Horror without Evidence:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dore+illustrations+for+raven&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbz_apjZTaAhUPM6wKHZSwBaoQ_AUICigB&biw=1260&bih=641#imgrc=Id2LlZtyq8mb8M: downloaded 3/30/18
In this essay I shall assume that you have found your way to my talks on http://nobabies.net/YouTube%20links.html and have watched and understood 1 through 32 or else to http://nobabies.net/movie%20scripts.html and read and understood the first 32 links. But here is a short version you can take as a review: in general, among animals, there is a relationship between population size – read inverse of kinship – and fertility.
There is a rest point where the population is stable. Much below that you get inbreeding and extinction while much above it you have falling fertility tending to level off.
Here are 50 years of UN numbers tracing birth rates in the world broken down into poorest, middle and richest.
Follow the yellow bars down to where they overlap with red, jump to red and follow them until they overlap with blue, jump to blue and follow them out. You get:
It is the same curve; the whole world is marrying cousins so infrequently that our kinship is falling and fertility following it down.
There are 2 mating strategies I know of: marry for status based on violence or marry for love based on kinship. Voles and fruit flies chose love; mice and humans chose status. Wherever mice would go, we shall go.
Someone put mice in a cage and counted them regularly. What happened was this:
There is exponential growth followed by a leveling off and then abruptly total infertility. This awaits us.
It might not be so unpleasant, tragic though the end will be. When the babies are all gone, the lack of outside threat and lack of internal population pressure might lead to peace and prosperity reigning until a few ancient codgers die out well attended by their automated servants. Nothing in the numbers I have suggests otherwise, but while I assure you that extinction is inexorably true (bar tiny populations that are statistically invisible) there might be some bad things that happen along the way. I shall discuss some, but bear in mind that I have no sound numbers to support any of them. This is pure speculation. But if any of them do occur, at least you may rest assured that there is a plausible biological explanation.
Before looking at the pathology of falling fertility, let us consider what should pass as normal for humans.
Over the eons, humans have neither increased to the point of standing on each other’s heads nor decreased to extinction. We have pretty much lingered in tribes near the rest point of the fertility curve; it probably is bigger than but not very far from the “optimum population size” in mice. I would imagine that at equilibrium each tribe has a sacred principle or object that identifies it. There is obviously a selective advantage to this; by identifying a worshiper as a member of the tribe, much of mate selection is accomplished in a way that isolates, and thus preserves the tribe. If you are an atheist, it might give you comfort to know that religion – practiced by almost everybody for almost all of the human experience – has for its cause a nice biological mechanism … maybe. But don’t get too happy; we shall return to this later.
Life in the tribe cannot be absolutely stable in this mutable world. Occasionally misadventure will produce a significant fall in population size, which needs must raise fertility until there is overshoot, and the population is too big. Then there are two possibilities; either the tribe will split, as explained by Robin Fox, or it will be surrounded by other tribes and no space is readily available. In that case, there selective pressure to create a mental impulse in young men, whose genome registers the excessive population, to get lazy or restless.
The lazy ones do not pursue the ladies but lounge around the parents’ house, contributing enough work to pay for the cost of their food and then some. Or they make a similar arrangement in another household. Either way, they are out of the gene pool that has grown too large. I would suspect that such lounge lizards spend more than the usual amount of time listening to the tales of the elders; it would have been the only entertainment after dark. Over time they will know the stories better than most and become tellers of tales in the next generation. Thye become the memories of the hive mind.
The restless ones wander out and encounter members of a neighboring tribe, who will try to kill them on sight. Nobody wants to increase the diversity of the gene pool; that would shift the tribe’s population toward lower fertility. If the wanderer is able to kill a man or a child, that will be an individual’s own people will not have to deal with in the future. So smoldering warfare is, alas, the state of the “normal” human experience. Killing a young woman is, of course, worth two or three men. But if the wanderer can make her pregnant, ah, there is the poison that keeps on poisoning. Either the victim’s tribe must kill her or the child – at terrible emotional cost – or the descendants will bear the marginal infertility for generations. If it happens enough, the fertility of the victim tribe will collapse, so they can be exterminated at little cost. No, this is not my sick mind talking; chimpanzees will wipe out another tribe. Now with some empty land, the triumphant tribe can subdivide.
So, sad to say, the impulse to genocide is a normal part of the human mind. It is a tragedy that should be specifically looked for and prevented. Instead, we treat it as an aberration as if it will never happen again. History reports otherwise.
That, it seems to me (and remember I have no controlled statistics. Just rumor and reasoning from the known biology) is the lamentable state of normal humanity in a stable environment.
