September 27, 2018
Professor Steve Turley
Tall Oaks Classical School
1390 Red Lion Rd
Bear, DE 19701
Dear Professor:
I have read Sound, Symbol, Sociality and got a whole sentence out of it, to wit: musical exegesis requires comparison with contemporaneous entailments/enantiodromia/enantiomers of intellectual normativity. This compares favorably with The Selfish Gene, where I discover nothing new after the title.
It is always a pleasure to see your YouTube posts wherein you regularly find good news in our dark and terrible world. I make bold to send in this envelope a DVD that contains 1) the explanation as to why globalism is probably going to result in the extinction of humanity – Grand summary fertility 2) an essay on unpleasant things that may happen along the way – Horror without Evidence and 3) a short video clip showing the process going along – Hans movie. Let me know if you have trouble seeing them. The lessons are available as lectures http://nobabies.net/YouTube%20links.html and scripts http://nobabies.net/movie%20scripts.html and the information on the video on gapminder.com .
Here is the pitch, so think hard: Skipping the first lesson, when a new environmental niche appears, the first animal to occupy it has an advantage like that of an army occupying a fort that another army cannot even locate; selection is a race. During the competition, if one animal can divide into two, one of them can retain the legacy niche while the other exploits the new one; speciation is a race. Say it takes 2,000 generations of separation for two populations to become two species. The actual number doesn’t matter. Now a chromosome or critical part in one population cannot function effectively with its opposite number in the other population. Now (alert) a population rises to 2,000 so there are 4,000 copies of each chromosome. The chance of a chromosome winding up in the same animal as that chromosome’s nearest kin is about 1 in 4,000. In 2,000 generations the whole population dies because no two chromosomes are closely enough related to its opposite number to be able to function.
Since extinction of the fittest is not what we see, there is very strong selective pressure for some mechanism to exist that tends to keep a population at some middling size. In lesson 3, that mechanism is shown to be in action by a team led by Richard Sibly. There is a rest population size, below which fertility rises rapidly and above which fertility falls slowly. In lesson 4, the Sibly curve is shown to be in action in Iceland and in lesson 5, in action in Denmark, where it is found that once kinship issues (between a couple and among their ancestors) are taken into account, there is absolutely no effect of income or education on family size. The notion of choice of family size being possible after choice of mate has been made is superstition.
Run the video, which shows fifty years of experience for the whole world showing how fertility of every country falls to below replacement and then age at first marriage rises inexorably toward, and eventually to, menopause. In the past few years sub-Saharan Africa has broken the mold. (Economist vol. 428 no 9110 September 22, 2018 Not So Fast page 12, Babies are Lovely, but … page 40 and Growing up too Early page 42.) “The fertility rate in sub-Saharan Africa is dropping about half as quickly as it did in Asia or Latin America when families were about the same size. This seems not to have happened anywhere in the fifty years to 2005. http://nobabies.net/Terror%206%20UN%20numbers%20video%20script.html This seems to be driven by resurgent tribalism and child brides, both of which restrict mating choice, and is not so bad a thing as we are going to need some babies as long as we wish to survive, and the rich and middling countries seem to be on the way out.
It would seem proper, once you have run the lessons, to start screaming hysterically, but I should caution you. As Horror without Evidence suggests, there is reason to suspect that after a number of generations of outbreeding, accumulated change might induce counter-productive changes in the thinking and feeling of the victims. What is not mentioned is that among these, might be the impulse to hate what I have just explained and hate the exponent even more. Decades of bitter experience support the idea, but I have no idea how selection might induce such a censor. And we can’t afford to lose you.
Obviously globalism is global suicide. The rise of populism is caused by a lack of bright young minds among the Left because, listening to their own poisonous ideas, they married strangers and did not have the necessary babies. Alas, the triumph may be short lived inasmuch as the whole high-tech civilization may be doomed for the same reason.
I see the cause and the mechanism; I don’t see the cure, but I much doubt one will emerge until brighter minds than mine address the issue, which will not happen until they are warned. If you can figure out how to warn without losing your popularity, power to you.
By the way, is there a text on classical rhetoric you’d care to recommend. It is clearly a field in which I do not excel.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
Sincerely,
Linton Herbert