective-and-direct.html

I am still fascinated by it, and have find nothing to refute it - on the contrary Michael A Woodley and I have confirmed it (paper submitted) using a completely different method of analyzing reaction time data from a totally independent sample. 

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But I think I understand better why this information will be resisted - and that is it destructiveness of a great deal of existing research in the field.

A suitable analogy is with Gregory Clarke's book A Farewell to Alms: a brief economic history of the world, which describes the effect of human psychological evolution in the economic history of England. He attributes the industrial revolution primarily to changes in the heritable psychology of the English (implicitly, some combination of increased-intelligence and a more-conscientious and less-aggressive personality).

This brilliant work was generally attacked, or faintly praised then ignored - because if acknowledged by the economics community, FtA would at a stroke destroy almost all previous work done on economic comparisons between nations and over long periods of time that have assumed that humans were essentially inter-changeable.

In a nutshell, Clark's work convincingly destroys much of economics as a discipline, by destroying one of its key assumptions - little surprise, therefore, that economists weren't keen on it, that they sensed a problem...

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Similarly, if it is true that human intelligence in countries like England has been declining as rapidly as one IQ point per decade (approximately, on average - and surely varying in speed and magnitude between countries and sub-groups) then this has truly enormous implications in relation to understanding a wide range of phenomena. It throws into doubt all sorts of things. 

For example, the striking decline of creative genius (and therefore of scientific and technological innovation) in the West over the twentieth may be explicable substantially on this basis. There are declines in educational attainment. There is the inexorable slump in economic efficiency. All sorts of indirectly-related phenomena such as the rise of bureaucracy and the corruption of democracy may be implicated.

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A substantial decline in intelligence is also a direct strike against our covert secular religion of progress - if it is known that each generation is significantly less smart than the preceding one, it becomes harder to believe that they are intrinsically superior and entitled to discarded the wisdom of the ages and remake the world on a new set of principles. 

Instead, it looks more like succeeding generation are just too dumb to understand what they have inherited, the culture and the capabilities; and because they fail to understand it - therefore they have no compunction about destroying it. 

Instead of the vast scale and complexity of modern society being a product of our greater capability; it becomes revealed as merely an out-of-control artefact of incompetence and corruption - and the inevitable prelude to collapse. 

Instead of living in a world where we assume that although we may not personally understand x,y and z - 'the experts' understand it. But these experts are getting dumber by the decade, so pretty soon nobody understands x,y, and z. 

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The implications of declining intelligence fan-out like the expanding circles from a rock dropped into a pond - even if we are, as yet, unsure of its causes. 

One cause is almost surely differential reproductive success among people of differential intelligence - but this only seems to account for about half of the decline - the other cause/s are unknown, although I suspect that an accumulation of deleterious mutations in the gene pool (due to the relaxation of natural selection from child mortality) is likely to be a factor. 

But if these are indeed the causes, then looking globally at the unprecedented speed and direction of demographic transformation - and a world where natural selection is now for pure fertility - the decline in global intelligence is certain to be accelerating; and the unprecedented scale of international population migration ensured that this more-rapid intelligence decline will accelerate the already-rapid decline in most native Western populations. 

*

To summarize - we now know, from reaction time slowing, that intelligence has been declining rapidly in England for about 150 years - at very approximately one IQ point a decade; and we know that due to the vast differential in fertility internationally - with rapidly growing and ever younger world population complemented by rapidly ageing and declining Western populations - that the decline in global intelligence must be of a broadly similar (or greater) order of magnitude.

(In reality, these speculative rates of decline will vary both over time and between populations - but numbers are needed, however approximate, in order to handle the consequences over reiterations of the cycle.) 

*

So, a country like England, has been 

1. undergoing a decline in intelligence among the native population measured at about 1 IQ point a decade. 

There is also:

2. a significant decline in intelligence due to the ageing population
 
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-aging-population-as-further-major.html

And on top of this there is:

3. ongoing population replacement, at an accelerating rate, due to mass migration. The effect on average intelligence is hard to quantify, but - given differentials in age and fertility of native and migrant populations - could easily be the same as the decline in the native population..

*

What would this mean?

Well, if the combination of factors led to a decline of 2 IQ points per decade, the consequences would be substantial over a generational time-scale (declining at five IQ points, or one third of a standard deviation per generation) - with an underlying tidal subsidence of capability, an ebbing of innovation, a steady erosion of all activities depending on intelligence (science, technology, arts, the economy, the military, education and so on) - yet invisible to day-by-day, year-by-year inspection. 

Over a lifetime of 75 years, there would be a slump of a whole standard deviation of intelligence - which would mean there would be very little overlap between average 'future-modern' intelligence and that of 150 years ago.

So, in about another three generations (75 years) almost all-Victorian English would have been more intelligent than almost all future-modern English-dwelling people will be (with us, now, about half-way between) - since Victorian English were 1SD more intelligent than us, and we now would be 1SD more intelligent than future modern English-dwellers...

Which implies only a tiny, few, percent, overlap in intelligence between the populations of England in Victorian and future-modern times. They would be regarded as essentially distinct populations in terms of intelligence. In 75 years time!

*

(This is comparable to the largest recently measured intelligence difference between human populations, and very large differences in autonomous cultural capability - the difference-between being able to administer modern technical societies (although probably not to originate them, since our intelligence has already declined) and the remnant of hunter-gatherers/ simple agrarians. )

*

The man in the street would never notice or understand what was going-on - and would no doubt find 1001 other and more obvious things to blame for the collapse of complexly differentiated modern culture - but he would nonetheless be missing the underlying inexorable reason behind a huge range of linked societal changes. 

