April 24, 2019
To be posted on Nobabies.net
April 24, 2019
To be posted on Nobabies.net
Dear Stefan,
Thank you for your reply. I have attached this letter to a short note; also attached is a file, “comment” has the information including the references to the science papers, which you might want to check out first hand. I could not attach a short video I made, but you can run it down on gapminder.com; graph “age at first marriage for women” against “total fertility,” and you will see country after country have a fall in fertility, which then more-or-less stabilizes while at the same time age at marriage starts rising inexorably toward menopause. The danger seems clear enough, and except for some tiny islands, Sweden seems to lead the way. I wrote a note of warning to the Swedish government several years ago, but I received word that all email from me was, blocked with the only explanation being the single word, “abuse.” That’s hardly fair since what I have to say will benefit everybody, but it’s kind of hard to explain to a blocked site.
What you will learn in exchange for reading “collection” is that kinship determines family size, kinship between a couple and among their ancestors, and nothing else has any important effect. Dismiss from your mind any notion of choosing have many children to have. There are ways to influence that number, modern ones better than the older ones I think, but the choice of how many children is made once and for all when the mate is selected. In modern terms to a first approximation the closer the kinship to more babies.
That is true out for some generations. Beyond 9th cousin, all strangers are alike. Ethnicity means nothing; it just takes a few generations for the epigenetic differences to accumulate and absolute infertility to appear. To me the ideal population size in the low hundreds, where the population should be stable; such a population should survive indefinitely. Rising or falling population can never be sustained indefinitely.
Your interests run toward politics. That is outside my comfort zone, but let me give an impression. The science as I outlined is supported by ample hard data; this is not
Globalization: the concept is ridiculous. It would take many, many generations to homogenize humanity, while on present course it looks like we will be extinct or inescapably bound for extinction within a couple generations.
Immigration: since an immigrant leaves a small and probably viable community with sufficient consanguinity and moves to a totally different population, the immigrants’ descendants would be expected to die out in a very few generations. Also the immigrant is likely to marry into the host population, removing a potential line of descent. The migration is biologically the equivalent of war; a million immigrants in the long run equal a million battle deaths and arguably the similar suffering.
Populism: this is fine, so far as it goes, but the population needs to be subdivided in to essentially air tight groups of less then 1,000. It will take a lot more than current populism, but it’s a start.
Inequality of income: this is a serious problem. In the past, since the rich always have a broader social horizon than the rest of us, they could pretty much be depended on to die out on a regular basis. If they knew what I am showing you, they could potentially make their families immortal. My impression is that Sweden does much better at sustaining equality than does the US. This will need some attention, since obviously they are already killing us off with their ill-conceived programs, but I don’t know what to suggest. Maybe you can come up with something.
Thank you again for your interest. I consider everything I am providing to be public property; use it as freely as you do the alphabet. Whether you use my name is entirely up to you. I’m so old that fame and fortune mean nothing, so serve your own ends in that regard.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert