Incidentally, I have an action European governments could take which would definitely, IMHO, affect fertility levels.

Offer the following tax incentives -- reductions in the _total_ tax burden a couple carry, from all sources, not just income tax:

10% off for the first child;
20% off for the second;
30% off for the third;
40% off for the fourth.

So that families with 4 or more children paid no taxes, direct or indirect, regardless of income.

This would have an immediate and, I think, quite substantial effect.

If you also cut pension and retirement benefits for the childless by, say, 50%...

Jonathan: "Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth."

-- I've read the article. It's overstated, IMHO.

What is more likely is that the _religious_ will inherit the earth.

The highest birthrates are not among groups that are specifically 'conservative', but among groups that are specifically religiously observant.

This overlaps with 'conservatism' but it's not a one-to-one correlation.

The correlation between religious practice and high fertility is much stronger in free countries where observance is genuinely voluntary, though.

In the US the fertility gap between the observant and the nonobservant is very high -- 3 to 1 among people of Christian background, probably even higher among Jews, something like 4 or 5 to 1.

But it's lower where there's high social pressure to conform religiously.

Eg., many Muslim countries now have low to very low birthrates (Tunisia's is about the same as England's, around 1.7/1.6) but their level of religious observance is high, much higher than England and possibly even higher than the US.

I strongly suspect this is because the people who go to church here in the US include a higher percentage of those who really want to than do the mosque-attenders in Tunisia.

The US has had a "free market in religion" for a very long time, so its churches have gotten very good at holding on to people (and converting them -- up to 1 in 3 American Hispanics are now evangelical Protestants, for example).

Jonathan: Steven Barnes used to argue with me that the American system of slavery had bred a more docile breed of African-Americans, in effect today.

-- that would be an extremely odd thing to say, given that black Americans are disproportionately likely to do things forbidden by law; that's why they're 13% of the general population and over 50% of the prison population. This is not evidence of docility.

What the American system of slavery mostly did was make "African" Americans less African, genetically almost as much as culturally. DNA testing has shown that this group is over 1/3 European (mostly British) by descent, with about 4% of Amerindian ancestry.

And there are probably at least 50 million "white" Americans with some black-slave ancestor hidden in the woodpile. Given the rate of "passing" by octroons and so forth, that's pretty well inevitable; the children of Sally Hemmings are only the most famous example.

Steven Barnes used to argue with me that the American system of slavery had bred a more docile breed of African-Americans, in effect today. I strongly disagreed, but waving equations at a novelist is usually a bad idea, with exceptions such as Benford, Brin, Egan, Rucker, Stross & Vinge and other such metalawfirms.

The Return of Patriarchy
By Phillip Longman
Foresign Policy
March/April 2006

"Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best.... Birthrates are falling far below replacement levels in one country after the next—from China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe, Russia, and even parts of the Middle East...."

I agree that we probably haven't had any genetic behavioral changes in the past 60K years, however lactose tolerance (genetic) is a relatively new phenomenon that would only have occurred after the domestication of animals.

There's what we observe in birds and other some other animals where there is little predator/food pressure; the males become decorated according to female preference. Yes, there's some speculation that this is a proof of fitness but still it only occurs after the selective pressures to hide from predators disappears.

Look at what we've done to dogs in a couple of centuries, whose to say we haven't been doing the same thing to ourselves over the past thousand years unconsciously.

SMS: I doubt there's been any substantial genetic change in behavioral traits siknce the emergence of fully behaviorally modern humans about 60K years ago.

Humans are so flexible that there just isn't any pressure for it. You can turn a culture inside-out in three generations, far too rapidly for genetic evolution to be a factor.

- I'd have to agree. There are plenty of second, third, or more generation Asians in the US and other countries who are fully Western, culturewise. I'm sure if there was a large population of Europeans in China or Japan for several generations they'd acculturate too.

I even question the reports that humans are evolving into more gracile forms over the past several centuries... given the impact of environment and lifestyle on bone and muscle development, it could just be the increasingly softer, healthier lives we lead than have led to our more gracile features.

