Bruce Charlton's Notions

A microcosm of what went wrong with the industrial revolution: Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment

Bruce G Charlton

The so-called ‘Mouse Utopia’ experiment was conducted from 1968 by John B Calhoun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun

Four healthy breeding pairs of mice were allowed to reproduce freely in a 'utopian' environment with ample food and water, no predators, no disease, comfortable temperature – a near as possible ideal conditions and space. What happened was described by the author in terms of five phases: establishment, exponential growth, growth slowing, breeding ceases and population stagnant, population decline and extinction:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/procrsmed00338-0007.pdf

Phase A - 104 days - establishment of the mice in their new environment, then the first litters were born.

Phase B - up to day 315 - exponential population growth doubling every 55 days.

Phase C - from day 315-560 population growth abruptly slowed to a doubling time of 145 days.

Phase D - days 560-920; population stagnant with births just matching deaths. Emergence of many pathological behaviours.

Terminal Phase E - population declining to zero. The last conception was about day 920, after which there were no more births, all females were menopausal, the colony aged and all of them died.

To summarise – when four breeding pairs of mice were allowed to reproduce under ideal ‘utopian’ conditions, the colony entirely ceased to breed after three years, and then went extinct.

Interpreting the demise of Mouse Utopia

The main fact about Mouse Utopia, was that despite everything possible being done to create ideal biological conditions; the mouse colony rapidly declined and became entirely extinct. This was a very surprising outcome, biologically; and implies that some very major factor about the basic requirements or behaviour of the mice was neglected.

The Mouse Utopia experiment is usually interpreted in terms of social stresses related to 'over-population'; that crowding generated pathological behaviours and a loss of the will to reproduce. But this seems, very obviously – I would have thought – an incorrect explanation; because 1. The mouse population never actually became crowded, 2. The suppression of breeding happened very quickly, and never recovered even after the population declined rapidly and crowding was reduced, and 3. the population rapidly became extinct.

Michael A Woodley suggests that what was going on was much more likely to be mutation accumulation; with deleterious (but non-fatal) genes incrementally accumulating with each generation and generating a wide range of increasingly maladaptive behavioural pathologies; this process rapidly overwhelming and destroying the population before any beneficial mutations could emerge to 'save; the colony from extinction.

So the bizarre behaviours seen especially in Phase D - such as the male 'beautiful ones' who appeared to be healthy and spent all their time self-grooming, but were actually inert, unresponsive, unintelligent and uninterested in reproduction - were plausibly maladaptive outcomes of a population sinking under the weight of mutations.

Why mutation accumulation?

The reason why mouse utopia might produce so rapid and extreme a mutation accumulation is that wild mice naturally suffer very high mortality rates from predation. Because wild mice are so short-lived, mice are not 'built to last' and have the reputation of being unusually-prone to produce new deleterious mutations (and are therefore extremely prone to cancer, and susceptible to carcinogens - which is why mice are used to test for carcinogens).

Thus mutation selection balance is in operation among wild mice, with very high mortality rates continually weeding-out the high rate of spontaneously-occurring new mutations (especially among males) - with typically only a small and relatively mutation-free proportion of the (large numbers of) offspring surviving to reproduce; and a minority of the most active and healthy (mutation free) males siring the bulk of each generation.

However, in Mouse Utopia, there is no predation and all the other causes of mortality (eg. Starvation, violence from other mice) are reduced to a minimum - so the frequent mutations just accumulate, generation upon generation - randomly producing all sorts of pathological (maladaptive) behaviours.

The danger of mutational meltdown

Extinction due to relaxed selection leading to rapid mutation accumulation is called ‘mutational meltdown’.

It happens because, in addition to the problem of mutation accumulation by relaxation of selection, when a population has begun shrinking, there is an increasing danger of extinction due to a positive feedback cycle. Deleterious mutations accumulate so rapidly that they overwhelm a population before it can evolve an escape – as the population shrinks so it becomes less and less likely to ‘randomly’ generate a compensatory beneficial mutation that might recue it from extinction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown

Mutational meltdown was first described as a threat for small populations of asexual organisms; later the phenomenon was described in sexual organisms, and then fond to occur in large populations. Therefore, mutational meltdown has gone from being a specific case to probably a universal possibility. And thus a possibility in humans.

The unusual twist with modern humans is that native populations in developed countries have begun falling (rapidly) over the past several decades apparently due to chosen sub-replacement fertility, and probably before mutation accumulation had reached a level sufficient biologically to suppress fertility.

In other words psychological factors have anticipated biological factors - and presumably both psychological and biological population decline will combine to increase the degree of reduced fitness resulting from mutation accumulation.

This will probably have increased the risk of mutational meltdown, and of extinction.

Modern England as Mouse Utopia?

If we look at the Mouse Utopia experiment and try to fit the history of modern England into it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_England

There could be an inflection point in 1921 when English population growth suddenly slowed - somewhat like the transition from Phase B to C in the mouse utopia graph (page 83)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/procrsmed00338-0007.pdf

Then the plateau Phase D - where births just replace deaths - was reached in the 1970s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kingdom#Vital_statistics_1960_.E2.80.93_2013

Which perhaps means the next phase would be the Terminal Phase E (among the native population - disregarding immigrants) with fewer births than deaths dwindling to zero live, births and escalating median age, until eventually ‘all’ women are aged beyond the menopause at which point extinction (of the native population) is inevitable.

Well, this isn't really comparing like with like! - and the whole picture is muddied by increasing medical capability and cossetting, which has radically reduced deaths from infectious disease (the main cause of mortality); and keeps infants and the elderly alive in circumstances which would previously have been fatal - but maybe gives us clues of what to look-out-for; assuming that the demise of Mouse Utopia was indeed substantially due to mutation accumulation.

Possible timescale for human extinction

If humans are recapitulating mouse utopia, what might be the approximate timescale for extinction?

As far as I can gather, mice are fully ready to reproduce at about 4 months, so the average generation time is probably about 5 months which is about 150 days.

So, starting with 104 days as zero - when reproduction in Mouse Utopia began; we can convert the above timings into mouse generations

Phase B exponential growth doubling every 55 days lasted 201 days, = 1.3 mouse generations.

Phase C exponential growth doubling every 145 days lasted a further 245 days = 1.6 mouse generations.

So population growth phase in utopian conditions lasted only 3 mouse generations.

Phase D of population stagnation phase lasted a further 360 days = 2.4 mouse generations

Therefore, Terminal Phase E the last conception (and de facto inevitable extinction) was 816 days after breeding commenced = 5.4 mouse generations.

Human generations are conventionally 25 years, although these have slowed to about 30 years in Western countries in the past several decades - but let us therefore give two values - one for 25 year, and the other for 30 year human generations.

If we start at 1850 as the date when the Industrial Revolution seems to have become certainly established and child mortality rates began to drop rapidly (from more than 60 percent to about 1 percent), and start counting generations from that point, and if humans were made like mice (which they are not!)...

We would then predict that human population growth phase (B & C) would last three generations up to 1925-1940

And the stagnation phase (D) for another 2.4 generations - with 5.4 human generations taking us up to 1985-2012.

Well, clearly English people did not stop conceiving four years ago, because babies are still being born to native English - albeit not at a high rate!

