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Until it isn't... and there are many, many cases of that too. That being said, the funniest example aligning with the article to me personally, is how nearly a

• AQuantized 7y ago
  I'm uncertain if that rationale is the driving force behind their procreation so much as the correlation with religiosity and low levels of education, which is in turn correlated with greater fertility.
  • skinkestek 7y ago
    I recommend you reread the post you replied to as it seems you agree without being aware of it.
    • brlewis 7y ago
      No, the comment by asdf21 says religiosity results in fertility (causation), while the comment by AQuantized says it's just correlation. Please don't start comments with "I recommend you reread the post you replied to". Be more specific, e.g. "It seems your comment and the one you're replying to are both saying X".
• wwweston 7y ago
  To take this further... is this belief incorrect? If you articulate it in a form that invokes literal theism, then I suppose that makes it a question of whether literal theism is correct, which obviously excludes atheists. But you could articulate it as "children are almost always a blessing" vs "children are a burden, especially after a certain number." Either of these are debatable (and truth for most people is probably a balance of the two propositions), but in this formulation, theism could be orthogonal, or it could take on an auxiliary role in supporting one over the other. And most of all, the question of whether theism is literal or whether it's a symbolic distillation of human observations about values and meaning gets factored out of practical considerations.
  • scubbo 7y ago
    I really enjoy instances where a tradition/belief/superstition results in a beneficial outcome for scientifically-verifiable reasons - especially when they're a shortcut or heuristic for that reasoning. My go-to example - I have heard it said (I'm no expert!) that Feng Shui teaches that one should arrange a room such that a dragon could flow through it comfortably. Even if a dragon never materializes in my room, visualizing that occurrence helps to sub-conciously prompt for clear walkways, sightlines, and other aesthetically pleasing properties.
• zbyte64 7y ago
  Or maybe atheists want to concentrate more resources on the upbringing of the child so that they have a competitive advantage. Then also consider that in 3,000 years I'll probably be ancestor to all (this holds true for others, I am by no means special). Don't really need to go through the hassle of rearing 6 more kids to secure my genetic future.
  • toasterlovin 7y ago
    > Or maybe atheists want to concentrate more resources on the upbringing of the child so that they have a competitive advantage. If you have less than 3 children, investing more resources in each child doesn't matter. 2 children is break even from the standpoint of procreation. So purposefully limiting yourself to that many or fewer children is a losing procreation strategy.
  • 0134340 7y ago
    True, quality over quantity, investing more in few is a valid evolutionary advantage, both short and long. OP should've used the term "evolutionarily advantageous on the short term in some conditions" instead of "massive evolutionary advantage" if correctness is valued.
  • shadofx 7y ago
    Historical observations of the logarithmic expansion of one's descendant-set are based off historical procreation rates. If your ideology is to have one child, and all your descendants adopt that ideology too, then you won't experience the same rate of proliferation.
• api 7y ago
  The correlation with wealth is much more consistent. Human beings have less children as they and their societies become wealthier (up to a certain point). In any case to make this argument work one must also argue that increased fertility is always good for fitness. If we all had children like we did in the 1800s today we probably would face some kind of Malthusian catastrophe fairly soon, an event that could easily lead to the deaths of far more people than the current more restricted population and the extinction of far more genetic lineages. It may be extremely adaptive to reduce population growth during times of abundance so as to escape the Malthusian treadmill and instead leverage that abundance for longer term investments in the future. If we're indulging in evolutionary psychology just so stories it seems reasonable to hypothesize that human beings might have some kind of built in population regulation valve. When abundance is high we have less children and invest more in them and when abundance is low we have more to try to brute force our genes into the future. All evolutionary lineages have suffered multiple bottleneck events, so it seems logical to at least consider that such mechanisms may have evolved to cushion and dampen out these fluctuations. But of course that may not be true. Correlation does not equal causation. The difference between pop evolutionary psychologizing and actual evolutionary biology is that the latter is built on physical evidence in the form of the fossil record and genomics. The former can only look at the present and concoct stories that might perhaps explain it if true.
  • bordercases 7y ago
    Children and wealth form a U-curve in the USA. Poor people: lots. Rich people: lots. Middle class: few to none. The middle class is in the unique position of craving upward mobility while being given the majority of the tax pressure and increasingly narrow means of differentiating a child among other children in a global market for an educated class. They also form the bulwark of conspicuous consumption dollars even if tastes have become more refined over time to not plainly state it as such. These are all factors which may correlate overall with societal wealth but are nonetheless not necessary to it, nor may it be necessary to abide to these incentives. I can see a conservative middle class producing many children but mitigating these expenses through greater social cohesion – which could mean more connected networks to take advantage of for labor placement rather than costly degrees to signal to HR departments that can't afford to put faces to names; or maybe having more people to rely on if you need to alleviate the time-pressures of raising a child – as well a different sense of what makes life worth living beyond one's toys or "experiences" which are passive engagements with scenery or momentary exhilarations.
• leoc 7y ago
  > nearly all atheists "believe" in natural selection, but almost no atheists have more than 2-3 children To go back to Chesterton by more or less paraphrasing what he says about the "German pessimist mouse" in Orthodoxy, you can't get a moral out of nature that you don't bring to nature in the first place. So that decision can be quite consistent if these atheists don't feel that they have some kind of "duty to the race" or something that should come well before their own well-being or that of their loved ones. (In reality the situation is more complicated, but that's by the by.)
• shadofx 7y ago
  Ideologies aren't genetic traits though. Ever-increasing numbers of atheists in America signal that those Conservative Christians aren't all giving birth to Conservative Christians.
  • pmichaud 7y ago
    They aren't literally encoded by genes, but they do follow evolutionary patterns. That's what a meme is. Just going the by the birth numbers, the tide will likely turn: conservative Christians have the adaptive "mutation" of believing they should make lots of babies. It's competing with a different mutation called "science" or whatever, but some proportion of those conservative christian memes are going to be passed to children, and it seems that those children will have more babies, and so on. Over time, those numbers overwhelm.
    • ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Your prediction is in die contradiction of the trend of the past 50 years, we are on track to have fully atheistic societies in the west withing decades. There is no empirical evidence that your rationalisation is correct.
      • pmichaud 7y ago
        I mean, memetic evolution is faster than genetic evolution because generations take longer and are most constrained. So the genetic trend is always lagging. I expect the trade off between these things to be cyclical and that we're in the part of the cycle where the tide is turning in favor of the baby-makers.
        • ClumsyPilot 7y ago
          If 'genetic' component is weak, it will be overwhelmed by the social function. If you look at the data, there is no evidence of a cyclical pattern, only a consistent fall in theism. In Czech republic is already approaching at 80%, i think there is no coming back from that.