*

The aging population as a further, major, factor in reducing average intelligence

*

From considering some of the points in this post

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/why-is-decline-in-average-intelligence.html

it is clear that the ageing population, the change in the age structure (as represented by a population pyramid) has been a factor in reducing average intelligence.

*

Almost all nations at present have grossly distorted population structures resembling one of another of these extremes:

In terms of the median (average) age, Angola is in the late-teens, Japan is in the mid-forties.

Such extremes of median age have not been seen in human history, and such an extreme difference between nations is highly significant.

*

The population structure ideal is something in between, and closer to the 'stationary' shape - therefore probably it would be roughly 'pyramidal', but with a much narrower base than Angola.

The developed world nations all approximate to the top-heavy Japanese shape among the indigenous population - very few children at the base of larger proportions of the elderly.

*

As a person ages they suffer a decline in intelligence - which is objectively (but only approximately) measurable by a slowing of simple reaction times.

Reaction times get faster from young childhood up to sexual maturity as intelligence increases throughout childhood and up to about age 16 for girls and 18 for boys.

Adults are more intelligent than children - and a population grossly-over-dominated by children and early teenagers, like that of many of the developed world nations, will therefore natural have a lower average intelligence.  However, such populations would expect to get more intelligent over the short to medium term (forthcoming years to decades) as current children mature into adulthood. 

*

The opposite applies in the developed nations.

The reaction times/ intelligence does not change much during early adult life; but seemingly decline gets faster and faster in the thirties or forties; so the decline in intelligence from age forty to fifty is much greater than from thirty to forty, and continues to accelerate.

*

(The actual amount of decline is only imprecisely known, I think, because it would require longitudinal studies lasting many decades. But as a very approximate ballpark figure, I would suggest a loss of about 10 IQ points (2/3 of a standard deviation) from age 20 to 70. Therefore the decline would go something like 30-40 - 1 IQ point lost; 40-50 - 2 IQ points lost; 50-60 - 3 IQ points lost and 60-70 - 4 IQ points lost.)

*

The developed countries currently have a median average age in the mid-forties, which means that average intelligence has already declined - but as the median age gets above 45 and continues to rise, the rate of intelligence decline will increase further, and further.

At a national level, there would appear to be an apparently sudden, because more rapid, and unavoidable decline in national capability to accomplish functions requiring a population of high intelligence.

*

Of course, intelligence is not the only thing that changes with age - physical ability declines, and personality also changes - but the objective nature of reaction times makes the picture simpler and more objectively measurable, in principle.

(Objectively measurable, that is, at the population level where the imprecision of simple reaction times for estimating individual intelligence, is overcome by averaging of larger numbers.)


*

The point is that a population with a top-heavy population pyramid, a population with a median age in the forties and increasing, is a population with:

1. Reduced average intelligence compared with the optimal population structure - and the transition of population structure to the top-heavy form would be accompanied by an increasingly rapid reduction in average intelligence from this cause;

2. And a population with high median age/ top-heavy structure is a population where further and more rapid decline in average intelligence is to be expected over the short to  medium term (the coming years, and next few decades; due to the small proportion of the population contained in those age- cohorts that will be moving into young adulthood (with peak intelligence) in the near future.


*


Note: Of course, the Leftist media propound sustained mass immigration as a solution to this problem; but of course it is not a solution to this problem and very obviously leads to multiple other and intractable problems.

Suffice to say, any potential immigrant groups that could theoretically improve the cognitive deficit will not improve (and probably worsen) the reproductive deficit - and vice versa. 

In the long term, the current top-heavy population structure of the developed nations will self-correct, because it is unsustainable in multiple ways; and thus the ageing-contribution to intelligence decline will cease. 

However, the intelligence level of the population which stabilizes will, of course, be significantly lower than it was 150-200 years ago - due to the substantial intelligence decline over that period.

*

Romantic Christianity across three centuries - wrong choices, lost opportunities

My understanding of Romantic Christianity is that there were several periods since the Industrial Revolution began; where events were aligned (presumably under divine influences, because this was Man's destiny) such that issue became clearer in The West.

I mean times and places when there was a significant awareness of a choice between the path of continued modernisation (based on continual growth based on increased technology, specialisation, trade etc); and a very different kind of religion, spirituality, ideology, way-of-being - that was Christian and also Romantic.

In none of these eras was that choice made. There were a few individuals, a small following of Romantic Christians - but the powerful and influential people and a large majority of the Western 'masses' chose instead to follow the path of increasing atheism, secularism, materialism, scientism, positivism and bureaucracy.

A smaller proportion adhered (in dwindling numbers, with diminishing conviction) to some form of traditional - Church-driven and externally-orientated - Christianity; or else chose an anti-or un-Christian Romanticism of (either or both) utopian politics and the secular revolution.


The first such era was the beginning of Romanticism itself in the late 1700s and early 1800s, originating in Farnce, Germany and Britain. It dissipated into the characteristic combination of atheism, leftist politics and sexual license that we see in the circle of Byron and Shelley.

