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You write: "At least in most western countries and Japan where successful people have less children. It's almost like an anti survival of the fittest, if you a

You write: "At least in most western countries and Japan where successful people have less children. It's almost like an anti survival of the fittest, if you are successful, less people in the next generation will carry your genes." One interesting scenario you should consider are situations where a researcher comes up with a game theory scenario that they would like to do research with, but the people who play the scenario are smarter than the researcher. The question then arises - can the researcher correctly analyze the strategies pursued by the players? It's an interesting problem for game theorists - the researcher might conclude that the players are making the "wrong" decision, but in fact, since the players are more intelligent than the researcher, they've actually seen nuances in the various options that the researcher did not see when the researcher first designed the scenario. For a point of comparison, imagine 2 grand masters play a game of chess. One of them wins and one of them loses. Now give a recording of the game to a chess novice. The novice can obviously repeat what moves that happened, but can the novice correctly analyze the game and determine what the losing decision was? Does the novice have the skill to correctly understand whatever gambit the losing master was trying to pursue? Can the novice correctly figure out what the decisive move (or moves) was? I do not mean to insult your intelligence, but you should consider whether the successful, intelligent couples "in most western countries and Japan" are in fact paying attention to nuances that you have overlooked? Just to throw out some random possibilities (I am not arguing for any of these, only pointing them out): 1.) the path to reproductive success is to make greater investment in less children (more resources per child, given less children) 2.) less children per parent leads to greater health for the child 3.) successful men who marry successful women are secretly (or openly) promiscuous when they are young and have more children than are recognized Again, I'm not saying any of these 3 options are true, I'm just saying there may be game moves that the very intelligent are considering, which maybe you have overlooked. I'd be cautious about assuming that the most intelligent members of the species are making all of the wrong moves in the game of life.

korl 16y ago
I see what you are trying to say. I'm not saying you are wrong, just what I think. In my opinion, 1) doesn't make sense in our current society. Nor did it make sense any time before it if having less children but more successful ones didn't translate in those children themselves having more offspring than if they had had brothers. The path to reproductive success is to make sure your children reach adulthood and can have children of their own..., ideally so your descendants grow exponentially. I don't know how making sure my kid has a Playstation 3 and an HD TV guarantees that he will have more reproductive success. College you say? Any lower-middle class person can go to college, you'll just get into debt like everybody else. Besides you don't need a college degree to reproduce, how are immigrants doing it then? 2) I know that you weren't arguing for any of this, but I'd really like to see citation for this one. Maybe during a time of famine it would be true, but how exactly would I be less healthy if I had 10 siblings? 3) I don't know if they are more promiscuous or not, but they are definitely not having more children, that's the whole point of these ideas about idiocracy. I didn't cover the successful couples that don't have kids at all, which are a lot of them. Please, explain to me how that makes sense, not having children will help your reproductive success because...? How is that not a wrong move? You might think that it's the right move if having only one well provided child made sure that he went to the top of society, i.e. become a millionaire, which is very unlikely anyway for most people. If your line of descendants has just one child over a few generations, your original DNA that is in that person will be a small part of him. I think the person whose descendants had at least 3 children each generation will have a greater chance of having his genetic legacy survive even if those descendants are a little less well off, which doesn't need to be true. I would really like to believe that you are right and in fact there is something we are not seeing. But there aren't even any statistics that show that an only child will be richer or healthier in the future.
- lkrubner 16y ago
  I wasn't arguing in favor of any of those 3 scenarios, I was simply pointing out that the very smart might be considering game moves that were non-obvious. I'm also keeping an open mind about the possibility that there is no reproductive advantage to limiting one's children. Richard Dawkins seems to believe that. In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes: "We can rise above the influence of our genes, indeed, we do every time we use contraceptives."

korl 16y ago

I see what you are trying to say. I'm not saying you are wrong, just what I think. In my opinion, 1) doesn't make sense in our current society. Nor did it make sense any time before it if having less children but more successful ones didn't translate in those children themselves having more offspring than if they had had brothers. The path to reproductive success is to make sure your children reach adulthood and can have children of their own..., ideally so your descendants grow exponentially. I don't know how making sure my kid has a Playstation 3 and an HD TV guarantees that he will have more reproductive success. College you say? Any lower-middle class person can go to college, you'll just get into debt like everybody else. Besides you don't need a college degree to reproduce, how are immigrants doing it then? 2) I know that you weren't arguing for any of this, but I'd really like to see citation for this one. Maybe during a time of famine it would be true, but how exactly would I be less healthy if I had 10 siblings? 3) I don't know if they are more promiscuous or not, but they are definitely not having more children, that's the whole point of these ideas about idiocracy. I didn't cover the successful couples that don't have kids at all, which are a lot of them. Please, explain to me how that makes sense, not having children will help your reproductive success because...? How is that not a wrong move? You might think that it's the right move if having only one well provided child made sure that he went to the top of society, i.e. become a millionaire, which is very unlikely anyway for most people. If your line of descendants has just one child over a few generations, your original DNA that is in that person will be a small part of him. I think the person whose descendants had at least 3 children each generation will have a greater chance of having his genetic legacy survive even if those descendants are a little less well off, which doesn't need to be true. I would really like to believe that you are right and in fact there is something we are not seeing. But there aren't even any statistics that show that an only child will be richer or healthier in the future.

lkrubner 16y ago
I wasn't arguing in favor of any of those 3 scenarios, I was simply pointing out that the very smart might be considering game moves that were non-obvious. I'm also keeping an open mind about the possibility that there is no reproductive advantage to limiting one's children. Richard Dawkins seems to believe that. In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes: "We can rise above the influence of our genes, indeed, we do every time we use contraceptives."