I have guesstimated above that the English situation was that the slower growth Phase C began in about 1920 (not about 1880) and the plateau phase began in about 1970) not 1930-ish

So maybe England is lagged about 40 years (or about 1.5 generations) behind Mouse Utopia , because 1. we are not mice, and 2. our mouse utopia emerged only incrementally – moving from the upper to the lower classes; and was probably not complete until about 1950.

So we do not need to worry about mutational meltdown and de facto extinction (i.e. the final English child of English-descended parents being conceived) for, oh, another thirty or forty years!...

Longevity versus fitness

In the late phases of the mouse utopia experiment the birth rate dwindled to zero - but there was a plateau phase when the population numbers remained approximately static because the fewer mice were being born but more mice were living to an extreme old age – a lifespan of four years and longer, which is considerably older than mice would expect to live in the wild.

Yet these mice were grossly abnormal, indeed pathological, in their behaviour. - in particular suffering what might be termed psychiatric abnormalities that impaired social interaction (and reproduction) including a strange narcissism in some male mice (the 'beautiful ones') which looked like superb physical specimens but did not mate.

So we find on the one hand a combination of evidence of cumulative disease, initially manifested in the realm of behaviour - yet on the other hand an ageing population with some animals having a very long life span.

My interpretation is that an increasing average lifespan cannot be interpreted as improving fitness - indeed increasing lifespan is compatible with a severe reduction in functional behaviour; especially when functionality is defined 'biologically' in terms of reproductive success (having sufficient viable offspring to maintain population numbers, and potentially amplify the population when conditions permit).

In Britain in recent decades there has been a large increase in average lifespan (among the native population), including several-fold increases in the length of survival of many groups of ill people. For example, elderly people with moderate to severe dementia may now live for many years, whereas thirty or forty years ago such a diagnosis was regarded as being rapidly fatal within months and less than two years. (And taking into account that modern English average life expectancy is about 80 years – an age at which about 20 percent of people have measurable dementia).

There is no doubt that modern people have been, and are being, misled by the increase in lifespan - and superficial appearances of youthfulness - into assuming that population health is improving; when in biological terms what matters is the ability to survive and reproduce under given conditions. Only if modern people - in particular those of reproductive and productive age - were put into the same kind of harsh, high mortality-rate environment that people of the past lived-in, would we know whether they really do have better functionality.

For example, in hunter gatherer societies those who lack mobility will, sooner or later, necessarily be left to die. In agricultural societies, the struggle for survival was extremely severe and the shortage of food, poor housing, and high prevalence of severe infectious diseases meant that the mortality rate among the elderly was much higher.

But modern societies shelter pretty much everybody from exposure to extreme heat or cold, dehydration, starvation, epidemic infectious disease and violence; plus there are several life-extending treatments of chronic medical conditions (such as high blood pressure) which would soon cripple or kill without continued medication and management.

Therefore, many people of much-reduced functionality who would been unable to survive in historical societies, are currently kept alive for many extra decades in modern societies - with all appearances of reasonably good health... except for behavioural pathologies and sub-fertility.

My point is that modern people may be much less biologically fit than they think they are; and that if societal conditions reverted towards those of historical agrarian societies, or hunter gatherer conditions, their low fitness and inability to survive would become very obvious.

Perhaps the increasingly elderly individuals of the terminal phase of mouse utopia may have congratulated themselves on the success of the experiment, and that mice had attained a more comfortable and compassionate level of social organization than in any previous society.

And then they died out; every last one of them.

Nonetheless, I draw the following lessons.

1. Assuming the decline and extinction of mouse utopia was due to mutation accumulation leading to mutational meltdown - then it happened very quickly indeed: only 5.4 mouse generations to the final conception, with half of that being stagnation.

2. The decline in rate of population increase after only 1.3m mouse generations suggests that the effect of relaxed natural selection and mutation accumulation leads to genetic damage immediately, in the very first generation.

3. Although humans (maturing over 14 years and with a natural life expectancy about 70 years) are built to last longer than mice (maturing over 4 months and living about 2 years) - this may mean that humans are actually more vulnerable to mutation accumulation - because we have a more prolonged and multi-phasic development and depend on extremely-complex brains supporting extremely complex behaviours; which depend on many genes to create and to sustain. Complex social and sexual adaptations are, in other words, large mutational targets – susceptible to damage from many mutations.

4. In mouse utopia, the mouse environment, shelter, food, hygiene etc were all managed by humans - and did not depend on the mice doing anything much for themselves except eat, sleep, fight, groom and reproduce (until they altogether lost interest in sex) - but humans depend on other humans for survival. But when the human population is damaged from mutation accumulation, there will be no external experimenters to ‘look after’ the increasingly-dysfunctional humans – and this will tend to destroy the 'utopian' environment. In other words, there will be a combination of an increasingly dependent population with a reducingly-capable population.

If this destruction is severe enough and comes early enough- then mutational meltdown will be avoided; because harsher natural selection (from the less capable ‘caring’ population) will purge the mutationally-loaded population to prevent it from breeding (and worsening the problem). But if there is a generational lag - and utopia is maintained for sufficiently long that further mutational damage to younger generations continues to accumulate rapidly - then this will hasten the meltdown and extinction; because by the time utopia comes to an end, the younger generations will be unfit to survive the harsher conditions which are the best they can themselves manage.

That is, the younger generations will become too unfit even to care for themselves at a bare minimum level while also being able to reproduce with genetically-viable offspring, and to raise them to independence – at which point extinction is inevitable. The ‘plateau’ phase is when a generation is born that can just-about keep itself alive and functioning, but not able raise any of its (even less-fit) offspring. Eventually, a generation is born that is not even capable to sustaining itself, and the die-off will then be very rapid.

What signs should we look for in monitoring mutation accumulation?

The first signs of mutation accumulation would probably be de-differentiation/ loss of adaptations - especially in social and sexual functioning. These would affect general intelligence 'g' (because g is a fitness measure), and adaptive social and sexual functioning (because these are subtle/ advanced adaptations which are damaged by even slight illness, intoxication, and functional or structural brain impairments).

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/objective-and-direct-evidence-of.html
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/further-evidence-of-significant-slowing.html

I think evidence consistent with both lowered intelligence and also impaired adaptive social functioning can be observed in the report of Mouse Utopia. The reduced fertility in Mouse Utopia is perhaps also related to impaired drive/ motivation - as well as ineffective drive/ motivation (due to loss of functional adaptations).

I general, I think loss of adaptive functionality is what should be looked-for with mutation accumulation (i.e. adaptive behaviours knocked-out or damaged or distorted) as the first and most sensitive changes; rather than weird new behaviours. Specifically:

1. The social domain - first subtle, then gross impairments of adaptive social interactions

2. The sexual domain - first subtle, then gross impairments of adaptive sexual interactions

...bearing in mind that 'adaptive' means tending to enhance reproductive success.

I suggest social and sexual functioning, since these are the areas which I think are the most sensitive to brain impairments; at least that seems to be the situation in neurological and psychiatric disease.

My observation has been that when there is almost any significant degree of neurological or psychiatric disease, even the slightest; social and sexual domain functioning can usually be detected as having been impaired, by those who best knew the patient before he suffered illness.

Psychiatric aspects of Mouse Utopia

In The Narrow Roads of Gene Land Volume 2, the great evolutionary theorist WD Hamilton partially described that world in a chapter entitled The Hospitals are coming, and that is perhaps a good starting point - the idea that everyone will be damaged and most will be sick, in one way or another; so that life will resemble a hospital in which (some of) the less-sick (or the damaged but not-yet sick) tend the more-sick, as best they may - in intervals between doing whatever it takes to stay alive.