At this time, the world's population was at its agrarian/ medieval level about one billion - and from a materialist point-of-view there was no problem about switching to a different and more spiritual way of life. The extra productivity/ efficiency of the agrarian/ industrial could - in principle - have been directed to alleviating absolute poverty, then reducing the quantity of drudgery and labour; and freeing more time and energy for 'higher things'.

The next Romantic era came at the end of the 19th century; but this again was dissipated into sex and politics; and creativity went-into radical experiments in the arts. There was the establishment of a 'Bohemian' lifestyle for drop-outs from the aristocrats, upper and professional classes. World population was about one and a half billion - about a quart of which was of European descent.

The next significant Romantic revival was not until the middle 60s-70s; when world population had grown to about three and half billion; and had reached the point at which an adoption of the Romantic lifestyle would have caused a very significant reduction in the standard of living people had become used to.

Nonetheless; there was among some people a clearly articulated sense that that material production had reached the point of 'more than enough'; and that it would be valuable to scale back on industialisation, trade and labour in order to have a life that was more free and more spiritual.

But, instead there was an expansion of the Bohemian lifestyle - radical politics, sex, drugs, and rock & roll - beyond the young upper-crust and to include pretty much anyone who wanted it: at first the middle classes, later everybody. There was a brief burst of creativity in the populist arts (pop music, pop art, modern dance etc); but before long, all of these were channelled into varieties of consumerism and bureaucracy.

We got to the present situation where most people are some kind of manager working for a branch of the global bureaucracy, and deploying their leisure in doing, watching, day-dreaming about whatever hedonic activity is favoured.

Since the middle 1970s there has never been any serious or large-scale attempt to move towards the Romantic Christian idea; instead the genuine problem has been lost sight of in a world of increasing diversions, short-termism and dishonesty taken to a level of ingrained habit.

Thinking has never been at a lower ebb - with high status intellectuals unable to follow a couple of steps in reasoning and unable to recognise even simple explanatory patterns behind observations.


The above is (very approximately, painted with a very broad brush) how we in The West (or the developed world) now find ourselves where we currently are; at the end of that era which began in the 1700s with the agrarian then industrial revolutions; after a sequence of chances and failures and evasions.

This end was inevitable because the situation was unsustainable - for many, many reasons; but mainly because generation upon generation of spiritual evasion, dishonesty, and outright lying has reached a point where people have decided - en masse - that things must be brought to an end.

We are observing as vast act of rejection of Life, at all the levels in which Life is manifested in this world. By the revealed preferences of hundreds of millions of people; nothing (including radical politics, sex, and hedonism generally) is valued enough to risk anything for it - all has been unceremoniously dumped.

As Thoreau accurately commented more than 150 years ago, and the situation has increased several-fold since: The mass of Men lead lives of quiet desperation; and in the past few weeks desperation has (for most of the mass) turned to despair, and an end is sought.

And perhaps (as was prophesied by various people at various times) most of those who have apparently been among the most devout of self-identified Christians are - it turns-out - as bad as everybody else.


Naturally enough - in a Godless, Christ-rejecting and repentance-denying world - this colossal act of global suicide is being dishonestly self-denied. But that is what's afoot.

Yet, because God is the creator, our loving parents and we his children - for every person at every moment there is an 'instant' solution to this suicidal despair; and the promise of everlasting, Heavenly, resurrected life to come.

(Everybody is an unique individual, but) At some level, we all know (from our pre-mortal life as spirits) the nature of this promise and that this promise is real; but the mass of Men are now so deeply corrupted that such a basic act of acknowledgement is beyond them - or else they know, but choose otherwise - choose sin, or choose annihilation of The Self.

It is better to make such choices during this mortal life; because that is what this immortal life was designed-for; but even if the choice is evaded and denied there will come a point (maybe at the moment of death, manybe sometime after) when we will be confronted with this choice.

Best be prepared. 

Should there be 'population control'?

*

Population control implies planning the size and composition of the human population (as a whole, or in particular areas) - with the stated goal of matching population to resources (potential and or available - over some kind of probabilistic and debatable timescale).

*

People talk about this, a lot - as if it was a common sense aspiration; but I don't know a situation where it has actually been done honestly.

The reason is obvious enough - population control could only be imposed honestly and justly by an extremely powerful but also honest and just government. However, since such governments are... ahem... very rare, then whatever policies are in practice justified by population control rhetoric are in practice dishonest, unjust, ineffective - in sum, counter-productive.

So population control is not common sense.

*

What is also not common sense is the idea (or, more likely excuse) that 'responsible' parents will have few children - or no children at all - because they are trying to prevent over-population.

This makes as much sense as starving oneself to death in order to prevent a famine.

*

But because population planning it treated in public discourse as if it was simple common sense, and because overpopulation is a reality in global and regional terms - and therefore large scale starvation, disease and violence are apparently inevitable - people very frequently argue that it is right and correct and moral for modern Western Man to suppress fertility, to have fewer and fewer children.

As I say, I think this is the mainstream opinion - that population both can and should be planned, that this implies responsible parents should have few to zero children, and that to do this is a sign of superior prudence.

*

Leaving this aside as a typical example of the kind of psychotic and dishonest refusal to think which is imposed upon people by modernity; the question still remains of if not this, then what?

How should we regard this question of 'population'?

Should we ignore prudence and have as many children as come along and trust to God or luck or government to raise them?

No. That is just another, and exceptionally vicious, modern deformation of thought - that it is just and proper and indeed necessary for the governments of developed nations to feed, shelter, clothe, and educate every child born anywhere in the world by an open-ended process of coercively extracting resources from its population and using these to create endlessly expanding child-raising bureaucracies.

