Edit, 7/18/17: r/K selection theory has been rebutted.
r/K Selection Theory: A Response to Rushton
E.O. Wilson on Rushton’s r/K Theory and More on Endemic Disease
r/K Selection Theory: A Response to Anonymous Conservative
r/K Selection Theory: A Response to Truth-Justice
r/K theory doesn’t apply to humans and if it did, Mongoloids would be r and Africans would be K. Cold with is an agent of r selection while endemic disease is an agent of K selection. Rushton used a debunked “continuum” for the basis for his theory and completely changed r and K. However it’s wrong. Rushton was wrong. Anonymous Conservative is wrong. Anyone who uses those two in reference to r/K is wrong by proxy since r/K is a debunked paradigm.
Japan has had a population crisis for a few years. Japan’s fertility rate was 1.4 in 2014. To have enough children to keep the population stable, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) needs to be 2.1. As a country industrializes and becomes more prosperous, the TFR drops as higher IQ follows better nutrition. As a nation industrializes and becomes more complex, the attention of the populace shifts from one of having children and a family to one of success and intellectualism. As this occurs, the birth rate drops because the more intelligent a population is, the more likely it is for them to pursue higher education or monetary achievement. Clearly, the main reason Japan has concerns with their TFR is due to their high intelligence.
The Japan Times reported yesterday that almost half of single young men and women were virgins. A survey of Japanese men and women aged 18-34 found that 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women were not in a relationship. Also discovered, 42 percent of the men and 42.4 percent of the women admitted to being virgins. The survey was taken before in 2010, with 36.2 percent of men and 38.7 percent of women admitting to being virgins.
These surveys have been carried out every 5 years since 1987. Then, the rate of men who said they had no partner was 48.6 percent and for women it was 39.5 percent. The survey, which was conducted last June and accounted for 8,754 single people and 6,598 married couples across Japan, also found that 90 percent of the respondents wanted to get married “sometime in the future”, but for some people, this turns out to be a mistake. Moreover, 30 percent of the 2,760 men and 26 percent of the 2,570 women polled said they were not currently looking for a relationship. The increase in singles was most noted in the 20s, when women are the most fertile. The Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe also said he wants to increase the birthrate from 1.4 to 1.8 by 2025.
Lastly, the study found that the number of children for couples marries for 15 to 19 years was 1.94, a record low. This study did not ask questions about same-sex partners, but what we are concerned about is the TFR and how it’s driven by evolution, so this is a non-factor.
Japan’s population is dramatically shrinking. In 2010, they had a population of 128 million but by their 2015 census, they had a population of 127 million. This is due to the increase in virgins and an aging population. Why is this happening?
This is, of course, driven by r/K Selection Theory. Rushton thought of r/K Selection Theory, also known as Differential K theory, in 1985 with a paper titled Differential K Theory: The Sociobiology of Individual and Group Differences. Organisms can be r-selected, K-selected or somewhere in between. Humans as a species are K-selected, but some human races and ethnies are more K-selected than others.
Africans are r-selected, meaning that they have many children while not investing too much time in their offspring. They evolved to be r-selected to offset the high mortality rate due to the harshness of Sub-Saharan Africa. Due to this, black girls have an earlier menarche (period) so they can reproduce more to a) offset the high mortality rate and b) have a chance to reproduce more due to the high mortality rate. This is driven by disease, malnutrition, and parasitic load, which also drop IQ and contribute to the high birth rate since lower IQ populations have more children.
Caucasians are in the middle of r and K, and have fewer children and put more energy into caring for each one. This goes back to evolving in the Ice Age where cooperation and altruism were needed. More attention to children was needed for Eurasians evolving back then due to the harsh conditions of the Ice Age. So, a higher IQ evolved, and along with the higher IQ came a bigger brain. The bigger brains of Eurasians led to children being born earlier, and a bigger brain allowed for better care for the children along with numerous other positive variables to help survive in the harsh weather. Moreover, genes from Neanderthals are responsible for a 1 percent decrease in historic fitness (biological fitness) in Eurasian populations.