This is not by any means an unusual or unprecedented situation for humans through much of the history of the species. For much of the time, Malthusian mechanisms have been in force, and populations have been limited by various combinations of starvation and infectious disease. Infections - in particular - have sometimes been endemic at a high prevalence, so that the majority or even all of the population might be suffering from, be affected by, some chronic parasitic disease (malaria and bilharzia are examples) - but at a relatively low degree of severity.

And with respect to the Mouse Utopia society being a Hospital, it is important to recognize that much of the pathology will be psychiatric rather than physical - this can be seen from the fact that the problems of the original Mouse Utopia were most behavioural rather than physical; and it follows from the fact that the highly complex human brain is exceptionally sensitive to random mutational damage.

Intelligence is probably damaged by mutation accumulation in an incremental and quantitative fashion - the more mutations, the more the lowering of intelligence. Therefore, decline of intelligence as mutations accumulate is likely to be relative smooth (rather than step-like). But intelligence is 'general' intelligence, and is unusual in being a general attribute of cognitive function – probably sustained by small effects of a large number of individual genes. By contrast, most psychological functions are specific; and genetic damage is likely to be more qualitative and either step-like, or all-or-nothing.

What I think would happen, is that accumulating mutation damage would most likely show-up as varieties of specific brain functional damage leading to a wide range of specific behavioural impairments of a social and sexual type (differing between individuals due to random mutations striking unpredictably at a wide range of individual genes) - in a context of progressively declining intelligence.

The kind of damage I am talking about represents a decline in ‘fitness’ – ie. a decline in the functional adaptation of the human organism to its environment (its sexual, social and surrounding environment): a loss of effective functionality. This represents a decline in absolute fitness, but not just relative fitness. It is a also a decline in group fitness - ultimately in species fitness.

If fitness is measured in terms of the capacity to raise sufficient viable offspring in a given environment; then the sexual and social changes induced by mutation accumulation will be such as to reduce the probability of doing this: partly by damage causing reduced brain processing speed and efficiency (detectable as reduced intelligence) and partly by damage causing specific functional impairments (detectable as sexual and social pathologies).

These impairments would presumably include a decline in motivation – reduced motivation to engage in effective reproductive behaviours, reduced interest in sex liable to lead to reproduction, reduced motivation to procreate, to care for and rear children etc. There is certainly abundant evidence of such changes in modern developed societies, such as England.

In sum, in a broad-brush interpretation of the evidence, it looks very much as if England specifically, and all other developed nations to a greater or lesser extent, are recapitulating the Phases of Mouse Utopia – leading towards extinction, or something close to it.

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Acknowledgements: It was Michael A Woodley of Menie who informed me of the Mouse Utopia experiment, and made the interpretation of its outcome in terms of mutation accumulation.


See also: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/was-human-mouse-utopia-inevitable-no.html

The following is a draft from a chapter in a book on genius I am co-writing with Ed Dutton:

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The idea, culminating here:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/coming-soon-giga-death-world-of-mutants.html

Is that the 'dysgenics' discourse may have been focusing on the wrong topic  - too much focus on fertility, and neglect of mortality.

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Natural selection depends on both fertility/ birth rates and mortality/ death rates. Babies are born, but reproductive success depends on how many of these babies reach sexual maturity and live long enough to have offspring.

Those interested in dysgenics have focused on the fact that the less intelligent (and those with less socially desirable personality traits) are more fertile than the more intelligent and more conscientious, self-controlled and altruistic.

But the primary fact is, I believe, reduced mortality - the situation that since 1800, more and more of the babies that are born will live to have offspring. 

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Every new baby is likely to have one or two new spontaneous deleterious gene mutations - some lethal, some only mildly harmful and others in between - they may also inherit mutations from their parents.

Why doesn't this genetic damage mount up, generation upon generation, to overwhelm and destroy the fitness of the species?

Essentially, under 'natural conditions' because the mutations are filtered-out by high child mortality rates.

Through most of evolutionary history, most babies and children (probably a large majority of them) especially those with the worst genetic damage - have died before reproducing. Thus mutation load is filtered by differential child mortality rates with each generation.

Those who have the least genetic damage are the healthiest and best adapted, and only they will (on average) be the parents of the next generation.  

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If it is correct that - up to about 1800 - in almost all situations almost all babies died (and maybe only the 'fittest' 15 percent or so survived - or the fittest thirty percent... the exact number makes little difference).

But since 1800, starting in England then incrementally spreading across the whole world with no exceptions, child mortality rates have got lower, and lower; the mutation filtering effect has got less and less complete - and the mutation load has got greater with each generation.

This must have happened. The only question is how much?

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So, the primary mechanism of dysgenic change is mutation accumulation. But this is where more usual dysgenic topic of differential fertility comes in. 

Theoretical calculations suggest that the effect of mutation accumulation under these circumstances would be quite slow - IF normal natural selection was in play and higher levels of mutation accumulation led to lower fertility.

But in the modern world, the direction of natural selection has reversed. In the modern world, higher levels of mutation accumulation lead to higher fertility (so long as the mutations are sub-lethal).

In historical times, natural selection filtered-out mutations; but in the modern world natural selection amplifies the carriers of damaging mutations!

(Up to a point, where pathology more-or-less prevents reproduction), the carriers of accumulated deleterious mutations ('mutants') - probably both between and also within populations, have the highest fitness, on average. 

Indeed, in the modern world, natural selection actually filters-out undamaged genomes - since the people with the least damaged genomes are least likely to have offspring.

The best genetic specimens have sub-replacement fertility - the (ever fewer) least damaged genomes are being actively eliminated by reproductive choices: this applies especially to women more than men. 

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The above is why things are happening so very fast - e.g. why general intelligence is declining so rapidly (as revealed by simple reaction time slowing).

What is now needed is to gather more data to measure the long term rate of mutation accumulation.

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Reference: http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/so-you-think-you-are-in-favour-of.html

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I was talking with Michael A Woodley yesterday, and he told me of yet more research evidence in the pipeline to support our hypothesis that modern men are suffering from more than a century's worth of mutation accumulation.

This follows-up on our work of three years ago when we discovered that simple reaction times had slowed substantially since they were first measured in the late 1800s - and that this indicated that general intelligence must therefore also have declined substantially over that period.

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=reaction+times

This decline could partly be accounted for by the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility but this mechanism alone was insufficient to account for the magnitude of the reduction in intelligence.

We hypothesized that mutation accumulation might be the other main cause. This is almost certain to have been happening for about 150 years, as child mortality rates have declined from historical levels of a half or more to just a few percent. Hence the primary mechanism for purging the gene pool of spontaneously-occurring mutations - of which there are probably many in each generation - has been all-but eliminated.

Early indications were that this was indeed the case:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mutation+accumulation

Michael has now unearthed confirmatory evidence of mutation accumulation using a completely different measure and in an independent population (paper prepared for submission, but still confidential).

It is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that we have been, for several generations, living in what WD Hamilton (in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2) called the Planetary Hospital - in other words, a world in which almost everyone is suffering from significant genetic damage, and an increasing proportion of the population are suffering from genetic disease.