This is a vile parody of charity, totalitarian tyranny masquerading as compassion.

*

So not that either - then what?

The answer seems to be simple enough - the 'system' is and should be that parents are and ought to be responsible for their own children.

In other words population 'planning' starts and ends at home.

We ought to 'plan' our own families and we ought to be responsible for them.

*

Now, of course, many many things can and do go wrong with such planning. Parents get sick and die, parents lose jobs and cannot find work, there may be economic collapse and natural disasters, children vary and may be handicapped, sick, unlucky... What then?

What then is essentially that families need and ask for charity, for help from others who ought to help them as and when possible (they have a duty to be charitable), and the givers of charity are given credit for their free gift and the receivers of charity ought to be thankful for such help.

Charity represents the labour - ultimately the time and effort - of other people.

Charity is a duty for Christians - although most of us utterly fail in fulfilling it - but resources coercively extracted by the government do not represent compliance with the duty of charity.

*

But the bottom line is that when parents have children which (for whatever reason) they cannot raise, and if charity is insufficient - then these children will die.

*

Population planning and control are therefore, essentially, euphemisms for population limitation. 

And at the bottom line, there are two options for population limitation: increased mortality or reduced fertility.

Increased mortality was the near universal mechanism is antiquity.

But it seems obvious and sensible and compassionate to modern secular people that reduced fertility is vastly preferable to increased mortality.

Well, how's that working out? Is it viable long term?

*

The secular developed world has reduced and reduced fertility among its rulers, and its productive population, under a wide range of excuses and false rationalizations...

But this is grossly unnatural and unChristian behaviour - so unnatural and unChristian that it is taboo even to discuss the subject in the public arena - so ashamed and angry and confused are we about this matter.

The dishonest denial of common sense always comes back to bite us; and when it does, matters are made worse by the fact that dishonest people who have inverted common sense cannot recognize what is happening to them.

Thus the punishment is doubled.

*

The West is deep into mandatory denial and evasion in terms of population as well as many other matters.

The consequences are extreme and deadly - but these consequences are also subject to mandatory denial and evasion.

So we see that sin is compounded by the consequences of sin - madness and ignorance lead to more of the same; unless or until repentance and rebirth.

*

The billion-fold global die-off - when will it come?

The population of the planet has grown from (approximately) one billion maximum, through most of world history; up to (apparently) more than seven billion at present - and this has happened since the industrial revolution and mostly in the past century.
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-modern-world-is-selecting-for-pure.html

Six billion of the population are therefore sustained by the global system of technology, organisation and trade that we call Western Civilisation - and thus includes all of the 'third world/ developing' nations where population growth is so rapid.

For example, without Western civilisation (including medicine and public health) Africa would have less than a tenth of current population.

And of course Western Civilisation is going to end, and probably quite soon - for many, many reasons not least of which is that the majority of the world, including the global establishment, are extremely hostile to it - and to that which created and sustained it.

This means that billions of people will almost-certainly die, quite soon - although exactly how many billions and how rapidly is merely a question of how long the shrinking remnant can live-off accumulated, but also shrinking, capital stores.

However; 'civilisation' is (quite rightly) nobody's priority to sustain - not least because it is a by-product rather than a strategy; and is anyway a very long-term and remote problem - so it will always be made a low priority in competition with so many others.

The big question is not If there will be a collapse of technology and trade and a colossal extinction event; but why it has not already happened - given the malign intentions of the most powerful people in the world.

The answer is simple, albeit ominous.

The Global Establishment is - grudgingly - maintaining the international system of trade and technology because they are engaged in spiritual warfare, and they are currently winning.

In a nutshell, the Global Establishment are ultimately tools of the supernatural powers of evil - and because evil is winning more and more souls to self-damnation, they want the system to continue... at least for a while longer.

Think of it this way: Billions are going to die for sure - but what is in doubt is the fate of these souls: will they accept the salvation offered by Christ, or will they choose to reject this gift and instead opt for damnation?

Everything currently indicates that more and more people (most obviously in the West - where moral inversion is official and dominant; but seemingly almost everywhere else too - by their behaviour) are motivated by fear, resentment, pride and despair.

In such a state of conviction, the mass of post-mortem souls will not want Heaven, will purposively reject salvation... Certainly they won't want it at the necessary and inevitable price of personal repentance and faith (including admitting they had been fundamentally wrong in mortal life, and then actively joining with God's eternal plan for our deification).  

What this suggests is that it is only the wickedness of the world which is keeping it going, and postponing the billion-fold die-off; and if there are strong signs of a Christian awakening in the hearts of Men, then that will be the time that the demons pull-the-plug on the vast, multiply-interdependent and therefore exquisitely fragile system that we call the global economy.

The mass death will come sooner or later, whatever happens - because its causes are probably unstoppable but in any case not being stopped - yet it may perhaps come sooner if many people do the right thing, than if they don't.

In which case there may be a stark choice between either extending this-world survival coupled with the expectation of an increased rate of eternal damnation; or alternatively accepting rapid collapse and death as the cost of saving more souls for eternal happiness...

Why is there So Much evil in the world today? - Much more than ever before?

The inevitable accumulation of evil through history leading to the End Times, seems to have been something that was apparent to various prophets of the past. 

