March 31, 2019
Nobabies.net
Professor Steve Turley
Tall Oaks Classical School
1390 Red Lion Rd
Bear, DE 19701
Dear Professor,
Last September I wrote you and sent you a DVD. The bottom line was that fertility in a human population depends on a single factor, to wit, mating strategy. In retrospect, I wish I had left out the troubling and unsupported “Horror without evidence,” and waited until I had put together one I call “Collection,” which is my most recent effort to be concise.
Any way you look at it, humanity faces a future that is imperiled with extinction. This is not your kind of subject. You seem able to find a cheerful angle to lots of things. And now – accept my deepest thanks – you have addressed demographics
http://nobabies.net/Open%20letter%20to%20Steve%20Turley.html;true to form, you find hope. It cheers even me. But there is more to do.
There are two obvious mating strategies: love or status. As you can see from the DVD I enclose with “Collection” on it, the weight of the evidence is that mice mate for status and fruit flies and voles for love. On paper it appears that currently humans are doing the mouse thing. Of course, it is no surprise to find, as you have announced, that those who value tradition and religion are more guided by love, so much so that for the first time in years I think there may be hope for us featherless bipeds.
The short version is that we have to marry reasonably close kin. If people do so, and if there is still time (which you seem to indicate there may be), and ONLY IF, we can avoid a terminal collapse of fertility.
Let me concoct a definition you won’t like because you’ll not have run into it: A “baby” is the youngest possible person. A person is a result of heredity and environment. The genetics of the person-to-be is uniquely established when a sperm reaches an egg, assuming an ideal environment. Sperm + egg = baby. It may stop there, but for now I say even if nothing of interest then happens, it was a baby for a moment. (Other definitions range from implantation of the embryo to a stage so late I can’t bring myself to mention it.) If you do or have done something that prevents further development, you (not you, of course) have killed a baby; the crucial thing here is the kinship of the sources of egg and sperm. If the kinship is too little, there is an increase in the chance that the two gametes will fail to form a “zygote.” (I’m sure Greek has no horrors for you. A zygote is a yoke, so a yoke of oxen can do more than a single ox and a zygote of gametes can develop into a fertile adult, kinship among ancestors permitting.) Of course, it continues to be a baby for something like four years.
It seems to me that encouraging people to marry for love on the basis of biological imperative is not the most elevating approach. But if that is what works, let’s go for it. Sure, some of our left-wing friends might be disposed to exploit the knowledge, but they might be thus won over.
Again, please accept my deepest thanks for the good news. Have a gander at the new DVD. I’ll think you find it takes less time to get through. And do call me and give me a suggestion on how to proceed; I’m at my wit’s end.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD