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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Correlation!= causation.

Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor places don't generally have significant educational budgets or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of things changes — education and freedom, not even always money — there is a corresponding change to number of births per woman.

It also means that rich couples in societies that lack women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to score against.

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In the short run, people can act against their own evolutionary fitness, but in the long run, evolutionary pressures should push those people to the wayside.

I've also seen two parents of below average intelligence make children who are of above average intelligence, and thats not even uncommon.

Well yeah in fact regression to the mean predicts that below average people will on average have children smarter than themselves while above average people will have children less smart than themselves (but still smarter than average).

That's not my point, my point is more that it's funny that people do things like going to college when this predictably causes them to have fewer children i.e. college actually hurts their evolutionary fitness.

I think if you're thinking about evolutionary fitness when having children, or deciding how many children to have, you should fundamentally reevaluate your moral and ideological system.

That line of thinking is the beginning or the road to eugenics, and it goes no place good.

Eugenics is about imposing a system on society where only a chosen group of people get to have offspring, not about your individual choices or your kids. Otherwise choosing a mate you're attracted to becomes paramount to eugenics.

Also, everyone is thinking about evolutionary fitness. Some people just do it explicitly (and others do it by instinct/intuition)

Do you also think women shouldn't be allowed to abort Down syndrome babies because "that's eugenics"?

Do you think that the state shouldn't be allowed to kill unwanted Down syndrome babies after they are born because "that's eugenics"?

What about Down syndrome adults, who are reliant on state benefits?

In case it's not clear, I don't support the killing of disabled people at any age, but I understand that different people approach these questions from a different set of assumptions.

My point is that adding scare quotes around "that's eugenics" doesn't stop it from being an accurate description, so your question is not the gotcha you might think it is.

I don't think the state should be in the business of killing anyone.

But a woman aborting a Downs baby is not the state killing anyone, and most pro choice people would say the woman isn't killing anyone either, since the fetus isn't a person in their view.

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