It does seem very evident here and now; in that we are alive in the most evil time in history, and things are getting more evil by the month. This, I think, is a fact - not an opinion.

There are far more people alive now than ever before - now more than seven billion when the world population was less than a billion through history up until the early 1800s. Since early 2020, the whole world is clearly run as a single polity - and this polity has a global leadership and all social institutions that incorporate increasingly inverted value-systems in the realms of truth, beauty and virtue. 

So, our unprecedented state is that the entire world has a vast population who are mostly-and increasingly living by an increasingly inverted system where evil is regarded as good; and good as evil; and this demonic reversal is (by revealed preference) substantially supported by the masses.  

Therefore I conclude that there is a really tremendous amount of evil in the world today, and that this evil has the upper hand - and evil has been able to overturn not only all traditional religious practices (including where differing religions overlap - such as core aspects of sexuality and sexual identity) - but even personal experience and common sense understanding and reasoning. 

Thus we live in an insane world that lives by Evil Lies. 

It is interesting to consider why this should be; and immediately there seems to be several important reasons - and many more that I do not mention; which suggests a convergence of multiple evil phenomena, that things are coming to a point. 

In an overall sense, I think the End Times have been prophesied for so long because evil is accumulative. It gets added to, incrementally. 

Why? I would suppose that much of this relates to the fate of demons and damned souls. That demons (fallen angelic spirits) are in some sense confined to earth - also that damned souls become likewise spirits who are - in some way - bound to the earth. This would explain that the spiritual presence of evil increases. 

Then, what about the mortal Men who are incarnated in this age? Why are they (we) so prone to evil that we are unable to discern the starkest inversions and unable to discern even the grossest lies? Unable or unwilling to respond to knowledge of evil...

Such gross incapacity as has become normal and average is a consequence of Man's denial of (or total indifference to) divine, creation and the realms of soul and spirit...

In other words, as well as the vast apparatus of top-down evil; there seems to be a matching evil among great masses of people on earth - which suggests that there is 'something wrong' with many of the billions of individuals who have been incarnated in recent generations - and (apparently) continuing. 

Why would God allow such a situation to occur - given that God is creator and also loves us each and individually as His children? 

The overall answer must be some combination of this being the nature of this world, and that the situation is 'for our own good' - given that this mortal life is a temporary state whose function is primarily (but not entirely) to prepare us for eternal resurrected life.

I think we must presume that - although God works at the level of individual persons, and the world as a whole is merely a sum of these individual situations; this evil world is the kind of world that is best suited to the needs of kind of people who have actually been born into it (including you and me). 

In a broad sense; it is comprehensible that a world full of evil spirits and damned souls is the kind of world in which mortal Men who have a nature that is grossly insensitive to evil might have the best possible chance of learning what evil is, and deciding to reject it. 

Since this world is built for those who choose to accept Christ's gift of Heavenly resurrected life - the purpose of this very evil world is to bring naturally-evil people to a realization of the consequences of their choice to reject Jesus. 

There are increasingly only the two choices of Jesus Christ, or evil. There is no neutrality and no other viable options - because all other options are collapsing into convergence with obvious and explicit evil. 

Good and evil have become more distinct and ever-further separated. The situation is unprecedented in clarity and simplicity. Clear and simple enough for even the most tainted of souls to know what it is that they are choosing. 

Men may (of course) still choose to reject Jesus Christ and join the side of evil - it is each person's individual choice and cannot be compelled; but they will know very exactly what they are doing.  

So there is a how so much evil accumulated? And there is a why so much evil? And there are reasonable answers compatible with the loving nature of God and the needs of his children - especially the kind of children that make up a majority.   

After which we need to step back and remember that this is ultimately a 'bespoke world', individually-tailored, so each person and situation is unique - and my job is mainly to learn from my situation. 

Mouse Utopia and the dysfunction and potential extinction of modern developed societies - a summary

A microcosm of what went wrong with the industrial revolution: Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment

Bruce G Charlton

The so-called ‘Mouse Utopia’ experiment was conducted from 1968 by John B Calhoun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun

Four healthy breeding pairs of mice were allowed to reproduce freely in a 'utopian' environment with ample food and water, no predators, no disease, comfortable temperature – a near as possible ideal conditions and space. What happened was described by the author in terms of five phases: establishment, exponential growth, growth slowing, breeding ceases and population stagnant, population decline and extinction:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/procrsmed00338-0007.pdf

Phase A - 104 days - establishment of the mice in their new environment, then the first litters were born.

Phase B - up to day 315 - exponential population growth doubling every 55 days.

Phase C - from day 315-560 population growth abruptly slowed to a doubling time of 145 days.

Phase D - days 560-920; population stagnant with births just matching deaths. Emergence of many pathological behaviours.

Terminal Phase E - population declining to zero. The last conception was about day 920, after which there were no more births, all females were menopausal, the colony aged and all of them died.

To summarise – when four breeding pairs of mice were allowed to reproduce under ideal ‘utopian’ conditions, the colony entirely ceased to breed after three years, and then went extinct.

Interpreting the demise of Mouse Utopia

The main fact about Mouse Utopia, was that despite everything possible being done to create ideal biological conditions; the mouse colony rapidly declined and became entirely extinct. This was a very surprising outcome, biologically; and implies that some very major factor about the basic requirements or behaviour of the mice was neglected.

