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 […]

Since the end of the Malthusian era, science-based technological growth has been the source of almost all long-term economic growth. However, we also know that it didn’t accrue in all regions evenly. For instance, Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment showed that the vast majority of “eminent” figures in science and the arts hailed from Europe, especially […]

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 […]