Orientals (Japanese, Chinese, Koreans) are further K than Caucasians are. This is reflected in brain size, where more K-selected populations have bigger brains, thus they can think further into the future and maximize care for their children. The opposite holds true for blacks. This is reflected in modern-day, first-world life where blacks have too many children to care for on their own accord and whites and Orientals have fewer children and put more investment into their children .
It’s not only Japan that’s having this problem with birthrates. It’s all of the West and East Asia. Higher IQ societies do have a longer life expectancy, while lower IQ societies have a lower one. Then, as described above, the lower IQ populations have more children to offset the mortality rate.
Japan’s birthrate concerns are due largely in part to genetic factors. This is currently occurring in all high IQ populations. Those populations have a large elderly population, with the young demographic quickly shrinking. Seeing this gradient throughout the world with IQ and fertility rates, we can make some general conclusions:
- Low IQ populations have more children while high IQ populations have less children.
- High IQ populations are more likely to have a large subset of virgins, as seen with this article. Lower IQ populations lose their virginity earlier.
This can be seen with the CLASH (CLimate, Aggression and Self-control in Humans) model (Van Lange, Rinderu, and Bushmen 2016). According the the CIA World Fact book 2014, in countries closer to the equator, the average age of first birth for a female was 20 years of age (the countries were the Gaza strip, Liberia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and various other middle African countries). Conversely, for countries further away from the equator, the average age of first birth was 28 years of age (Japan, Canada, and most European countries). Those populations that evolved in warmer climates where the changes in season are minimal with unpredictable harshness tend to enact faster life history strategies than those in colder climates.
Moreover, a slower life history strategy (K-selection), under a predictable environment would be better to enhance inclusive fitness. There is a growing body of evidence that predictable environments promote K-selection “in terms of lower mortality, morbidity, delayed reproduction, and a higher contribution towards one’s social capital.” This can be seen with the trends in Western and East Asian countries.
The trend that Japan is facing can be reversed with incentives for reproduction. However, the more intelligent a society is, the fewer children it will have due to evolutionary pressures. Is there a happy medium between IQ and fertility rates, where the population isn’t too dumb and the fertility rates aren’t too low? I’ll explore that in the future.
NotPoliticallyCorrect 
Patriarchy and fertility is linked in K-selected societies:
http://blog.jim.com/economics/patriarchy-and-fertility/
LikeLike
It’s clear that people with bigger heads are more K-selected. Bigger brains correlate with fewer children due to it being more demanding on the woman. I’d even go as far to say that bigger heads is one of the direct causes of low fertility rates in K-selected populations.
K-selected populations care more abkht fewer children, more care for them, and in the modern world, monetary success. I see where he’s coming from. I’d go a step further and day that K-selected societies have a greater abundance of low testosterone men. Men who stay with their children have lower testosterone on average than those who leave (r-selected men). Testosterone levels also seem to correlate with r- and K-selection.
Looking at Middle Eastern countries, an example of a patriarchal society as Jim mentioned, we see that they clearly have high levels of testosterone and high consanguinity rates. That’s the perfect mix for r-selected. While the perfect mix for K-selection is low testosterone, low consanguinity, fewer children and more parental investment in each of them.
LikeLike
”While the perfect mix for K-selection is low testosterone, low consanguinity, fewer children and more parental investment in each of them.”
All advanced civilizations prior to the modern enlightenment were Patriarchal which promotes both high investment parenting and higher fertility.
In contrast to single-motherhood and low investment parenting in Africa were prior to European influence they did not even have a word to describe Father.
Islam wasn’t impacted by the enlightenment nearly as much as the west and east Asia had been.
LikeLike
Eurasians have a 1 percent decrease in historic fitness due to deleterious Neanderthal alleles. This is part genetic in nature. I would wager that the archaic admixture that Africans have, their descendants were r-selected.
But K-selected populations (not coincidentally populations that have Neanderthal DNA) always had lower fitness than those who evolved near the equator.
Because of consanguinity.
LikeLike
Your are correct. What I do argue is that K-selected populations need patriarchy to have high enough birth rates in contrast to what is happening now. For instance japan had healthy birthrate before it collapsed after legal equality of the sexes was introduced.
While r-selected populations can reproduce quite well without patriarchy.