The Mouse Utopia experiment is usually interpreted in terms of social stresses related to 'over-population'; that crowding generated pathological behaviours and a loss of the will to reproduce. But this seems, very obviously – I would have thought – an incorrect explanation; because 1. The mouse population never actually became crowded, 2. The suppression of breeding happened very quickly, and never recovered even after the population declined rapidly and crowding was reduced, and 3. the population rapidly became extinct.

Michael A Woodley suggests that what was going on was much more likely to be mutation accumulation; with deleterious (but non-fatal) genes incrementally accumulating with each generation and generating a wide range of increasingly maladaptive behavioural pathologies; this process rapidly overwhelming and destroying the population before any beneficial mutations could emerge to 'save; the colony from extinction.

So the bizarre behaviours seen especially in Phase D - such as the male 'beautiful ones' who appeared to be healthy and spent all their time self-grooming, but were actually inert, unresponsive, unintelligent and uninterested in reproduction - were plausibly maladaptive outcomes of a population sinking under the weight of mutations.

Why mutation accumulation?

The reason why mouse utopia might produce so rapid and extreme a mutation accumulation is that wild mice naturally suffer very high mortality rates from predation. Because wild mice are so short-lived, mice are not 'built to last' and have the reputation of being unusually-prone to produce new deleterious mutations (and are therefore extremely prone to cancer, and susceptible to carcinogens - which is why mice are used to test for carcinogens).

Thus mutation selection balance is in operation among wild mice, with very high mortality rates continually weeding-out the high rate of spontaneously-occurring new mutations (especially among males) - with typically only a small and relatively mutation-free proportion of the (large numbers of) offspring surviving to reproduce; and a minority of the most active and healthy (mutation free) males siring the bulk of each generation.

However, in Mouse Utopia, there is no predation and all the other causes of mortality (eg. Starvation, violence from other mice) are reduced to a minimum - so the frequent mutations just accumulate, generation upon generation - randomly producing all sorts of pathological (maladaptive) behaviours.

The danger of mutational meltdown

Extinction due to relaxed selection leading to rapid mutation accumulation is called ‘mutational meltdown’.

It happens because, in addition to the problem of mutation accumulation by relaxation of selection, when a population has begun shrinking, there is an increasing danger of extinction due to a positive feedback cycle. Deleterious mutations accumulate so rapidly that they overwhelm a population before it can evolve an escape – as the population shrinks so it becomes less and less likely to ‘randomly’ generate a compensatory beneficial mutation that might recue it from extinction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown

Mutational meltdown was first described as a threat for small populations of asexual organisms; later the phenomenon was described in sexual organisms, and then fond to occur in large populations. Therefore, mutational meltdown has gone from being a specific case to probably a universal possibility. And thus a possibility in humans.

The unusual twist with modern humans is that native populations in developed countries have begun falling (rapidly) over the past several decades apparently due to chosen sub-replacement fertility, and probably before mutation accumulation had reached a level sufficient biologically to suppress fertility.

In other words psychological factors have anticipated biological factors - and presumably both psychological and biological population decline will combine to increase the degree of reduced fitness resulting from mutation accumulation.

This will probably have increased the risk of mutational meltdown, and of extinction.

Modern England as Mouse Utopia?

If we look at the Mouse Utopia experiment and try to fit the history of modern England into it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_England

There could be an inflection point in 1921 when English population growth suddenly slowed - somewhat like the transition from Phase B to C in the mouse utopia graph (page 83)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/procrsmed00338-0007.pdf

Then the plateau Phase D - where births just replace deaths - was reached in the 1970s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kingdom#Vital_statistics_1960_.E2.80.93_2013

Which perhaps means the next phase would be the Terminal Phase E (among the native population - disregarding immigrants) with fewer births than deaths dwindling to zero live, births and escalating median age, until eventually ‘all’ women are aged beyond the menopause at which point extinction (of the native population) is inevitable.

Well, this isn't really comparing like with like! - and the whole picture is muddied by increasing medical capability and cossetting, which has radically reduced deaths from infectious disease (the main cause of mortality); and keeps infants and the elderly alive in circumstances which would previously have been fatal - but maybe gives us clues of what to look-out-for; assuming that the demise of Mouse Utopia was indeed substantially due to mutation accumulation.

Possible timescale for human extinction

If humans are recapitulating mouse utopia, what might be the approximate timescale for extinction?

As far as I can gather, mice are fully ready to reproduce at about 4 months, so the average generation time is probably about 5 months which is about 150 days.

So, starting with 104 days as zero - when reproduction in Mouse Utopia began; we can convert the above timings into mouse generations

Phase B exponential growth doubling every 55 days lasted 201 days, = 1.3 mouse generations.

Phase C exponential growth doubling every 145 days lasted a further 245 days = 1.6 mouse generations.

So population growth phase in utopian conditions lasted only 3 mouse generations.

Phase D of population stagnation phase lasted a further 360 days = 2.4 mouse generations

Therefore, Terminal Phase E the last conception (and de facto inevitable extinction) was 816 days after breeding commenced = 5.4 mouse generations.

Human generations are conventionally 25 years, although these have slowed to about 30 years in Western countries in the past several decades - but let us therefore give two values - one for 25 year, and the other for 30 year human generations.

If we start at 1850 as the date when the Industrial Revolution seems to have become certainly established and child mortality rates began to drop rapidly (from more than 60 percent to about 1 percent), and start counting generations from that point, and if humans were made like mice (which they are not!)...