This raises the possibility that some or much of the social pathology in The West, including the general mainstream attitudes to this social pathology, may be attributable - in part, at least - to the accumulation of endemic genetic damage.

Is this plausible? Against it is the greatly increased Western life expectancy; but in favour of it is the ever reducing fertility - which mostly reflects an ever reducing desire for people (especially women) to have children - with fertility rates well below replacement levels despite unprecedented prosperity. And biological fitness is about reproductive success, not life expectancy.

But superficially, aside from a possible increase in 'autistic spectrum' disorders, there is no obvious epidemic of innate genetic disease among the native Western population. However, there is evidence of behavioural maladaptiveness - behavioural change which would (under ancestral conditions) lead to reduced reproductive success.

The subtlest and most easily-damaged human traits are social and sexual behaviour; and here there are very obvious changes which would tend to be net maladaptive. These might include a reduction in average self-preservation, bravery and ability to deploy violence among men to the extent of a near-suicidal passivity in the face of danger and indifference to the prospect of genetic extinction.

And among women an indifference to having children, rearing children; and the embrace of fashions which signal (according to innate signalling mechanism) sexual promiscuity and the presence of disease (eg deliberate, usually asymmetrical skin lesioning by piercing and tattoos - which mimics pathology).

In terms of sexuality, as well as the widespread embrace of non-reproductive sex in many manifestations, what is perhaps even more striking is the bland social indifference to this.

Indeed, what is most distinctive of all is an inversion of mainstream attitudes concerning sexual pathologies (by 'sexual pathologies' are meant those sexual practices which biologically impair net reproductive success). For perhaps the first time in human history, we are approaching the situation in which non-reproductive sexual practices are becoming the officially-sanctioned 'norm'.

The fact that traditional religion is an effective antidote to these trends indicates that biology is not the whole story by any means - and the abandonment of religion must bear a great deal of responsibility.

However, the abandonment of Christianity in the West may, to some extent, have been driven or more likely facilitated by changes in disposition (in attitudes, motivation etc) that are themselves a consequence of (mostly) sub-clinical genetic pathologies (ie. mostly-subtle impairments to social and sexual behaviours) due to mutation accumulation.

So, the current scenario - unrestrained as it is by the compensatory wisdom of traditional religion - increasingly resembles Hamilton's Planetary Hospital with more-or-less sick people in a majority; to the point of generating an inverted ethic in which sickness is seen as not just normal but good: a world of sick people (in effect) trying to induce as many others as possible to share their sickness (presumably so the sick will not be relatively disadvantaged).

Of course, this situation cannot long persist; not least because the sick need healthy people to look after them. But in the meantime, we have an extraordinary situation of the (indirectly) suicidal policy of promoting sickness.

This is probably unique in world history, because never before have child mortality rates been so low for so long; and never before has mutation accumulation been able to become so advanced - due to the soft, comfortable, prosperous life bequeathed to us by our recent ancestors.

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Note added: According to WD Hamilton, when someone has a large accumulation of deleterious mutations, this will typically reduce the desire to reproduce. This impaired libido will presumably be partly from feeling ill and lacking energy; but also, and importantly, probably as a built-in, evolved, species-benefiting trait which is actually designed to reduce the mutation load in the relevant gene pool. In effect, the individual sacrifices his own reproduction for the benefit of his genetic relatives or group (indeed, this trait may be necessary for the evolution of complex brained species, such as humans, where mutations have exceptionally large scope for causing significant functional damage). This tendency to 'reproductive suicide' of the unfit would normally be a beneficial trait; however, when there is a heavy mutation load spread through the whole population, then this trait will lead to population reduction and eventual extinction; since too many individuals opt not to reproduce.

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It has been a fascinating, and I must admit horrifying, three-and-a-bit years since Michael Woodley and I first discovered the first objective evidence that there has been a very substantial decline in general intelligence ('g') over the past two hundred years - the evidence was posted on this blog just a few hours after we discovered it:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/convincing-objective-and-direct.html

Since then, Michael has taken the lead in replicating this finding in multiple other forms of data, and in a variety of paradigms; and learning more about the magnitude of change and its timescale. His industry has been astonishing!  

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We currently believe that general intelligence has declined by approximately two standard deviations (which is approximately 30 IQ points) since 1800 - that is, over about 8 generations

(Note added - I now regard 2 SD as overstating it, also that an SD is not of fixed size over generations. More correct would be to say intelligence has declined since 1800 by more-than-one modern SD.).

Such a decline is astonishing - at first sight. But its magnitude has been obscured by social and medical changes so that we underestimate intelligence in 1800 and over-estimate intelligence now.

On the other hand, magnitude and rapidity of decline in world class geniuses in the West (and of major innovations) does imply a decline of intelligence of at least 2 SDs - so from that perspective the rate and size of decline is pretty much as-expected.

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Two hundred years ago, and for many decades afterwards, performance of the population in a wide range of tasks was substantially impaired by things like malnutrition and high rates of serious endemic infectious diseases. On any particular day, many or most people would have been ill, and their ability to do skilled activities (including examinations - or IQ tests, if they had been in existence) was significantly impaired.

Furthermore, two hundred years ago there was much less information around, and people had to think things through for themselves.

However, general intelligence is buffered against environmental change - it is hardly affected by disease, or even malnutrition - until these are of such severity as to result in death (under pre-modern conditions).

So even very sick and/or malnourished populations, who may be living in simple cultures at a subsistence level, or under conditions of multi-generational malnutrition and near starvation, may have high g - and this will become obvious in terms of high performance as soon as their environment becomes more favourable (for example the migrant Norsemen and the Chinese).

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Wind-forward to today, and the general health and nutrition are much improved; and in a thousand ways it is easier for people to give a falsely high impression of their ability by deploying technology and 'parroting' the hard-won knowledge of other people. This does not represent g-driven intelligence, but a multitude of specialized, task-specific intelligences.

To caricature,  in 1800, the average Man (when we was not impaired by illness) had a very deep kind of abstract reasoning and problem solving ability which was spontaneous and almost independent of education - his intelligence rose-up powerfully and unstoppably from below, rather like a geyser.

By contrast, Modern Man has a much weaker subterranean spring of intelligence and instead a 'mosaic' of separate and trained abilities, superficially 'studded' onto him by culture and education.

Modern Man has relatively very poor abstract reasoning and problem solving abilities; but can be trained to learn and can quote (or parrot) the reasons and solutions across a wide range of things - but without understanding what he is saying.

(And, indeed, without even knowing that he does not understand - since he equates 'knowing the right answers' with intelligence.)

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Michael and I immediately recognized that the rate of change in intelligence that we were observing was too fast to be accounted for my natural selection favouring lower intelligence; although this does have a significant role.

We soon began to recognize that the primary mechanism was likely to be mutation accumulation due to the decline in child mortality rates from more than half to about one percent - child mortality having, through human history, served as the main (but not only) selective 'sieve' to remove the spontaneous fitness-reducing mutations which occur with every generation.

We also discovered the biological concept of 'mutational meltdown' - which sometimes leads to the extinction of a species, especially when combined with a reducing population: mutational damage accumulates so fast in a population that organisms cease to reproduce and become extinct.

Michael has gone on to confirm the plausibility of this mechanism of mutation accumulation in rapidly reducing general intelligence, and to make the first steps in quantifying it.

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But our story which had begun with declining general intelligence then began to take on a much larger scope.

