To: carranza2 who wrote (8713 ) 8/30/2006 12:56:52 AM From: Maurice Winn Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 219671 C2, "the rich get richer and the poor get children" theory has been around for a century and probably more. <"Fisher's empirical observation is correct, that the lower orders have more babies, but that doesn't mean their genotypes are inferior." > In a human community, it isn't necessarily the case that breeding rate is a measure of success of a community or to use the more precise self-gene theory, the success of a gene. If I have no children, but relatives [which includes all humans] do really well from what I do, then it's better that I enhance the breeding prospects of a billion people than have 1000 babies of my own. So, if educated people have no children, but average people do all the breeding, that doesn't mean the gene pool will decline. I think that theory is too imprecise. For example, it completely ignores the real bottom of the heap. The bottom 5% for example. How many children do they have? I guess that they don't have many at all for the same reason that everyone thinks they are an above-average car driver. People are social climbers. So even if they themselves are bottom of the heap, they'll reject somebody else who is bottom of the heap because they think of themselves as not actually bottom of the heap, but "above average". So, Mq's theory is that the highly educated [which is another way of saying the highly intelligent] have few children, but their smart genes proliferate in the reproductive rate of the average and just above average mass of humanity, while the average intelligence of the population increases because the bottom 5% decile isn't keeping up their breeding rate. They also suffer more maimings and deaths by accident and I guess by suicide. If we check actual facts, always a good idea in theory development, we see that the Flynn Effect is alive and well. So the doomster idea that the overall intelligence will fall is false. Even if Mq's breeding theory isn't the driving force, the theory that intelligence is falling is wrong. But the biggest driver of all is the synergistic effect of 6 billion becoming globalized, with vast economies of scale. Copy/paste or "click download" costs nothing to produce another of something, whereas producing another sulphuric acid plant, or steel mill, or car factory cost a fortune and took years in the old days. Then they'd have vast wars to fight over various things which set everyone back a decade or two. Mqurice