Maybe a way out:
Many years ago I worked on the data from the empires of southern Mesopotamia. It became apparent at once that the infertility due to excessive gene pool size was the driving force of history. Other factors existed, but they were known and competently taken into account at all times in all places. The fertility blindsided everybody, always had and was doing it again. I just had no idea how great the peril was.
I assumed that once the question was raised that every decent human being who got a whiff that it was even suspected would raise it to his first priority until the matter was well known and any necessary remedial measures had at least been proposed.
Little did I recon.
Over all these years evidence has piled up but the silence has been deafening. Those who deign to answer at all say that my approach is wrong. Nobody challenges the facts. Well they are right to the extent that my approach is certainly not right. It hasn’t worked. Perhaps it is petty of me, but I rather think the response has been wrong. If anybody has a better approach then by all means go for it. But everybody should care.
Having read The Red Lamp of Incest by Robin Fox, (and having heard from him, cheer, cheer) I now have an earnest suspicion that I am facing enormous prejudice. That is the prejudice against marrying cousins. This of course is a social issue. Fix the social issue and the biological issue should fix itself.
But my recent assessment, based in part of gapminder.com is that it may be impossible to fix things biologically even given the best social will in the world. I had already suspected that the last woman in the developed world who will ever have a baby already lives – always allowing for a ten percent noise element in the numbers. Now it appears she is very likely to be a teenager, to be already in love, and that ends it.
What to do, what to do?
On current evidence there seem to be two ways forward. One is business as always and to leave the world to the meek and most disadvantaged few percent. That would be a comfort, but the possibility of a major social event, like a war or worse, on the way down remains in the shadows.
So here is another possibility. It appears from the numbers that this infertility accumulates over generations. That means that those places where the birth rate is still ample are many years behind us and have a generation or two to go. It may be more, but certainly not much more because the present strategy seems to assure collapse over about five generations.
So if you want to save XYZ, some rich and peaceful country, you import a very large numbers of young people from countries that are neither. They can be expected to marry locally, and innocent of the recent history of the prosperous host country, will to a significant degree have more than one child. If those siblings marry – duly screened for genetic problems of course – they may still have normal fertility. XYZ survives in name and to a limited degree also as a gene pool.
It’s sort of like the Florida panther. These large cats were at the brink of extinction. So Texas pumas were brought in to beef up the gene pool. In the case of the Florida panther it was inbreeding rather than outbreeding that was the problem, but no matter. It seems to be working. By now they calculate that most of the Florida panther gene pool is actually puma, but a significant native component remains.
And I thought I had a problem before. I was rowing carefully between the Scylla of racism and the Charybdis of incest. It now looks like it may be necessary to do battle with both monsters at once.
I think I shall leave that to another. I shall be content if the truth gets out. Meanwhile I shall have a go at the matter of prejudice against marrying cousins.
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