Because if mutation accumulation was the main mechanism for declining intelligence, then this had implications for the total fitness, indeed the viability, of the human organism.

General intelligence can be regarded as an index of reproductive potential or 'fitness', because high g depend upon a highly efficient brain, which depends on multiple genes coding for multiple and complexly-interacting brain systems. Any randomly occurring mutation has a high probability of impairing brain efficiency, so intelligence will be expected to decline incrementally with accumulating mutations.

So, declining g due to mutation accumulation only represents the tip of an iceberg of genetic damage to the fitness of an organism, or a population of organisms.

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In a sense, the reduction of intelligence may be one of the lesser concerns about this world of what looks increasingly like a mutational meltdown. Because mutations will also damage what might be termed the 'basic instincts' of the population or species.

In particular, mutation accumulation will be expected to affect social and sexual instincts of the kind we used to call 'common sense' and 'human nature'.

So, common sense could be considered the normal, standard behaviours which enabled humans to function in groups, and to survive; while sexual instincts refer to the basic sexual orientation and attraction of humans; and the suite of adaptations that lead to 'pair bonding', fertile matings, raising of offspring etc.

These basic instincts used to be taken for granted; but in fact they are highly complex adaptations, and represent the product of multiple generations of natural selection. Indeed, social and sexual instincts are perhaps the most sensitive of all human traits to damage of any kind - it is change in social and sexual behaviour which is most sensitive to any form of disease or disorder affecting the brain.

This applies to genetic and chromosomal disease, which always show-up in social and sexual differences; but also to trauma. For instance the residual effect of a stroke is much more evident in terms of subtle psychological changes to social and sexual behaviour (personality) than in terms of physical function. And, even small amounts of many drugs - such as alcohol; or hormones - such as testosterone or oestrogen; will observably change, and derange, social and sexual behaviour.

*

In conclusion, since there has been considerable mutation accumulation over the past two hundred years - enough to cause a very large reduction in general intelligence - this must also have caused considerable damage to human social and sexual adaptations.

Therefore, both common sense and sexual instincts are impaired in modern Man.

Our basic instincts have been damaged.

*

Once that is realized as being necessarily entailed, then the evidence for such impairment is all around us.

The most fundamental measure is fitness, i.e. reproductive potential - and it is probably the most remarkable fact about modernity that it leads to impaired reproductive success - indeed to below-replacement fertility.

The 'demographic transition', interpreted as plain biology, is therefore strong prima facie evidence of mutation accumulation; indeed it points to incipient mutational meltdown, since the (age-adjusted) post-industrial Western population has been declining for several decades.

Mutation accumulation would also be likely to lead to the lack of common sense, the lack of basic self-preservation, the lack of what would be expected as normal and adaptive social behaviours that are so striking a feature of the West.

And, even more significantly, the lack of any concern about this lack of common sense - damage to social mechanisms has been so profound that the Western population has lost the ability to notice or feel that there is damage - that our situation is pathological.

Indeed, the obvious pathology resulting from damaged instincts is vehemently denied - and to point it out is punished. This is exactly what would be expected when the lunatics have taken-over the asylum, when disease is endemic. Disease is the new health.

Look around. We live in a profoundly weird world socio-sexual , yet there is near zero response to the fact - just a kind of bland, bewildered, vague approval that socio-sexual change means 'progress'.

*

The same applies to sexual instincts. What is striking is not so much the high levels of disordered sexual behaviour; but the widespread loss of the ability to notice and feel that sexual behaviour is disordered.

Past generations did not need to depend on education and were immune to propaganda when it came to sexual instincts - but modern attitudes reveal that these basic instincts have been severely damaged - so that sexual attraction, evaluations, and motivations are all - very generally - disordered.

The Western populations have suffered such extremity of damage to their evolved human nature, that they have lost even the innate sense that there was any such things as human nature to begin with.

To be in the situation of arguing about the necessity of 'common sense', or the reality of sexual instincts and other attributes of human nature, is itself strong evidence that human nature has been substantially destroyed - as would be entailed by two centuries of mutation accumulation.

*

And more of the same is to be expected - because it is not clear that anything substantive could be done about this problem except over a multi-generational timescale - even if there were an understanding that there is a problem, and any motivation to do anything about it; neither of which is the case.

**

Some extra reading and references:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mutation

*
Sexual selection is usually a more proximate and often more rapid and powerful mechanism of natural selection than selection based on differential survival - because animals excluded from mating, or whose matings do not lead to viable offspring, have their genetic contribution cut short immediately - in the same generation.

Adverse sexual selection is reproductive death: genetic death.

Assortative mating is a mechanism of sexual selection in which similar females mate with similar males - similar in terms of some aspect of their phenotype such as 'beauty', status, or an ability such as intelligence - these aspects of phenotype being significantly correlated with genetic differences.

Thus the 'fittest' (those having highest reproductive potential and - through most of human history - the lowest deleterious mutation loads) will pair with the fittest, and vice versa. 

*

When humans are producing a several-fold surplus of offspring, natural selection needs to have mechanisms by which as high a proportion as possible of the following generation are on average parented by those carrying the minimum load of deleterious mutations - and this requires that those carrying the greatest mutation load be mostly prevented from producing sexually mature offspring (I say 'mostly' because by chance some small proportion offspring of the population of those with highest mutation loads will - by chance - be low in mutations).

*

In assortative mating, then, a minority of the population who are the most 'attractive' and fittest males and females will pair-off and have (on average) a large number of (mostly) fit children (without accumulation of mutations) - while the majority of the population who are least attractive, the least fit, and the heaviest mutation-load bearers will be left-over.

This population majority of left-over males and females may not have a sexual partner (reproductive death), or the females may have a share in mating with the minority of high fitness males, or else a male and a female pair who are both low attractiveness/ low fitness/ heavy mutation load will mate - but have a very low (but not zero) probability of raising offspring to viable sexual maturity.

(The effective of sexual selection is usually greatest on the males; with a higher proportion of males than females having zero matings, zero long term sexual partners, zero viable offspring. Thus, it is one function of the male sex to be the main way in which new mutations are purged from the population.) 

Therefore, assortative mating of this type - with 'the fittest' parenting almost all of the next generations offspring - has the potential, in combination with normal natural selection based on survival, to (on average) purge all newly occurred mutations from a population with each generation; so each new generation can - in effect - start afresh with a minimal mutational load.

*

Reflecting on the above scenario in light of human society in the developed nations over the past century plus - it can be seen that the effects of the industrial revolution has been to put assortative mating into reverse; and not merely to fail to purge all new mutations from a population with each generation - but actually to amplify the proportion of new mutations in a population with each generation.

This happens by a combination of chosen sub-replacement fertility among the fittest (instead of, as has been usual in human history, the fittest parenting almost-all the next generation); with the least-fit who carry the heaviest mutational load parenting most of the next generation (instead of almost none of them). 

Furthermore, instead of a system which over-produces offspring who are then selected for optimum fitness; we now have a system which under-produces offspring - so there is no possibility of ordinary natural selection or sexual selection or any combination of the two being able to purge the new mutations from each new generation!

*

In such a scenario it is easy to understand how a fitness-sensitive trait such as intelligence (as objectively measured by reaction time) has declined so much and so rapidly over the past century plus.

