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Everyone knows, by which I mean I can't be bothered to look up the source, that the poor and uneducated are having more kids than the rich and educated in the first world. There is much crying about what this means for human evolution- they even made a documentary about it. And it's true that in preindustrial times, the rich and literate outbred the poor and literate, and the the thesis of Farewell to Alms is that this, through cultural or genetic evolution, led to the industrial revolution. But did you know that in frontier New France (aka Quebec), where land was cheap, population density was low, and hence wages were high, the poor and illiterate outbred the rich and literate? Once you had enough intelligence for farming, which wasn't that much on such productive land*, anything else would just get you in trouble.
Biology field trip: the number of individuals of a given species that an ecosystem can support is called k, the number that actually exist is called n. The number of individuals a female could hypothetically produce in her lifetime is called r. Some species (most mammals and birds) provide a lot of extremely expensive care for their offspring, and often start reproducing relatively late in life. These are called k-strategists. Other species (most arthropods) just crank up r, provide no parental care, and hope some of their offspring happen to survive. As long as the population is at equilibrium, it doesn't really matter- each adult is going to average two surviving offspring. But if the population is temporarily depressed below k (due to e.g. weather or disease), or k suddenly increases (due to e.g. weather or a loss of predation), r-strategist species will catch up to k much faster than k strategist species. Like most things, it's a continuum, not a discrete choice- rabbits put some energy into their offspring, but less than whales do, and more than spiders. That's (one reason) why the rabbit population in Australia has recovered from the deliberate plague we released faster than the orca population has from us stealing all of their babies. Previous statement "if we raise productivity we just reproduce more and the standard of living stays the same" is mathematically equivalent to "k is determined by resources/person, raising resources raises k." Humans are more or less unique in our ability to raise k. For the first couple of hundred thousand years we did so pretty slowly, but since 1800 or so it's been up like a rocket- in fact, it's going up faster than n.
I think that that there's also variation in placement on the r-k continuum within a species. Think of all the time we spent discussing concerted cultivation (practiced by well off, well educated people who reproduce late and have few children) versus natural growth (practiced by comparatively poor and uneducated people who start reproducing earlier and have more children**). My hypothesis is that when the human population is well below k, r-strategists (breed quickly, invest relatively little in offspring) are evolutionarily favored. But when we're near k, which is what Farewell To Alms calls the Malthusian limit, k-strategists are favored. n/k was small in in frontier Quebec because there was so much land relative to the number of people, given the farming techniques they had available*** . This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense- if your environment is awesome, why waste time making it more awesome? that's energy you could spend having babies. And if you make your environment more awesome and your neighbor has babies, guess who's better represented in the population next generation? n/k is small now because k is growing faster than we can keep up with it, and so low-offspring-investment strategies are favored. Either intelligence is the driving force behind the increase in k, in which case this will eventually balance out, or it isn't. And while I personally want the world to keep becoming more intelligent, there's no evolutionary reason for that to be "right."
All modern economics show that even unskilled immigrants grow a 1st world economy on both an absolute and per capita basis (with possible costs for high school dropouts). I wonder if this is also a function of n/k- maybe the 2nd derivative of the utility curve isn't uniformly negative (non math people: maybe we don't hit diminishing returns right away). Since that's where we've spent most of our lives, it would we have the capacity to strongly believe that immigrants are threats..****
Special thanks to scythe_of_time, if she hadn't asked about this in a comment on Wednesday's post I might not have realized the significance of the throwaway sentence about New France.
*I so need to write the post about how the difference in European and Asian farming techniques selected for intelligence much more strongly in Asia. But right now this is more interesting.
**I never got a full post out of this, but Unequal Childhoods talks about how lower class families value extended family more than middle class families, spend more time with them, and have substantially less sibling conflict. I feel like there might a thing here, but I haven't worked it out yet
***What about the Native Americans, you ask? The book doesn't say, but I believe that they were at the k allowed by their cultivation techniques, but the more advanced techniques of the French had a higher k.
****Human beings can believe almost anything, but I believe there are certain ideas that we're predisposed to have strong emotional reactions to, similar to the way you can teach a monkey to fear snakes but not flowers.
Biology field trip: the number of individuals of a given species that an ecosystem can support is called k, the number that actually exist is called n. The number of individuals a female could hypothetically produce in her lifetime is called r. Some species (most mammals and birds) provide a lot of extremely expensive care for their offspring, and often start reproducing relatively late in life. These are called k-strategists. Other species (most arthropods) just crank up r, provide no parental care, and hope some of their offspring happen to survive. As long as the population is at equilibrium, it doesn't really matter- each adult is going to average two surviving offspring. But if the population is temporarily depressed below k (due to e.g. weather or disease), or k suddenly increases (due to e.g. weather or a loss of predation), r-strategist species will catch up to k much faster than k strategist species. Like most things, it's a continuum, not a discrete choice- rabbits put some energy into their offspring, but less than whales do, and more than spiders. That's (one reason) why the rabbit population in Australia has recovered from the deliberate plague we released faster than the orca population has from us stealing all of their babies. Previous statement "if we raise productivity we just reproduce more and the standard of living stays the same" is mathematically equivalent to "k is determined by resources/person, raising resources raises k." Humans are more or less unique in our ability to raise k. For the first couple of hundred thousand years we did so pretty slowly, but since 1800 or so it's been up like a rocket- in fact, it's going up faster than n.
I think that that there's also variation in placement on the r-k continuum within a species. Think of all the time we spent discussing concerted cultivation (practiced by well off, well educated people who reproduce late and have few children) versus natural growth (practiced by comparatively poor and uneducated people who start reproducing earlier and have more children**). My hypothesis is that when the human population is well below k, r-strategists (breed quickly, invest relatively little in offspring) are evolutionarily favored. But when we're near k, which is what Farewell To Alms calls the Malthusian limit, k-strategists are favored. n/k was small in in frontier Quebec because there was so much land relative to the number of people, given the farming techniques they had available*** . This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense- if your environment is awesome, why waste time making it more awesome? that's energy you could spend having babies. And if you make your environment more awesome and your neighbor has babies, guess who's better represented in the population next generation? n/k is small now because k is growing faster than we can keep up with it, and so low-offspring-investment strategies are favored. Either intelligence is the driving force behind the increase in k, in which case this will eventually balance out, or it isn't. And while I personally want the world to keep becoming more intelligent, there's no evolutionary reason for that to be "right."
All modern economics show that even unskilled immigrants grow a 1st world economy on both an absolute and per capita basis (with possible costs for high school dropouts). I wonder if this is also a function of n/k- maybe the 2nd derivative of the utility curve isn't uniformly negative (non math people: maybe we don't hit diminishing returns right away). Since that's where we've spent most of our lives, it would we have the capacity to strongly believe that immigrants are threats..****
Special thanks to scythe_of_time, if she hadn't asked about this in a comment on Wednesday's post I might not have realized the significance of the throwaway sentence about New France.
*I so need to write the post about how the difference in European and Asian farming techniques selected for intelligence much more strongly in Asia. But right now this is more interesting.
**I never got a full post out of this, but Unequal Childhoods talks about how lower class families value extended family more than middle class families, spend more time with them, and have substantially less sibling conflict. I feel like there might a thing here, but I haven't worked it out yet
***What about the Native Americans, you ask? The book doesn't say, but I believe that they were at the k allowed by their cultivation techniques, but the more advanced techniques of the French had a higher k.
****Human beings can believe almost anything, but I believe there are certain ideas that we're predisposed to have strong emotional reactions to, similar to the way you can teach a monkey to fear snakes but not flowers.