I'm skeptical, but open-minded, Mr. Stirling. After all, the Communist dogma was that human nature could be changed by ideology, in a handwaving
Lysenko fashion. It took the world at least 75 years to beat down the USSR that evolved (or was created by intelligent design) based on that false premise of the malleability of human nature. Yet the Singularity and current schismatic clades of Transhumanists also devolve on changing human nature, albeit by technological means. There may or may not be a breaking story here. See the cover article in the current New Scientist - 11 March 2006 -

"Are we still evolving?
Some say no, but others believe the process is moving faster than ever - so which is it, asks New Scientist."

Jonathan: If so, scientists and historians say, a fresh look at history may be in order. Evolutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures....

-- sounds like your typical evolutionary-psychology "just so story" to me.

I doubt there's been any substantial genetic change in behavioral traits siknce the emergence of fully behaviorally modern humans about 60K years ago.

Humans are so flexible that there just isn't any pressure for it. You can turn a culture inside-out in three generations, far too rapidly for genetic evolution to be a factor.

Follow-up to previous post, same source, later date:

The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA
By NICHOLAS WADE
The New York Times
Published: March 12, 2006

EAST ASIAN and European cultures have long been very different, Richard E. Nisbett argued in his recent book "The Geography of Thought." East Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced for thousands of years.

A separate explanation for such long-lasting character traits may be emerging from the human genome. Humans have continued to evolve throughout prehistory and perhaps to the present day, according to a new analysis of the genome reported last week by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. So human nature may have evolved as well.

If so, scientists and historians say, a fresh look at history may be in order. Evolutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures....

Amazing stuff. I did think those people had pudgier faces in the older paintings :) They do look different but maybe that was just the draw style??? With such a hyper-optimized culture today it could lead to overly synthetic genes. Too much bone structure and your left with bones.

Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story

By NICHOLAS WADE
The New York Times
Published: March 7, 2006

Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.

Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny....

Very interesting facts. So TNR is more current. I thought China/India were continuing to pump too much brood but they stopped or balanced at 2.0 about 10 years after us leading to major frame-dragging event. I think It seems most nation’s TNR is about the same now and everyone’s population is aging. That’s probably OK if we can enhance that aging experience. Florida simply can’t hold that many old people. In the past the tendency was to live a young life and die that way (live hard, die young and except the genetic default of a generation not quite ‘sin’ free yet) but being old with just enough of a population seems serviceable. But it will just create more disease/hardship/depression/accident leading to an eventual mass death if we don’t enhance it. We have major problems with older drivers loosing control of cars as Jonathon Vos Post can fortunately attest to.
Our tendency to meddle with genetics is overwrought with rudimentary stuff and ideas now as I don’t think sex or humanness elimination is the way to go. The tendency to stay indoors more and attend less social events because there’s too many people outside.

Andrew Lias:

“In other words, whatever evolution "wants" doesn't have much bearing on whether or not I should have a few kids that I heavily invest in or a dozen kids with less investment. My genes may "want" one or the other (and, as I've pointed out, the "more kids" option isn't necessarily the default), but what I want or need may very well be entirely different.:

Your genes may want something but it’s always partial though. Like I know I’m going to space and my body wants gravity but only partially as it also has been prepared for the journey.
Evolution fluctuates but I believe everything works to a common purpose. It’s the hidden value of things that offer the illusion of choice but I don’t think that’s so bad in the greater scheme of things. Illusions have partial truths to them. It’s good to examine illusions or thoughts as it helps to motivate instead of scare.
I would put evolution partially in the intelligence category because our brains are biological connecting to our base desires. I think the reaction toward Darwin was the oversimplification of evolution to a default.
It’s like plastic is a mild from of biology; because of it’s ultra-simplicity it looks very basic with clashing colors on the surface but it’s still biology or science overall going back to relativity. We use mostly data or a few thoughts to create it not complex biological process that takes years to develop. To me everything is natural which actually allows for more choice. Natural can mean high intelligence so I don’t smoke pot “because it’s natural.” I don’t think having everything enumerated equals less freedom. I think educating ourselves about these choices allows us to partake in that freedom though. If we don’t retain our place then we devolve or over-evolve.

As to the debate about whether life is really changing for most people, under demographic perturbations, technology, and the like:

"And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leave the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind."

The Devil, in Man and Superman, Act 3, by George Bernard Shaw.