LikeLike
Hmmm after thinking about this for a bit, I do get what you’re saying now and I do agree. However, Eurasians will *always* have lower fertility rates than Africans and others who are r-selected. As shown in my article, that’s a 2 percent, actually (from neanderthal alleles and the population bottleneck) decrease in fitness in comparison to non-Eurasian populations.
Seems like our problems in America. But fertility is falling all over the world, I doubt feminism/sex “equality” has something to do with it everywhere, though some of it may be due, in part, to it.
Exactly. Because their Patriarchal head, more often than not, will leave. Low testosterone men stay with their children, high testosterone men leave.
LikeLike
Re-Japan. After a long period of sub-replacement birthrates all those individuals who had no relationships, no sex, and no children, will pass out of the gene pool, leaving a stable population that reproduces because only those who reproduced will be represented. This will make for a culture of people who may look exactly alike the previous one but under the skin are not. This experiment is only possible in Japan. Unfortunately.
LikeLike
Exactly. Those who don’t breed don’t have their alleles pass, however, due to genetic similarity, those alleles will still pass on and birth rates may be stable, but I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near replacement levels.
You mean genotypically different??
LikeLike
This is kind of a good thing too I have to say (aside from the lopsided population distribution and heavy “costs” to society)
Low arable land with high economic costs for children make selection pressures much more predominant. With an aging society and redistributive taxes, you will have to see that not only those that are willing, but those that are able to, will reproduce.
Each successive generation must be stronger in selection pressure to have wealthy offspring or offspring with a lot of resources or knowledge/combination of good genes. Higher IQ is roughly correlated with higher positions (bank Councillor, etc, etc).
Theoretically speaking then, you should observe an increase in IQ overtime until you reach an equilibrium point at which the cost to bare a child is normalized to an affordable level in correspondence to the average population’s IQ level as a proxy for productiveness/industriousness (whether that be everyone developing super high-tech autonomous robots with ingenious algorithms or whatever).
LikeLike
That should be the case but even the high Iq people in Japan are not having children either or least only they will only at best have 1. Iq tends to stay about the same in nations unless events force’s change such as war, mass immigration, mass disease, cultural change, and famine. In the west many of the highest Iq people in history did not pass along their genes for example Leonardo Davinci. I would guess this trend of very high Iq people would not breed as many off springs would be about the same for the rest of the world.
The other thing you must take to your example is that high taxes are for the successful. It often in countries that the rich get tax at a higher %, in a lot of cases the higher Iq the more successful you are. And since many nations tax success, they reduce the breeding of high iq and often increase the breeding of low iq in the forms of welfare.
The third thing is that Iq is more often related to the mother than the father since it is in the X chromosome. It is interesting to note that it is tradition of Jews to say that your only Jewish if your mother is/was a Jew And since males are more often attracted to youth, fertility and beauty and not iq well on average the mix will only increase a small percent of the iq over the next generations.
Today it is worst because high iq women in the West (and Asia) often go to university and work full time only to breed if at all at an older age . This alone will pull down the iq of the next generation of the nation since the lower iq woman will often skip higher education and work in part-time job if they work at all.
It is not all bad news since today events and the future ones are going to push a shift. Once the money run out and the debts need to be paid off in Europe and then the US it will push pressure to cancel government programs and low taxes. It might cause in same places a civil war and/or a nation to break up.
Companies will have to make cuts and the programs for feminist and multi culture will be scarp for better qualified people since the economy will be low. Women will need more than ever to depend on men of intelligence and the smarter woman will see this and adapt faster. The lower ones well their children may not survive (take a look at Venezuela).
Japan will shift just like the west. Though Japan and China will have one advantage over the west and therefore recovery faster and that is that they are less diverse and less multi cultural.
LikeLike
Hi RaceRelist can I ask in your opinion with the Iq difference with the Orientals (105-108) vs Caucasians (100) which I how much is just due to the different Neanderthal alleles genes and different levels of Testosterone vs say the different history of the two regions? Or maybe they are both related?
I was thinking about this subject on the Iq difference when thinking back to the ancient warfare and the differences in Europe history vs North East Asian. It occur to me three main differences one was Sun Tzu (544 – 496BC) and how he shape Chinese history (and his book the Art of War).