*

The effect of failing to purge newly occurring mutations with each generation is that mutations accumulate and overwhelm that particular lineage with random genetic damage; each new generation will have more genetic damage and lower fitness than the previous generation; and after a number of generations, that particular lineage will lose fitness completely and become extinct. 
*

Note: The above idea concerning the vital role of assortative mating in purging of mutation accumulation is substantially derived from my conversations with Michael A Woodley.

*

Note added 18 September 2014

In addition to the problem of mutation accumulation by relaxation of selection, when a population has begun shrinking, as is the case for the native populations of all Western and developed nations, there is an increasing danger of extinction due to 'mutational meltdown' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown) .

The unusual twist with modern humans is that the populations have begun falling due to chosen sub-replacement fertility, and before mutation accumulation has reached a level sufficient to prevent fertility. This will probably have accelerated the severity of mutation accumulation, and increased the risk of mutational meltdown.
*

*

To reiterate; I am against eugenics, and I am against mainstream anti-eugenics.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/why-eugenics-is-bad-and-anti-eugenics.html

What I favour is realism. The reality of human dysgenics - the generation upon generation decline of desirable traits, due to an accumulation of genetic damage - is real; and seems to be a much larger problem than most advocates of eugenics allow.

Indeed, dysgenics is such a big problem, that its solution by deliberate human planning and artificial selection is almost impossible to contemplate - so harsh would be the requisite regime.

However, 'Nature' has no scruples on these matters.

*

Intelligence - when measured by an objective correlate such as simple reaction time - is a useful measure of dysgenics because 'general intelligence' or 'g' is an overall measure of biological fitness (this idea from Geoffrey Miller). 

Dygenics comes from at least three sources, the third being the most significant:

1. Differential fertility - the less intelligent individuals being more fertile than the more intelligent - the most intelligent actually having negative-fertility - averaging less than two offspring per couple.

2. Demographic change with mass migration of population - the less intelligent groups and nations being more fertile than the most intelligent - and migrating to occupy the territory of the more intelligent.

3. Accumulation of deleterious genetic mutations. New mutations - nearly all of them damaging - probably occur at a rate of more than more per generation, and (since intelligence is a fitness measure) probably are higher than this among the less intelligent - which is indeed a major reason why they are less intelligent.

*

Due to the massive decline in child mortality rates since the industrial revolution, and the massive international transfers of wealth, technology and medicine from the most to least developed nations the majority of babies that are born nowadays (and for the past several generations) will live to sexual maturity - survival of newborns is near 100 percent in developed countries, but even in the places with the worst child mortality rates, the child mortality rate is still low enough to allow massive rates of population growth.

*

How important is the decline in child mortality rates? Incredibly important.

On the one hand, the reduction in child mortality must be one of the greatest of all contributions to human happiness - since the death of even one child is a terrible and devastating thing - one of the very hardest to bear; and because the causes of child death include many things horrible in themselves such as starvation, disease, accidents and violence - the decline of which also represent an increase in happiness.

It is hard to exaggerate how historically-unprecedented is this modern world, where most children are expected to survive to maturity - and how profound are the biological consequences of this situation.

It seems that the human is an animal which has evolved in a situation where almost all children who are born will die without reproducing - mostly during childhood; and where the next generation is produced by only a small minority of the present generation.

(Michael A Woodley is working on assembling this argument and documenting it in detail.)

*

When we consider Man through most of history, we should be thinking of a species which is:

1. Highly likely to generate and accumulate fitness-reducing mutations, and

2. Has dealt with this problem by reproducing only from a small minority of the fittest individuals - the majority of historical humans will have averaged zero surviving offspring.

*

This is termed mutation-selection balance

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/ma-woodleys-treadmill-metaphor-to.html

and it makes a big difference to the human condition where, quantitatively, this balance lies.

*

In a nutshell, in humans very high rates of child mortality have historically functioned to filter-out damaging mutations which otherwise will accumulate rapidly, generation upon generation, to damage fitness - and this accumulation of mutational damage can be measured in substantially slowing simple reaction times - and (it would be predicted) in other objective measures of fitness.   

*

Except for WD Hamilton, eugenicists have tended to neglect this problem of mutation accumulation - presumably because they assumed that it was a small problem.

The assumption of eugenicists seemed to be that if the bottom few percent of the population (maybe habitual criminals or the significantly handicapped or whatever) were prevented from (or at least discouraged from) breeding, then this would be sufficient to maintain the quality of the human genome.

A few percent is one thing; but what if it was three-quarters of the population, or four fifths, or five sixths of the human population who had to be prevented from reproducing?

Because that sort of proportion - a large majority of people prevented from having children (almost certainly including you and me) - seems most likely from the biological perspective of preventing mutation accumulation.

*

In other words, it seems probable that throughout most of human history, natural selection maintained human genetic quality and prevented rapid dysgenic collapse mostly by very high (near total) child mortality rates - and by, in effect, only allowing a small minority of humans to raise almost all the children.

When this stopped, mutation accumulation started: and on theoretical grounds mutation accumulations is likely to lead to very rapid decline in average (and peak) human fitness, with very significantly deleterious effects on all aspects of human functioning.     

*

This is a horrible vision of human history - but it is likely to be what happened; yet for a human society to accomplish the same by deliberate implementation of 'rational planning' is beyond-horrible - it would necessarily be a profoundly monstrous society that implemented a policy which either forbade the mass majority of people from having children, or slaughtered them. 

*

Therefore, I think that rapid, generation upon generation, dysgenic decline is probably both inevitable and also insoluble by human agency - something we should acknowledge and work around as best we can - but not something that can be, or indeed should be, prevented.

In such circumstances, the 'reasonable' prescriptions of 'sensible' eugenicists are just a joke.And the quibbles of those who deny the scale of dysgenic change will simply be swept away by waves of catastrophes.

*

This is a tragic situation; and it is a consequence of a tragic historical situation - where a majority of humans probably experienced the death of all their children before adulthood.

We have been living in an unprecedented era of very low child mortality, and this cannot continue because its continuation will be made impossible by the decline in human capability caused by reducing fitness caused by mutation accumulation - itself caused by the era of very low child mortality.

My own response to this, once the truth began to sink in; is in fact religious: to value and be thankful for my good fortune day-by-day - and to recognize that the Christian perspective of past generations was much tougher and more realistic and also more joyful than our modern mainstream secular materialist Leftist ideology can sustain even despite our vastly greater peace, prosperity, comfort, convenience, and capability.

*

I recall that the medieval poets Chaucer, Langland and the author of Gawain were living through the Black Death, yet virtually never even mention this horrific plague which killed fully a half of English people in just a couple of decades (it took the population about 300 years to recover).

The vast and genial knowledge and humour of Chaucer; the intense spirituality and all-seeing eye of Langland; the nobility and morality of the Gawain poet - all these come from a context of wholesale death from a horrible and incomprehensible disease.

Clearly their faith enabled them to deal with extremely harsh circumstances with courage and without despair - to exemplify love and hope, and to accomplish works of the highest calibre.

That is what we will need.

*

Reconceptualizing natural selection as primarily concerned with counteracting entropy (e.g. mutation accumulation)

Michael A Woodley and I have developed a new conceptualization of the fundamental process of natural selection. It draws on diverse perspectives such as a couple of years of conversations about the cause of decline in intelligence (g) since Victorian times (especially the importance of mutation accumulation due to the massive decline in child mortality rates - http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mutation), the work of WD Hamilton on the evolution of sexes, Graham Cairns-Smith's work on the origins of life, an old paper of mine on 'endogenous parasitism', recent discussion on the implications of the 'mouse utopia' experiment and more.  