So what would one expect if for one reason or another the population size rises and kinship declines to a pathological degree? One would expect that there would be an imperceptible increase in the tendency of the young men to go lazy or restless to the point where the whole community is dismantled. The selective pressure for this effect is that the genetic diversity of the population has risen to such a toxic level that it is a danger to any other communities. Those restless young men can swamp or so infest another community that it, too, is doomed. The whole species is at risk; the selective pressure to snuff out the bloated population is overwhelming. Selection now takes mental sets the previously were adaptive and reverses them. What once seemed right now seems wrong and vice versa.
One catastrophe can be the rise of a civilization. A number of tribes decide that it is better to cooperate than to fight and formalize an arrangement where they all work together. Now status, previously a rather small issue, becomes a really big issue. One or more people begin to set policy. Their exalted status gives them and the other elite a wide scope for mating. At this point a biological clock starts. In ten generations they go extinct. The regime simply vanishes like a wisp of vapor on a hot day. If there is a nearby civilization, they may fill the void, even keeping many of the primary producers at work. Otherwise it falls back to nature and normal people. It is the “cold lairs” of Kipling’s Jungle Book. Explorers will find mighty ruins of some fallen state unremembered by humanity. The population is gone, along with its holy things, its language, its culture and all else it holds dear, but humans persist.
As the civilization declines there may be any of a number of waypoints it can experience. I shall try to work out a few, but it seems most unlikely that the list will be complete or include only valid possibilities.
One pathology is that women begin to accept men as mates who are not known to be related and in fact the women gain a distaste for marrying cousins and are attracted to exotics. Obviously this totally maladaptive, but it tends to pass unnoticed because women are generally regarded as less important than men even though any fool should know they are far more important. In our normal tribe, I did not mention it, but it seems obvious that women made all the important decisions, particularly who should marry whom. But humans value status based on violence above love based on kinship (you really need to go over the information I pointed to in the beginning) and women are not so good at violence; strong, expendable men are useful for scaring off dangerous animals and even more dangerous outsiders.
Another event is when the elite, the high-status men, in the society begin to accept migrants. One might theoretically describe three kinds of migrants. 1) Refugees. If there is a war or a bad government, people might run away; true enough. But many years ago, now, after the World Trade Center atrocity I figured there was going to a be a war in Afghanistan and volunteered to go help care for refugees. There were no refugees; evidently the population was normal, and they elected to stay right where they were and live or die to slug it out there. There are no actual refugees; there is just a symptom of a society in decline. 2) Economic migrants. People have moved all around the world, exploiting environment after environment BUT if you go to the 15th link from the second link you will see that economic migrants only move as a group of families. That should be obvious; how else are they to find biologically suitable mates? There are no individual economic migrants; the appearance of such is a pathological symptom. 3) Sexual migrants (or rape/murder tourists if you will). The young men go out looking to make women pregnant. That is in fact normal. It is the first sign of poisonously high genetic diversity/population size and appears when the population might still recover. So don’t be surprised if immigrants tend to engage in rape, murder or worse. They are just responding to the demands natural selection has imposed on them. I hasten to say that among the small group of immigrants I know there is no rapist or murderer; on the other hand they do have a conspicuous tendency to demand money in exchange for nothing.
I am trying to work in chronological order, and I have even less confidence that I am getting it right than my already low confidence that any of this is true at all. One form of infertility nature might throw at a population is homosexuality. A man who is uninterested in women is less likely to have children. He may marry for status but have low heterosexual drive, so normal blends into bisexual into homosexual, and although this has been widely studied I really can’t unravel it except to say they are all forms of a tendency toward infertility and whatever it is probably develops in society by degree.
I have recently read that somebody has done a study and found that children born of ethnically different parents tend to be smarter and stronger than those born of parent in the same ethnic group. I think I saw something like that going on when I was a child. Of course, the rich have a greater opportunity to meet those in a different country, but they were supposed to have controlled for that sort of thing. I take little comfort in the observation even if it is true. Mules tend to be bigger and stronger than the horses and donkeys that produce them. Swapping out fertility for muscle is a poor move unless the person is going to pull a plow or otherwise be a slave, as a mule generally is. Sorry for having bumped into politics, but I suppose it’s unavoidable since we are perforce talking about the elite and about status and violence anyway.