We would then predict that human population growth phase (B & C) would last three generations up to 1925-1940

And the stagnation phase (D) for another 2.4 generations - with 5.4 human generations taking us up to 1985-2012.

Well, clearly English people did not stop conceiving four years ago, because babies are still being born to native English - albeit not at a high rate!

I have guesstimated above that the English situation was that the slower growth Phase C began in about 1920 (not about 1880) and the plateau phase began in about 1970) not 1930-ish

So maybe England is lagged about 40 years (or about 1.5 generations) behind Mouse Utopia , because 1. we are not mice, and 2. our mouse utopia emerged only incrementally – moving from the upper to the lower classes; and was probably not complete until about 1950.

So we do not need to worry about mutational meltdown and de facto extinction (i.e. the final English child of English-descended parents being conceived) for, oh, another thirty or forty years!...

Longevity versus fitness

In the late phases of the mouse utopia experiment the birth rate dwindled to zero - but there was a plateau phase when the population numbers remained approximately static because the fewer mice were being born but more mice were living to an extreme old age – a lifespan of four years and longer, which is considerably older than mice would expect to live in the wild.

Yet these mice were grossly abnormal, indeed pathological, in their behaviour. - in particular suffering what might be termed psychiatric abnormalities that impaired social interaction (and reproduction) including a strange narcissism in some male mice (the 'beautiful ones') which looked like superb physical specimens but did not mate.

So we find on the one hand a combination of evidence of cumulative disease, initially manifested in the realm of behaviour - yet on the other hand an ageing population with some animals having a very long life span.

My interpretation is that an increasing average lifespan cannot be interpreted as improving fitness - indeed increasing lifespan is compatible with a severe reduction in functional behaviour; especially when functionality is defined 'biologically' in terms of reproductive success (having sufficient viable offspring to maintain population numbers, and potentially amplify the population when conditions permit).

In Britain in recent decades there has been a large increase in average lifespan (among the native population), including several-fold increases in the length of survival of many groups of ill people. For example, elderly people with moderate to severe dementia may now live for many years, whereas thirty or forty years ago such a diagnosis was regarded as being rapidly fatal within months and less than two years. (And taking into account that modern English average life expectancy is about 80 years – an age at which about 20 percent of people have measurable dementia).

There is no doubt that modern people have been, and are being, misled by the increase in lifespan - and superficial appearances of youthfulness - into assuming that population health is improving; when in biological terms what matters is the ability to survive and reproduce under given conditions. Only if modern people - in particular those of reproductive and productive age - were put into the same kind of harsh, high mortality-rate environment that people of the past lived-in, would we know whether they really do have better functionality.

For example, in hunter gatherer societies those who lack mobility will, sooner or later, necessarily be left to die. In agricultural societies, the struggle for survival was extremely severe and the shortage of food, poor housing, and high prevalence of severe infectious diseases meant that the mortality rate among the elderly was much higher.

But modern societies shelter pretty much everybody from exposure to extreme heat or cold, dehydration, starvation, epidemic infectious disease and violence; plus there are several life-extending treatments of chronic medical conditions (such as high blood pressure) which would soon cripple or kill without continued medication and management.

Therefore, many people of much-reduced functionality who would been unable to survive in historical societies, are currently kept alive for many extra decades in modern societies - with all appearances of reasonably good health... except for behavioural pathologies and sub-fertility.

My point is that modern people may be much less biologically fit than they think they are; and that if societal conditions reverted towards those of historical agrarian societies, or hunter gatherer conditions, their low fitness and inability to survive would become very obvious.

Perhaps the increasingly elderly individuals of the terminal phase of mouse utopia may have congratulated themselves on the success of the experiment, and that mice had attained a more comfortable and compassionate level of social organization than in any previous society.

And then they died out; every last one of them.

Nonetheless, I draw the following lessons.

1. Assuming the decline and extinction of mouse utopia was due to mutation accumulation leading to mutational meltdown - then it happened very quickly indeed: only 5.4 mouse generations to the final conception, with half of that being stagnation.

2. The decline in rate of population increase after only 1.3m mouse generations suggests that the effect of relaxed natural selection and mutation accumulation leads to genetic damage immediately, in the very first generation.

3. Although humans (maturing over 14 years and with a natural life expectancy about 70 years) are built to last longer than mice (maturing over 4 months and living about 2 years) - this may mean that humans are actually more vulnerable to mutation accumulation - because we have a more prolonged and multi-phasic development and depend on extremely-complex brains supporting extremely complex behaviours; which depend on many genes to create and to sustain. Complex social and sexual adaptations are, in other words, large mutational targets – susceptible to damage from many mutations.

4. In mouse utopia, the mouse environment, shelter, food, hygiene etc were all managed by humans - and did not depend on the mice doing anything much for themselves except eat, sleep, fight, groom and reproduce (until they altogether lost interest in sex) - but humans depend on other humans for survival. But when the human population is damaged from mutation accumulation, there will be no external experimenters to ‘look after’ the increasingly-dysfunctional humans – and this will tend to destroy the 'utopian' environment. In other words, there will be a combination of an increasingly dependent population with a reducingly-capable population.

If this destruction is severe enough and comes early enough- then mutational meltdown will be avoided; because harsher natural selection (from the less capable ‘caring’ population) will purge the mutationally-loaded population to prevent it from breeding (and worsening the problem). But if there is a generational lag - and utopia is maintained for sufficiently long that further mutational damage to younger generations continues to accumulate rapidly - then this will hasten the meltdown and extinction; because by the time utopia comes to an end, the younger generations will be unfit to survive the harsher conditions which are the best they can themselves manage.

