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> If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility

It is not a few corners of the world. It is currently "developed countries", but we have no reason to believe that the non-"developed countries" will do any better.

> is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?

Putting to a side for now the blase attitude to several societies slowly disappearing due to lack of births:

1. Much of society is built around the implicit assumption of there being more people in the future.

2. The carrying capacity of the world is only of interest to us as long as we are around for it. All of humanity suddenly disappearing tomorrow would also do wonders for the world's carrying capacity.

Regarding the idea I’m taking a blase Attitude. My arguments allow for two separate defences against this argument. Both that humans are not very genetically different so a change in genetics should hardly affect culture, and that culture isn’t dependent on genetics. How blase can I be while preparing two different defences against your allegations?

Regarding argument 1, I will say there is no problem with the supply of people, global population is growing. It doesn’t need to grow everywhere simultaniously, insisting that it must will inevitably lead to a bias towards population growth. The population HAS to shrink somewhere for things to stay stable, since it will invariably grow in a few places, and at this point the growing countries outweigh the shrinking ones sharply.

With 2, I’ll expand on this argument. Unrestrained pollution will lead to a future where the earth warms which can rapidly leading to famine and population decline after an era of sharp population growth. You are worried about a decline in children in a set of countries, but that problem is a lot less of a problem when it’s happening in a few countries, than when it’s happening in every country at the same time. Then things go worse for every individual country involved, as immigration is not an option.

> Regarding the idea

Perhaps my use of "society" overemphasized the culture aspect that you pick up on. "perserving culture" is of a secondary importance to me, what's more important is the people themselves. As you say, the memes will be able to fend for themselves and survive even if the people in the society do not. People are not merely the transmission vectors of DNA and memes.

> there is no problem with the supply of people, global population is growing. > and at this point the growing countries outweigh the shrinking ones sharply.

Global population may be growing (for now) but the rate at which its growing is decreasing [0].

Further, (and I wish I had a source at hand) the problem with relying on immigration to sustain population levels in a country is that many countries do too good of a job at assimilation. The fertility rate of immigrants rapidly converges to the local level over the course of 2-3 generations.

> You are worried about a decline in children in a set of countries. I’m worried a decline in children, immigrants, population, in every country in the world simultaneously.

I don't think that's true. You and I are worried about the same thing. I look at Japan and Korean as habringer of what's to come for the rest of the countries in the world (and thus the world as a whole), i.e. an aging population without enough children to maintain any semblence of the current way of life working, much less to replenish the population.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-–-W...

Honestly I'm trying to play devils advocate here a bit for the sake of dialouge, cheers mate.

I would love to save western cultures and the genetics are part of the culture. They just are. The regional adaptions people's bodies have to their climate and geography and local food sources really does influence their interests and their cultures to a degree. Peoples bodies are different and that makes them do different things, that's one example I can think of genetics influencing culture. If all the whites die off for instance there will probably be less people doing extreme snowboarding while chugging milk.

Yet the concerns I've raised I believe we should at the very least be wary of.

We may be genetically similar but there are literally millions/maybe billions of people in the world who do not agree with LGBT or women's rights. Some of these places execute people for expressing their authentic selves. Some of these places do not believe in science and progress, and are extremely insular and religiously conservative.

So no, I don't think it is a victory unless human rights and progress don't mean anything. I'm from one of these places where birth rates are high but the quality of life is awful and government corruption is astronomical. Most people there will probably shun you if not actually harm you for doing something that nobody cares about in the US or some western countries. Recently I saw a post about how the Norwegian health ministry released some images of people doing various sexual poses as part of some sex-ed. I thought it was quite neat, and it features multiple sexualities. I will bet my life savings you try doing that where I'm from that it won't go so well and the number of fundamentalist minded people is rising.

No the poorest countries don’t have the human capital potential to make scientific and engineering advancements.

They need scientists too if only to solve their own pressing problems.

I think it's less about preserving sparkling blue eyes and more about the negative effects of a declining population on a country's economy. Sam Harris had a guest (Peter Zeihan) a few episodes ago who talked about the downsides of population decline, and he was pretty interesting.

One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering. This means that the people who train up the next generation of scientists and engineers are spread thinner, and therefore less depth of expertise in those fields as the decline continues.

I'm not sure how much that idea is backed up by evidence, but it at least makes some sense.

Population decline had never really registered as a problem to me until I heard that episode - I always kinda figured that less people around would be a net good. Definitely worth a listen if you're interested in the topic.

Sam's a smart guy. He gets a lot right. Sometimes he has blind spots that make him seem alarmist.

> I think it's less about preserving sparkling blue eyes and more about the negative effects of a declining population on a country's economy.

Good thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration is a thing

> One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering.

Good thing we have books, the Internet, billions of video recordings, et al.

Minor nitpick - Sam is not the one making these points in the referenced episode - it's the guest who wrote a book on the topic. In fact Sam brought another guy onto this show to act as a backstop, admitting up front that he didn't feel he knew enough about the topic to have a deep conversation without some help. The other guy pushed back on various points that Zeihan made and it's a pretty interesting discussion.

As for immigration, no arguments there. But that point leads back to the question of why a society hits population decline in the first place. Presumably the same things that cause your "native" population to stop reproducing eventually affects your immigrants after a generation or so, so while it can definitely slow the population decline, it's not a full solution.

To your point about the loss of deep expertise - I think the problem is still worth thinking about. Yes, we can make new experts. And those experts might even be more productive than the last generation of experts. But at the end of the day, it takes longer to make them, and you still have less.

I'm not sure how much I agree with Zeihan, but he makes some interesting points which I hadn't previously considered.

>Presumably the same things that cause your "native" population to stop reproducing eventually affects your immigrants after a generation or so, so while it can definitely slow the population decline, it's not a full solution.

I think it could be a full solution. In theory there could be 2 populations, a slow population and a fast population, and the fast population continually donates people to the slow population via immigration to sustain it. The worry would be if some idea from the slow population infects the fast population and causes it to slow down.

That point doesn't seem particularly intuitive to me. A society in population decline is a society where the old outweigh the young. You would seemingly have a higher ratio of long-term experts to young learners than you do under a population growth scenario.

If there is a risk, your risk isn't that you have too few experts to offer training, it's that the young learners are spread too thin. There aren't enough people looking to learn for all the people who have knowledge to pass down and so you lose knowledge in that transition.

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With that said, I find the general premise that we would be looking at some kind of dark age with the level of population decline any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes, nearly comical.

The global population now is around 8 billion. It was around 3 billion in 1960 (4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999). It doesn't seem to me that the pace of change or technological advancement was particularly slow in any of those time periods, and the substantial productivity gains since then would alone suggest that we'd be more efficient for those population levels than things were at that time.

> Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger

Yes. If modern (western dominated) society is not self-sustaining, this should be a big hint, that there is something deeply wrong with our culture.

> If you think of us all as one race, the human race

But that doesn't mean populations are interchangeable?

"since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too. You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century."

David Reich in the NYTimes (archive https://archive.ph/Zfhc3)

>The whole contention that it’s terrible that high birthrate countries are so much more feminist than low birthrate ones

I think there's a typo there.

the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility

Every corner of the world is declining in fertility, from South Korea to Niger.