What the study I just mentioned did not address is whether the children of these mixed marriages have increased incidence of mental problems, particularly autism or – as they now say – autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Reading about ASD prevalence is somewhat disorienting. Obviously people are passionate about the issue, and that makes a lot of people shaky in their reasoning. As for me, I could hardly be more passionate since what is on the table is the extinction of the entire human species, but if my reasoning is warped, then the passion is dysfunctional, and I truly beg anyone to give me a good steer. Somebody made a remark to the effect that some states have a higher incidence than others, but that is because they have more affluence and urbanization, which are known to correlate with higher incidence; that must mean that diagnosis is better in some places. The mind reels. On the other hand, an expert in New Jersey said that the politics and diagnostic criteria are unchanged over the past 20 years but the incidence has been going steadily upward just like everywhere else.
My impulse is to say that ASD is caused by the same outbreeding that causes infertility but in the case of ASD it is hard for me to fathom just where natural selection might come into play. ASD is more common among boys, where of course it is not very effective; men are expendable with respect to tribal fertility. And as for women, well they can be as sweet and attractive as you please, but there are probably always going to be men who care nothing for that.
On the subject of female attractiveness, which is so anomalous that the failure of people to remark on it is odd – in other animals the sex that is attractive is not the sex that does all the work – I would suspect that like Lot’s daughters, women have over the years often sought the attention of older men if the young men were getting gay; it might be harder to attract a bitter old man than an oversexed young one.
I mentioned earlier that the essentially universal human capacity to sense something divine in their experience has had a selective advantage. On the other hand, people are capable of abstract reasoning, which by the rules of science is not actually possible, http://nobabies.net/Making%20a%20Universe.html
and there is a perception of fair play and there is empathy even among animals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By7j3ziZl-k , which three together mean that there is a cosmic drive to be attracted toward the core principles of the enlightenment, now disparagingly called the ideas of dead white men. Like genocide, these are behaviors that are never far below our perceptional horizon. They really only cropped up in Europe after centuries of quasi stability and interchange of ideas. None the less, I suspect they would have been ascendant long before had we not had the tragic cycle of development and then extinction of civilizations. Knowing what you should have learned here and in the relevant links, the cycle can be broken, but it is not yet generally known. So of my atheist brethren I am tempted to ask, “Exactly which of the universal constants of science has been tweaked to create enlightenment? If you do not know, why then you are actually an agnostic.”
Starting from the existence of a tribal holy thing, and given the human impulse to seek things divine, I propose that in our normal society described before there was a sort of spiritual mission creep in which the sacred was extended to the land, plants, animals and weather until the individual was immersed in a holy landscape. Since such things made life possible, it should have been perceived that creation was ongoing.
The fragmentation and amalgamation of tribes drove such feelings away until science proclaimed that the natural world was not a holy thing but just a place where we could exploit things for our own advantage. Thence it was a short distance to seeing that people are parts of the natural world so of course they are to be exploited however ruthlessly. I know I’m getting into politics again, but it seems to me that oppressive politics and oppressive concentrations of power and wealth are to be expected as a society putrefies.
We are by now in the late stages of extinction, so make sure your stomach is ready. If a population has made it this far, nature takes off the gloves; exterminating the population has become of paramount importance because the danger to the rest of the species is so great. Now recall that there seems to be an impulse in humans to perceive divine presence. Recall that atheism claims support from science, which should give it enormous prestige – humans are drawn to status before love – and it carries with it a denial of any value for humans beyond anything else that might be exploited. Call forth your cosmically impossible abstract reasoning, and you might think that humans, still needing spiritual context, have their conventional religions withdrawn and turn to the only other obvious pattern which would be whatever the religion was worried about. You can see that this rather parallels nature reversing all the selection-induced patterns of human response so that what was adaptive before is replaced by the maladaptive.
The outcome is satanism or whatever its equivalent is in another culture. Together satanism and reversed emotional impulse produce a drive. In the old days, we would have said, “perversion,” meaning any social activity that is at odds with normal biological necessity. They never used the word at Harvard Medical School, so feel free to object to it. Besides we have been talking about biological unproductive choice ever since we suggested a steady increase in the number of young men looking outside of the greater family circle for mates. Is there serious satanism going on now? Well they haven’t recruited me, so I don’t know. There is an undercurrent of suspicion and a wish that they be exposed and destroyed. It might happen but only if it happens soon. These are leaders of the march toward outbreeding, highly effective and high-status people with a bent toward violence. Once they have exalted themselves enough and the commoners have moved far enough in the same direction, then expose them as you will, you will never overthrow them. That never happens. The only thing that can destroy them is demographic collapse, but by the time that happens others will probably be entrained, drawn along behind.