Second the greatest generals in the West often did not breed or leave any books on military tactics (Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon) vs the East whereas in the east Japan, China, Mongolia or Korea some of the greatest generals had many children (Genghis khan, Han Shizhong,, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Eulji Mundeok Kwon Yul).
And last the warfare in the west was for the most part less bloody and losses are kept to the solders compare to the east. I mean that with a few expectations, warfare in the west was two armies fighting until one side gave up. War in most of western history is about the tactics on the battle field.
Whereas In the east it is a campaign and were for the most part winning means life or death. The campaign is Strategy, winning battles is only secondly. To lose the war in the East meant your culture would die and your women taken as prizes. To rebel would be meant with big punishment to the peasants. In the west it was different after Christian where the loser would give up rights to land.
Even reading on ancient Greece hoplite warfare is so different to the Warfare Warring States period in that the warfare is small and agree to by both side not to target civilians until the Peloponnesian Wars.
I also note that Christian would of affected the west in that one that it force Monogamy meaning the kings could not have more wives. Two that priest were not aloud children thus lowing iq
Thoughts?
LikeLike
Both different environment and I would say yea more Neanderthal DNA has Asians slightly more intelligent, as they have 20 percent more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans.
This would have partly led to selection for the slightly larger skull and brains of Asians.
Testosterone negatively correlates with IQ due to differing levels of sun exposure (vitamin D is a steroid hormone)
Rushton posits this to be the cause of the fall of the Roman and Greek civilizations.
Those three you named had kid(s).
Also, it takes a few very influential people to start making big waves. Asians had, and still do, great inventions. South Korea leads the world in robotics. Their visio-spatial IQ is around 110 on average. Their verbal suffers, with Chinese verbal IQ being 99 for instance.
Anomalies. East Asians have more Neanderthal DNA which means, as a whole, they’ll have fewer children. And this is seen again in the three-way gradient. Neanderthal DNA, or lack thereof, has a strong relationship with fertility rate of the population. Historically, Eurasians have a 2 percent decrease in historic fitness. One percent from the bottleneck coming OoA and another 1 percent from introgression of deleterious Neanderthal alleles. Since East Asians have more Neanderthal DNA, they have fewer children.
This causes more aggressive people to die, ie those more willing to fight. This is why I think one of the reasons the European Migration Crisis is occurring.
They have bigger brains. In the end it was about the land as well as people need the land to live.
Well religious people have lower IQs on average:
And Kings and Queens inbred a lot, for one example.
LikeLike
R/k selection theory has been debunked a long time ago because, East Asian reproductive rates have fluctuated over time. In fact, the Chinese had a higher reproductive rate that US blacks who were enslaved. Keep in mid that these US blacks were bred to produce as many children as possible. The women had no choice of family size.
In Rushton’s debate with Joseph Graves, Graves undermines his utilization of r/k selection theory.
Graves went further in depth about 5 years later, writing this comprehensive response to Rushton’s utilization of the theory.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.731.3826&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Rushton is incredibly dishonest
LikeLike
Not really, r/K theory is back, rebranded as the CLASH (CLimate, Aggression, and Self-control in Humans) model. The whole paper actually vindicates Rushton.
Eurasian populations have a 2 percent historic decrease in fitness compared to Africans due to 1) introgression of deleterious Neanderthal alleles and 2) the population bottleneck that occurred coming out of Africa.
There are life history differences between human populations. See the paper linked above.
From the abstract of Graves’s paper:
Differences in ancestral evolutionary environments.
Graves also says in that video that you can’t take populations from today and say that they have fewer children in comparison to another. That’s wrong. See my article on Neanderthal alleles and bottlenecks OoA that decreased fitness for Eurasians by 2 percent historically.
Yes he did.
In Rushton’s last paper before his death, he wrote that melanin has been linked to behaviors in species. He conceptualized skin color as a multi-generational adaptation to differences in climate over the past 70,000 years. He proposed life history theory to explain the covariation found between human and non-human pigmentation and variables such as birth rate, infant mortality, longevity, the rate of HIV/AIDs and violent crime.
I refer you to Van Lange, Rinderu, and Bushmen (2016). Rushton was right. A few of his theories have been proven this year.
No he’s not.
LikeLiked by 1 person