From the indispensable BioHackInfo: China’s new Criminal Code, which came into effect four weeks ago on March 1st, has a new section dedicated to ‘illegal medical practices’, which makes it a punishable crime to create gene-edited babies, human clones and animal-human chimeras. The new section is an amendment to Article 336 of China’s Criminal Law, and officially […]
Shows zero signs of letting up, according to Twitter demographer Cicerone: “Birth data for the first months of 2020: Slight recovery or flatline in Western Europe, Easternmost Europe continues its sharp decline, Hungary stronk, South Korea ever more doomed.” My observations: Uzbekistan now has as many births as France & 50% of Russia’s. South Korea
In my Age of Malthusian Industrialism concept (see archive), I explore the possibility of a future scenario in which technology stagnates due to problems becoming harder and dysgenic reproduction patterns. Meanwhile, the demographic transition will be reversed, since fertility preferences are heritable, and ultra-competitive in a post-Malthusian world. This may eventually bring the world population
reiner tor comments: Anyway, regardless of Nobel laureates, it’s pretty likely that East Asians are somewhat deficient in the nonconformism department, and so while they’re likely to excel (and overtake whites) in the “add together existing technologies and make them stronger” type of activities, not that many truly original inventions are likely to come from
In one of my posts on the Age of Malthusian Industrialism, I pointed out that groups such as the Amish and the Mormons will be some of the first to become saturated with genotypic breeders: This acceleration will be noticed first, and remain most pronounced – at least in relative terms – amongst already highly fertile tribes,
Recent paper (h/t @whyvert). Kim, Yuri, and James J. Lee. 2018. “The Genetics of Human Fertility.” Current Opinion in Psychology 27 (August): 41–45. There’s basically two classes of people having more kids: Overall, there is a suggestion of two different reproductive strategies proving to be successful in modern Western societies: (1) a strategy associated with
This is the fourth in a series of posts about the demographics of the coming Age of Malthusian Industrialism. In the decades and centuries to come, technological progress will slow to a crawl, as dysgenic reproduction patterns deplete the world’s remaining smart fractions (assuming that there are no abrupt discontinuities in humanity’s capacity for collective problem solving,
In my third post on the Age of Malthusian Industrialism, I suggested: Somebody should really do a GWAS for fertility preferences before the idiocracy takes over. Happily, it looks like some people have already started doing that. Barban, Nicola et al. (2017) – Genome-wide analysis identifies 12 loci influencing human reproductive behavior The genetic architecture
This is the third in a series of posts about the demographics of the coming Age of Malthusian Industrialism. In the decades and centuries to come, technological progress will slow to a crawl, as dysgenic reproduction patterns deplete the world’s remaining smart fractions (assuming that there are no abrupt discontinuities in humanity’s capacity for collective problem solving,
This is the second in a series of posts about the demographics of the coming Age of Malthusian Industrialism. In the decades and centuries to come, technological progress will slow to a crawl, as dysgenic reproduction patterns deplete the world’s remaining smart fractions (assuming that there are no abrupt discontinuities in humanity’s capacity for collective problem solving,
This is a Russia-specific offshoot to my previous post Where Do Babies Come from? For reference purposes, here is how Russia’s actual TFR has developed since the end of WW2. Since I last posted substantially on the topic of Russia fertility preferences in 2009-2010, a lot more data has come in. Here is a survey of
This is the first in a series of posts about the demographics of the coming Age of Malthusian Industrialism. In the decades and centuries to come, technological progress will slow to a crawl, as dysgenic reproduction patterns deplete the world’s remaining smart fractions (assuming that there are no abrupt discontinuities in humanity’s capacity for collective problem solving,
The December 2018 AP-NORC Poll asked 1,067 adults about their attitudes toward the technology that could be used to edit the genes of human embryos It was carried out a couple of weeks after China’s CRISPRgate. Results are basically the same as for the July 2018 poll by PEW, in which 72% consider gene editing
Technology Review: Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies It was the invention of a powerful gene editing tool, CRISPR, which is cheap and easy to deploy, that made the birth of humans genetically modified in an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) center a theoretical possibility. Now, it appears it may already be happening. According to Chinese medical