Most Dreaded Terror 6 UN numbers

Dore “Raven”
https://hyperallergic.com/102457/rediscovering-the-dark-splendor-of-gustave-dore-with-edgar-allan-poe/   downloaded Feb 18, 2018

It is 1st of March 2018, and we are piling on the data.  We are in pursuit of something that is inherited but not genetic and which is able to stabilize a population of animals, including humans, so that it has a chance of not going extinct, but the same mechanism will kill babies, all the babies, if we are ignorant of how it works.  Now we shall look at UN numbers:

1. The UN has accumulated data on the total fertility of countries and divided those countries into least developed, middle and most developed, thus. 

The number cover the fifty years into 2005.  I am not exactly sure how they handled the fact that a country can become more developed or less developed relative to each other over time, whether they moved countries from one group to another group, but I doubt there was much of that.  I took down their numbers and simply graphed them.  Approch this graph with great care; do not leap to conclusions.  I suspect there is not much of a surprise that the largest group babies come up in the countries that can least afford them. 

1. A celebrity I shall not name since I have no permission and only a rumor to go on apparently looked at this and decided that the poorest, largely sub-Saharan African, not only had the most babies but when they become more prosperous did not lower their fertility as fast as the middling group did.  I can accept that.  Then he decided that it was because they were not as bright as the rest of us.  That was mistake number one. 

Forgive me for digressing.  My grandfather, according to family lore, made the highest grade average of anybody who had gradated from his college; the record stood until he was eclipsed by both his sons.  This grandfather, the kindest man I ever knew, was chatting once with a hired man, who used the word, “Boliform.”  When asked what it meant, the hired man said it was African for elephant, he being of African extraction.  Well the story went to one of my brothers, who graduated in English from Harvard, and thence to me.  Being of low suspicious mind compared with these other men, I cudgeled my brains for years.  After all, there is not just one African language; they are countless.  Then I got it.  A bolus is a mouthful of food after it has been chewed and before it has been swallowed.  Just as cruciform means shaped like a cross, boliform means a shapeless mass – not so bad a description of an elephant.  Instead of explaining the hired man concocted the story to be polite. 
I could give examples of times when I was blessed with the same good manners, but since these are uncontrolled observations they prove nothing.  But it would take a mountain of evidence to persuade me that Blacks are not very intelligent.
Alas the celebrity compounded his error by flapping his yap.  To say his reputation suffered would be an understatement.  Had he manifested a bit of African courtesy he’d have kept his job and been more highly thought of to this day. 

1. But the fact remains that the poorest have the most babies, and the temptation is real to think that the people in richer are being more responsible.  Don’t buy into that.  We know already that kinship issues alone determine fertility.  Actually folic acid does, too, be we shall not be getting to that for a long time.  For now, let’s look more closely at the numbers we have seen. 
2. If you follow the least developed curve down until it overlaps the middle, then follow the middle down to overlap with the most developed, the composite curve looks like this:

It’s all the same curve.  You can’t even tell where the edits are. 

Don’t let anybody tell you there is a serious difference between groups of people.  So far as fertility goes, we are all riding down the same slope, just separated in time. 

Don’t buy into the notion that the rich world has stabilized.  We have been below replacement for 30 years.  Since there is no evidence I know of that the rich world has begun marrying cousins, the low fertility must persist.  It may go to zero, but with current mating strategy it cannot go back up. 
Cut to the chase and go to nobabies.net, the summaries, papers and source code if you have the fortitude. 

nobabies.net

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