*

The essence of the idea is that replication is not the main problem for living entities, indeed replication can be taken for granted.

The big problem for living entities is entropy; the main answer to entropy is natural selection, and the main anti-entropic mechanism of natural selection is massive overproduction of offspring with various means of selectively culling the most entropically-damaged offspring.

In terms of genetics; this could be understood in terms of saying that something like mutation-selection balance is the essence of natural selection

*

On Graham Cairns-Smith's conception of life, natural selection is built-into reality – NS is simply a part of the world – certainly part of chemistry (e.g. crystal propagation), probably physics too. In evolutionary terms, there is no dividing line between organic and inorganic, alive and dead.

Therefore, Life (in the sense of replicating entities subject to natural selection) is to be found pretty-much everywhere – not just in biology.

*

So the main problem for a living entity is not to make copies of itself, replication can be 'taken for granted' as a kind of universal phenomenon, but the main problem is to counteract entropy.

Entropy, that is to say random damage to replicating entities from many sources and copying errors during replication, is inevitable. Indeed, entropy will tend to degrade any identifiable structure, and any form of organization. Over time, the tendency is for all structure and organization to be returned to randomness.

This means that all lasting structures and all types of organization must overcome entropic degradation.

So, any actually-observable entity has already solved the problem of entropy to the extent that it is indeed observable! Any structured or organized thing which exists has solved the problem of entropy such that it at least came into existence, was sustained long enough to be observable by us, and - unless it is unique - has some mechanism for making more-of-itself: for replicating.

*

Furthermore, entropy affects all replication - so there are errors in replication that enter in the transmission of information between parent and offspring.

In a nutshell, this means that there is an unavoidable, intrinsic and cumulative entropic tendency for the fitness of any naturally selected lineage to decline to zero - to extinction, to non-life.

An example of this would be the tendency for mutations to occur in each parent organism, to be transmitted from parent to offspring - with new mutations occurring during the replication process, and for such mutations to accumulate generation upon generation until extinction.

Indeed this is not just additive accumulation, but there is a tendency towards a positive feedback cycle, in which mutations damage functionality which leads to more and additional, and uncorrected mutations.

So, the suggestion is that the fundamental problem for any entity is not replication, but combating entropy.

*

One implication is that the basic function of a molecule like DNA is not a matter of achieving replication - because replication would already have been happening, and can be taken for granted; DNA (and its evolution) is primarily about a mechanism of more-accurate/ less error-full replication.

So, the main question for living things is: how is entropy controlled?

And the main answer is: Natural Selection.

The context of Natural Selection (NS) is thus massive over-production of offspring (and spores, seeds, ova, sperm etc), and the strongly-selective reproductive-culling of offspring to eliminate accumulated entropic damage (such as mutations).

Thousands or millions of offspring (etc) may be generated, and selectively eliminated.

*

So, the context of the intrinsic decline of fitness in all replicating entities means that the main thrust of evolution by natural selection is simply to maintain fitness - to prevent extinction from intrinsic entropic tendencies - and not to improve fitness, nor to evolve adaptations.

So, this is a Red Queen phenomenon (in which there is running fast just to stay in the same place). Natural selection is necessary to maintain fitness in the face of the entropic tendency for fitness to disappear.

In other words, the phenomenon described as mutation-selection balance is not a specific, contingent, occasional circumstance: but the normal and indeed primary nature of natural selection as it applies to a genetic organism.

The genetics of NS is not primarily about evolving new genes but primarily about preserving from (entropic) destruction what are already-successful genes. It is about preventing the intrinsic tendency towards corruption/ degradation of an already- known-to-be-successful genetic recipe.

*

In sum, NS happens in what are ‘already fit’, already replicating, massively-over-reproducing, entities. Lacking which, fitness inevitably regresses to zero.

So – the main thrust of evolution (NS) is to maintain fitness. (A Red Queen sort of thing.)

The usual method for combating entropic damage is massive overproduction of offspring, and therefore Disposable Offspring.

The usual, background situation was that replication was not a problem, and sufficient offspring survival could be taken for granted in the immediate short –term – the problem was the distal long term of a few generations ahead at the point when the tendency was for mutation accumulation to destroy fitness.

*

Short term fitness, over the next few generations, was not the major problem - since there was such over-production of offspring; therefore long-term fitness beyond the next few generations is THE major problem.

Therefore, because in this conceptualization, natural selection implicitly looks-forward several generations,  so this is not about the single organism and its fitness but is instead a 'group-ish theory' kind of selection process.

*

With such a concept, it is trivially easy for individuals to ‘sacrifice’ their own fitness to some degree, or even the fitness of the immediate next generation or two - when the longer term fitness of the group of descendants is significantly enhanced. (This is a consequence of short-term replication being 'taken for granted' due to the context of massive over-production of offspring.

There is a very low cost to ‘adaptations’ which somewhat lower individual fitness if there is a fitness advantage in the next few generations – because the next few generations are almost guaranteed – they are not the big problem. The big problem is entropy, hence mutation accumulation – and that takes a few generations.

A pay-off two or three generations down the line is therefore almost-directly selected for, in the sense that the short term costs are trivial in the context of massive overproduction and a world of replication-not-a-problem.

*

Sexual reproduction was, by this account, relatively easy to evolve; because it enabled better control of entropy (see the work of WD Hamilton - but replacing/ adding to 'parasites' with spontaneously occurring entropic damage), e.g. the purging of mutations, the purifying of the gene pool of second, third etc –generations of offspring.

What gets naturally selected is therefore fitness down-the-line.

In a sense, the proximate locus of natural selection is a few generations ahead; specifically the future generations whose fitness would have declined to zero absent the operations of natural selection.

(This is different from the main emphasis of the conceptualization of mainstream selfish gene theory - which only very seldom allows for the possibility of long-term 'group' fitness advantage overcoming a significant short-term fitness disadvantages. In our view the short-term disadvantages are trivial in effect in a context of 'replication taken for granted' and the usual situation of massive overproduction of offspring.)

*

The new conceptualization of NS implies that ‘competition’ with other living things is mainly about preventing the accumulation of entropic damage. Competition with other living things, including other members of the same species, is primarily about the purging, purifying or culling of a large majority of offspring - as the primary method for removing what would otherwise be fitness, lethal accumulations of mutations.

*

Note added 11 Sep 2014:

New concept of Natural Selection: RES
1. Replication
2. Entropy
3. Selection

1. Replication is taken as given, 2. entropy tends to degrade structures and organization to stop replication (extinction of lineage), 3. natural selection controls the entropy - lineage is maintained.

By contrast -

Traditional concept of Natural Selection: ERS
1. Entropy
2. Replication
3. Selection

1. Entropy generates variants 2. some of which replicate, and 3. some of these undergo natural selection to expand and create a lineage.

*
Who is in control of human destiny: God, or biology?

In other words, if post-industrial revolution mutation accumulation (aided by the inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility) will end global industrial civilization - is this ultimately a product of undirected natural selection, or is it part of divine destiny?

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mutation+accumulation+

The answer is that it is part of divine destiny.

Biology is necessarily incomplete (it leaves out most of reality in its explanations), however we should also recognize that it does have some significant predictive validity. We cannot just forget about biology! Just that it only explains imperfectly a narrowish range of things.