That is, the younger generations will become too unfit even to care for themselves at a bare minimum level while also being able to reproduce with genetically-viable offspring, and to raise them to independence – at which point extinction is inevitable. The ‘plateau’ phase is when a generation is born that can just-about keep itself alive and functioning, but not able raise any of its (even less-fit) offspring. Eventually, a generation is born that is not even capable to sustaining itself, and the die-off will then be very rapid.

What signs should we look for in monitoring mutation accumulation?

The first signs of mutation accumulation would probably be de-differentiation/ loss of adaptations - especially in social and sexual functioning. These would affect general intelligence 'g' (because g is a fitness measure), and adaptive social and sexual functioning (because these are subtle/ advanced adaptations which are damaged by even slight illness, intoxication, and functional or structural brain impairments).

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/objective-and-direct-evidence-of.html
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/further-evidence-of-significant-slowing.html

I think evidence consistent with both lowered intelligence and also impaired adaptive social functioning can be observed in the report of Mouse Utopia. The reduced fertility in Mouse Utopia is perhaps also related to impaired drive/ motivation - as well as ineffective drive/ motivation (due to loss of functional adaptations).

I general, I think loss of adaptive functionality is what should be looked-for with mutation accumulation (i.e. adaptive behaviours knocked-out or damaged or distorted) as the first and most sensitive changes; rather than weird new behaviours. Specifically:

1. The social domain - first subtle, then gross impairments of adaptive social interactions

2. The sexual domain - first subtle, then gross impairments of adaptive sexual interactions

...bearing in mind that 'adaptive' means tending to enhance reproductive success.

I suggest social and sexual functioning, since these are the areas which I think are the most sensitive to brain impairments; at least that seems to be the situation in neurological and psychiatric disease.

My observation has been that when there is almost any significant degree of neurological or psychiatric disease, even the slightest; social and sexual domain functioning can usually be detected as having been impaired, by those who best knew the patient before he suffered illness.

Psychiatric aspects of Mouse Utopia

In The Narrow Roads of Gene Land Volume 2, the great evolutionary theorist WD Hamilton partially described that world in a chapter entitled The Hospitals are coming, and that is perhaps a good starting point - the idea that everyone will be damaged and most will be sick, in one way or another; so that life will resemble a hospital in which (some of) the less-sick (or the damaged but not-yet sick) tend the more-sick, as best they may - in intervals between doing whatever it takes to stay alive.

This is not by any means an unusual or unprecedented situation for humans through much of the history of the species. For much of the time, Malthusian mechanisms have been in force, and populations have been limited by various combinations of starvation and infectious disease. Infections - in particular - have sometimes been endemic at a high prevalence, so that the majority or even all of the population might be suffering from, be affected by, some chronic parasitic disease (malaria and bilharzia are examples) - but at a relatively low degree of severity.

And with respect to the Mouse Utopia society being a Hospital, it is important to recognize that much of the pathology will be psychiatric rather than physical - this can be seen from the fact that the problems of the original Mouse Utopia were most behavioural rather than physical; and it follows from the fact that the highly complex human brain is exceptionally sensitive to random mutational damage.

Intelligence is probably damaged by mutation accumulation in an incremental and quantitative fashion - the more mutations, the more the lowering of intelligence. Therefore, decline of intelligence as mutations accumulate is likely to be relative smooth (rather than step-like). But intelligence is 'general' intelligence, and is unusual in being a general attribute of cognitive function – probably sustained by small effects of a large number of individual genes. By contrast, most psychological functions are specific; and genetic damage is likely to be more qualitative and either step-like, or all-or-nothing.

What I think would happen, is that accumulating mutation damage would most likely show-up as varieties of specific brain functional damage leading to a wide range of specific behavioural impairments of a social and sexual type (differing between individuals due to random mutations striking unpredictably at a wide range of individual genes) - in a context of progressively declining intelligence.

The kind of damage I am talking about represents a decline in ‘fitness’ – ie. a decline in the functional adaptation of the human organism to its environment (its sexual, social and surrounding environment): a loss of effective functionality. This represents a decline in absolute fitness, but not just relative fitness. It is a also a decline in group fitness - ultimately in species fitness.

If fitness is measured in terms of the capacity to raise sufficient viable offspring in a given environment; then the sexual and social changes induced by mutation accumulation will be such as to reduce the probability of doing this: partly by damage causing reduced brain processing speed and efficiency (detectable as reduced intelligence) and partly by damage causing specific functional impairments (detectable as sexual and social pathologies).

These impairments would presumably include a decline in motivation – reduced motivation to engage in effective reproductive behaviours, reduced interest in sex liable to lead to reproduction, reduced motivation to procreate, to care for and rear children etc. There is certainly abundant evidence of such changes in modern developed societies, such as England.

In sum, in a broad-brush interpretation of the evidence, it looks very much as if England specifically, and all other developed nations to a greater or lesser extent, are recapitulating the Phases of Mouse Utopia – leading towards extinction, or something close to it.

**

Acknowledgements: It was Michael A Woodley of Menie who informed me of the Mouse Utopia experiment, and made the interpretation of its outcome in terms of mutation accumulation.


See also: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/was-human-mouse-utopia-inevitable-no.html