The Clevon Fallacy

Used to be, you grew up and got married and had kids, and that was how it was for everyone - but a larger percentage of couples now are simply opting out of that traditional lifestyle, and saying no to children. Details magazine online this month features a neatly polarizing article about the virtues of remaining childless. Seems like people have some quite pointed opinions on the subject. But, really, kids or no kids - so what?

Well, if you've seen Mike Judge's cult hit Idiocracy, you'll be familiar with what I'll call the Clevon theory of human evolution. In a nutshell, Judge notes the inverse correlation between IQ and having kids; that the more intelligent we get, the fewer children we have. Follow this observation to its logical conclusion, and eventually all the smart people die out and you wind up with a planet populated entirely by dunces almost too stupid to remember to breathe.

That's a good basis for a funny movie, but it's way too simplistic of a take. Yes, the correlation exists, but look closer: it's specifically the women who are controlling the birth rate, and it doesn't have anything to do with native IQ (which is also a measure of Western enculturation, not just of simple problem-solving intelligence). It's EDUCATION that makes the difference. The more educated we become, the fewer children women choose to have, across the board, regardless of race or nationality.

So, really, does this mean we should ban smart women from college just so we can keep having smart babies? I'd like to note that I know many intelligent, college-educated women who have families - but that in general they chose to have two kids, not seven. Not only that, but Judge has been thinking about intelligence as if it's hard-wired, ignoring all the myriad influences that environment can have upon the expression of genes. There are indeed some really stupid people out there who just drew short straws genetically, but I'd bet that for every one of those you'd find three who just didn't get enough vitamin D as children, or whose mothers were exposed to punishingly high levels of stress while they were in the womb, or who were exposed to any of thousands of different intelligence-busting developmental influences. Poverty hurts everyone. Moreover, if it wasn't possible for intelligence to arise spontaneously as an adaptive response to our richly interactive environment, we'd never have bothered coming down from the trees and taming fire in the first place, never mind inventing space flight and the Internet.

The human population of Earth is brushing 7 billion, which in this blogger's humble opinion is just too damned many. So educate the women, let us choose when and if to have kids, and could we please ditch the Malthusian melodramatics? We're doing OK; we really are. Rather than sweating the population analytics, we'd do better to spend effort getting over our entrenched and purely reflexive preference for whatever culture we were raised in. We need to teach the children we have to see the web of life on this planet as it truly is - a single entity to whose health we individually contribute or detract depending upon how well we run our own lives.

Read more here: THE NO-BABY BOOM via Details.com