The most recent demographic wild card is sex-selective abortion in societies with very strong preferences for male offspring. It's reaching a scale where it'll have a major impact in global terms.

Among young Chinese this has now resulted a 120/100 ratio of men to women and it's getting worse.

It's already worse than that in large parts of India, hitting 140/100 in parts of the Punjab.

Fewer figures are available from the Middle East but I suspect the same thing is happening there as overall birthrates fall. The confluence of ultrasound technology, son-preference and falling birth-rates means that families which aren't having as many children are very determined that the ones they do have will be male.

In turn, 20-30 years on this means a _lot_ of young men with no prospect of finding a wife.

That may have a number of social-political implications, but demographically what it does is push down the crude birth-rate for those age-cohorts, since the controlling factor is the number of women, not the total number of people in that age-group.

Mark: OK, I'm not sure what TFR is, (per family?)
I was talking about Birth rate (births/1,000 population) based on this information:

-- TFR is Total Fertily Rate, the adjusted lifetime total of children per woman in a population; it's arrived at by comparing the crude birth-rates of different age-cohorts. Try the CIA World Factbook for rapid comparisons.

2.1 children per woman is 'replacement level' with first-world mortality rates. In most third-world settings it's a bit higher, around 2.2 or 2.3, because of higher infant mortality.

TFR is the best long-term prediction tool in demographics. Crude birth-rates (births per 1000) are less informative because they don't catch trends as quickly; they reflect _previous_ birth-rates as well as present ones, and also the relative proportion of various age-groups within the population.

Eg., if the TFR 25 years ago was 7, and it's currently 1.7 (which is essentially Tunisia's record, btw) then for a while births will still exceed deaths because the large "bulge" of women born in the 1980's at the higher rate are still in their reproductive years and having their (much smaller) families.

Quite small differences in TFR can have quite drastic long-term effects. A TFR of 1.6 means that eventually the population will drop by up to 30% a generation and will reach a very, very high median age, over 50. A TFR of 2 means rough stability and a much lower median age.

Once it drops below 2.1, especially if it's a rapid drop from a high level, the 'population pyramid' will start to look like a python swallowing a puppy, with fewer people at the lower ages. Or to put it another way, the median age of the population starts increasing rapidly because the number of children born is smaller relative to the size of the adult population. The 'bulge' has to travel all the way to the top of the pyramid (where it 'exits' through death).

A lot of developing countries now look like this because their birth-rates fell very rapidly, much more rapidly than ours, compressing a demographic transition that took Western societies centuries into a few decades.

To use the example above, 25 years ago France's TFR was a little over 2 and in the interim it's fallen to 1.85, a change of about .15 of a child. French TFR's have been quite low since the 1880's, and fell below 3 in the mid-19th century.

Tunisia's TFR was nearly 7 as recently as the 1970's and then it fell very quickly to 1.7 in 2005, a fall of over 5 children per woman.

So Tunisia's population growth will stop and go into reverse, but it will take a while because of 'demographic intertia', as the 'bulge' of women born at higher rates are still in their childbearing years.

Comparing China and the US, note that China's TFR was quite high in the 60's and early 70's -- around 6, IIRC -- and then started falling in the mid-70's, dropping below replacement level in the 80's and continuing to fall to about 1.6 today.

Hence China has a very, very pronounced "bulge" of people born in the 70's and before, and hence its population has started to age very quickly; China's median age will pass that of the US in the next 10-20 years and by 2050 it will be nearly as high as Europe's.

The US TFR peaked at about 3.6 in the late 1950's, fell slowly in the early 60's, declined sharply in the late 60's and early 70's and bottomed out at about 1.7 in the late 70's and early 80's.

Since then it has increased gradually, and has been at 2 or a bit more for most of the time since the early 90's.

Demographic inertia works both ways; the 'baby bust' of the 1970's having an echo effect 20-30 years later, and depressing the crude birth rate despite higher levels of fertility.

This has about worked its way through the demographic cycle and the US now has record numbers of children, approaching or exceeding the baby boom levels. This will accelerate as the women born from the mid-80's on start having their children, which has started these last few years.

Duh, correction: "I'm *not* sure what you're talking about,...".