Amerika

Jobs are dysgenic. They reward those who follow orders over those who can achieve without them. They make people obey rules instead of goals. They distract from the purpose of life with the purpose of getting along with others so that no heckler’s veto can be invoked by the ill-behaved.

On top of that, jobs seem to be reducing birth rates because women want higher salaries:

Women in the U.S. typically earned 85% as much as men for every hour they spent working in 2024. However, working women are faring much better than their moms and grandmothers did 40 years ago. In the mid-1980s, women were making only 65% as much as men for every hour of paid work.

We found that employees’ average number of children fell significantly between 1980 and 2000, declining from around 2.4 to around 1.8. That average stabilized after 2000; employees had an average of about 1.8 children in 2018—the most recent year in our analysis.

At the same time, the pay that women in this age range earned per hour relative to men rose steeply. It climbed from 58% in 1980 to 69% by 1990 and then rose more gradually to 76% by 2018. That is, as people were having fewer kids, the gender pay gap got smaller.

Looking at it from their perspective, if you cannot count on marriage and family, you are alone, and need the highest salary you can get for your own self-preservation. This is the paradise of the libertarians crossed with the Keynesian nightmare of socialism, since taxes drive up prices no matter how much “free” stuff we get.

At the same time, can any society survive this? Its most productive people have stopped breeding at replacement rates. Slowly, by dribs and drabs, society dies as the competent are replaced by the insane and semi-intelligent.

Even worse, this means that the socializing (might as well read “peer pressure”) genes predominate over the more useful ones:

In social species, there is individual variation in sociability—some individuals are highly social and well-connected within their society, whereas others prefer less social interaction. This variation can be driven by many factors, including mood, social status, previous experience, and genetics. However, the genetic and molecular mechanisms that influence sociability are poorly understood.

Sociability is a complex characteristic, controlled by many genes, but these shared genomic features suggest there are ancient molecular building blocks of social life that have been conserved through millions of years of evolution, even if humans and bees evolved social life independently, the authors say.

The authors add, “It is a central feature of all societies that group members often engage with one another, but vary in their tendency to do so. Combining automated monitoring of social interactions, DNA sequencing, and brain transcriptomics in honey bee colonies, we identified evolutionarily conserved molecular roots of sociability shared across phylogenetically distinct species, including humans.”

If you want an explanation for the third world, here it is: those were once-vital societies that have decayed over time genetically as the socializers replaced the functional because the functional were busy working to keep the rest of the society afloat.

This replaces the way societies rise, which is through a strong founder effect and successive bottlenecks trimming off those which do not adapt, which we can see in Darwinian adaptation:

However, it also became clear that individuals from Nishinoshima had distinct genetic traits. Importantly, they seemed to derive from very few individuals, leading to a strong skew in subsequent genetic divergence. This is known as a founder’s effect.

Seeds of common purslane are flat, oblate, and less than a millimeter in size, making it easy for them to disperse via wind, birds, and ocean currents. The team’s analysis, however, showed that opportunities for the plant to survive on the island must have been very limited; the founder’s effect observed in the genetic makeup of the samples was very strong. They also found evidence for genetic drift, where isolated events such as typhoons and volcanic eruptions, not natural selection, are responsible for changes in genetics.

Founder effects mean that the hardiest individuals, who are also capable of seeing opportunity, move to a new space and set up a population there. This is itself a form of bottleneck but an unforced one, driven by opportunity instead of hardship.

Imagine if humanity colonizes Mars. We choose a few to go; we can select them by either passive methods like test scores, or active methods like seeing who gets involved in the process early of their own volition. The latter group will be genetically stronger because the first group are rule-followers not pioneers.

On Mars, they become successful, but every dozen generations disaster strikes and kills off those which did not take steps to avoid it. Again, volition chooses the best. Over time this group maintains the founder effect, but has sorted those genes for the ones most likely to thrive in the new environment.

Established civilization does the opposite. It chooses people for compliance, and then wonders why year after year, it becomes less competent, less healthy, and more neurotic. Eventually it collapses, the peer pressure people take over, and you have a third world ruin in a formerly thriving society.

Tags: bottleneck, collapse, degeneration, founder effect, gene drift