Protecting children has to be an instinct that towers over all others. Reverse that, and the result is child molesting. I have no numbers, but I have had a few friends who were victims. It did not take great sensitivity to suspect that the result had left permanent damage to their ability to socialize, heroically though they fought and compensated. Score another round for nature snuffing the population.
What about murdering children? Of course, it happens. And of course, it can be called human sacrifice. Biologically there is not much difference. Remember the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham set out to sacrifice his son. There was divine intercession, but his intent was clear. Well the story has been retold for millennia and believed for as long. Were it totally implausible, don’t you think people would have talked about something else?
Generally speaking, sacrificing an animal was in preparation for eating it; this was true in ancient Rome and ancient Judea and I suppose ancient Greece. So for some centuries it would have been obvious that sacrificing a child meant cannibalism. They were sacrificing and eating animals on a regular basis. Biologically except for a trivial issue of nutrition, cannibalism of course was without impact. Isaac was lucky. With Iphigenia accounts vary. I think for normal people the expected course of events was just too horrible to imagine.
The opposite side of the coin of young people moving out for the sake of a different sexual horizon is that the power elite, the high-status people with the monopoly on violence may encourage immigration. Now that overwhelms me.
For decades I was a busy practicing medical doctor, now less busy. Any number of people sought my help or were referred to me for help. Never once did I do anything that was not my best to render that help. For the elite to do something as blatantly destructive to the needs of a population as immigration – any immigration – is … well it strikes me as subhuman. At least the previous perversions were decisions based on the choice of one or a few people affecting one or a few people. This is slaughter on an astronomical scale, and even if the overlords are working in profound ignorance of the biological implications, it is theft from the people on that scale, people who can ill afford it and who trust these mighty of the earth to look out for their needs. And yet this is the one thing where one knows that it is more than a possibility; it is actually going on.
When the babies stop in the rich world there will quickly come a time when there simply are not enough capable young people to maintain our high-tech civilization. We will be back to traditional means of agriculture, which under ideal circumstances can feed two billion. But circumstances will be anything but ideal. Feeding a half billion people might be more realistic in a world that may have seven billion. Then come the hunger wars. Given our appalling weapons, which will not vanish at once with the technology that created them, war over the scraps of remaining food seems inevitable. Will the overlords than stop short of genocide? We can already see their colors in the presence of immigration.
If all this fails to reduce the genetic variability to that of a village of a few dozen who never mate outside the circle, nature has another trick. Instead of depending on populations taking each other out or waiting for the infertile to die, nature may go straight for the kill. Populations may begin to kill off themselves; call it sui-genocide. I lack, as throughout this essay, decent numbers, but there are a few anecdotes. 1) As a boy I read a volume of Riply’s Believe It or Not. I have no way of fact checking, but one story was about an Asian prince who habitually had people executed for little cause. One day he stuck his thumb with a rose thorn and screamed, “I want everybody killed!” The province was soon virtually depopulated. If you are wondering how anybody could know about the rose, I take your point. 2) When people remember the story of Lot, they of course remember the fire coming down from heaven and Lot’s wife, against warning, looking back and being turned into salt. Playing the same game of “how could anybody know?” I would like to dismiss the salt thing because nobody else looked back to notice. Similarly, prior to Lot bolting with his family, a small riot developed outside his house; men wanted to have sex with Lot’s guests. No doubt the town was far down the outbreeding trail. When they realized that their juicy marks had escaped they went crazy. The fire could not have been seen coming down; scripture covers that by saying Abraham saw it from off in Mesopotamia, but that ignores the curvature of the earth. The people of Sodom torched their own town. Sure, you may consider the whole thing myth, but if so it was a myth long remembered and plausible for that reason. 3) I recently saw a show on YouTube in which the narrator predicted that our overlords were going to set off a device in the very near future that would release an electromagnetic pulse over the US that would shut down every electronic device along with the power grid resulting in a famine of depopulating magnitude. Well at least it happened in his mind. So the notion of say a nation immolating itself is not beyond the imagination of a number of people.
Finally maybe somebody will set off something and directly extinguish us – pan-genocide. Possible devices have been described, but I think it’s pretty clear that nobody has ever done that and I cannot imagine how natural selection would select for it. So that one I dismiss. Besides outbreeding infertility is going to take us down anyway.
As I said, there are not things I can support with statistically valid numbers, I cannot offer many good arguments as to what order they might come in, and there may be ones I have included or excluded in error through some combination of ignorance and stupidity. But some might come to pass, and if so, look not to any supernatural cause. Natural causes are all around us.
Directory of video scripts.
Home page.