So, how does the biological process of mutation accumulation fit into God's plan?

There are various possible way - but the simplest is probably that it is a Tower of Babel phenomenon: God is constraining Man's power, because He knows that Man will very probably misuse excessive power.

If Man had better used the power and capability generated since the industrial revolution (used prosperity for Christian goals), then perhaps things would have worked-out differently in ways we cannot comprehend - through non-biological factors, presumably,

However, we have misused our power - we have used power, efficiency, capability, prosperity, the abolition of absolute poverty etc - to deny God and adopt an anti-religion of moral inversion.

Clearly Man is now extremely corrupt, and will certainly abuse all his power, including any extra power he might gain - so Man must be, will be, stripped of power.

Mutation accumulation is a mechanism by which the Tower will be destroyed before any kind of ultimate spiritual catastrophe can occur (one mechanism among several).

I am not saying that the above is the correct explanation - probably it is not; but I offer it as the kind of explanation which includes both biology and Christianity.

*

*

In addition to the problem of mutation accumulation by relaxation of selection, when a population has begun shrinking, as is the case for the native populations of all Western and developed nations, there is an increasing danger of extinction due to 'mutational meltdown' - when deleterious mutations accumulate so rapidly that they overwhelm a population before it can evolve an escape. 

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutational_meltdown) .

Mutational meltdown was first described as a threat for small populations of asexual organisms; later this was widened to sexual organisms and then to large populations - so mutational meltdown has gone from being a specific case to probably a universal possibility.

The unusual twist with modern humans is that populations have begun falling due to chosen sub-replacement fertility, and before mutation accumulation has reached a level sufficient biologically to suppress fertility. In other words psychological factors have anticipated biological factors - and presumably both psychological and biological population decline will combine to increase the degree of reduced fitness resulting from mutation accumulation.

This will probably have increased the risk of mutational meltdown, and of extinction. 
*

*
People, all of us really, are prone to talk of ideology as a cause; and those of us who recognize the decline of the West are prone to blame it on Leftism (and for Christians, secular Leftism) - but this is only proximately true.

Leftism is indeed the mechanism by which decline is - as it were - implemented; but that is not where the drive for decline comes from - in other words, Leftism is not the ultimate cause, it a means to the end of decline.

So where does the decline originate? There are (at least) two levels of answer - depending on where you locate ultimate causes. The candidates are biology and religion.

*

For secular people, the ultimate cause must be biology, since biology is the ultimate cause for social phenomena in a secular explanatory model - in other words, the West is declining  due to natural selection (since that is the ultimate explanation for everything in biology - or, at least, matters related to change, adaptation etc.).

So what kind of biological change might explain the decline of the West?

The most usual explanation is related to change in selection pressure under conditions of modernity (since the Industrial revolution) - in a nutshell that modern conditions select for lower intelligence, short-termist time horizons, parasitic/ exploitative behaviour and so on.

This would mean that the West was still adaptive, biological fitness (reproductive capability) is still the same (or improving) - we are still getting better at doing stuff; but now the West (and its people) is becoming good at something different from what it used to be good at.

*

But for me the striking factor of the collapse of the West is not that it rewards the wrong people (wrong from the point of view of sustaining and growing the West) - but that it is just plain maladaptive.

It is not that we solve problems in a different way, but that we don't solve problems.

In particular we don't marry and stay married - we don't even want to marry; we don't have children - we don't even want to have children; we are so utterly terrified of death we have nothing to say about it, nor even for the function of old age.

In other words, it seems to me that the West is broken rather than better at something different - that what we are seeing is an all-round decline in fitness.

The reason for this would probably be mutation accumulation due to the 'relaxation' of natural selection. Humans used to undergo harsh selection at each generation with damaging gene mutations filtered-out; because that only a minority of the 'fittest' children would survive to adulthood, and in adulthood only the 'fittest' minority would provide the majority of the surviving offspring ('fittest' meaning - having the fewest deleterious mutations).

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mutation+accumulation

*

This scenario of decline driven by mutation accumulation would mean that as individuals, and therefore en masse as groups and nations and the world, people fail to understand what is going on and fail to make the right decisions and fail to take the right action: humans have become worse at solving problems. And this will continue to deteriorate.

But, the big question for me is whether this biological explanation suffices to explain the collapse in will - Modern Man is distinguished by his having 'given up'. He does not seem to want to survive, or to reproduce, or to know what is really going on, or really to solve real problems.

For me, a big question is whether this situation can be explained along the lines of Mouse Utopia

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mouse+utopia

in which modern people are so genetically damaged that we, like the mice in Phase D and the Terminal Phase, are simply doomed by our indifference to everything except our own momentary comfort and pleasure and our failure to reproduce - or whether the malaise is primarily spiritual.

*

As a Christian, my ultimate explanatory model is religious - and related to the destiny of earth; and by this account (and in the opinion of people whose spiritual insight I respect) - we are in the End Times or Latter Days; and that are hope-less maladaptiveness is because we are trying (and failing) to live without God.

(The duration of the End Times is not known - the Bible states it cannot be known (not even Jesus Christ knows this) - and there is always the possibility of human choice and action delaying the End - and even effecting a temporary and/ or local reversal. Nonetheless, once the final phase has started, as it has, then it will sooner or later run to completion.)

So, I tend to think that even if the worst predictions of Mouse Utopia are true, and this is what we are living through - IF we were spiritually healthy, if we (as a society, and as individuals) turned back to God, then we would not be in such a bad state - because we would be pointing in the right direction.

We would not just have given up in a profound existential despair, but we would still be trying and striving, still doing our best, still learning from experience. And, no doubt, much could be done - problems could be ameliorated rather than as (at present) exacerbated; we could, for example, do nothing instead of always making things worse.

So, I would regard the spiritual, 'supernatural', religious explanation for the decline of the West as the deepest and truest - although I think it is very probably interacting with biological change.

*

*

I have tended to assume that common sense is something which pretty much everybody has - excepting the intellectual elite and psychotics - but which in our modern mass media has overlaid and overwhelmed.

But this is to take common sense for granted. Common sense is in fact a complex functional adaptation to (something like) 'survive and reproduce and raise offspring on earth', and complex adaptations can be lost. Indeed there is an inbuilt tendency to lose them.

Insofar as common sense is a gift of God; it can be lost by rejection of God. Insofar as common sense is a Good, it can be lost by subversion, inversion and the destruction of Good.

Insofar as common sense is a suite of evolved adaptations it can be destroyed by loss of adaptations - from mutational damage to the genes which make the structures which implement the common sense.

(All this on top of the fact that what was common sense in the ancestral evolutionary environment may be mis-matched to the modern environment and may function as common nonsense.)

*

So, until recently, I have assumed that when the mass media and the crazed, self-hating and suicidal structure of Leftism destroys itself or is destroyed, and brings down the material structure of modernity - we will 'at least' be left with common sense to help survival and rebuilding. Common sense and common experience - in a phrase I used.

But maybe I was being over-optimistic (!).

Common experience depends on intelligence, and average intelligence is falling so rapidly that it seems likely that people after the collapse will not able to learn from experience in the way that was normal through most of the past millennium or so: they will not be as quick nor as able to learn.

And if widespread and cumulatively-severe genetic damage from mutation accumulation is a major element in the decline of intelligence, as now seems to me (unfortunately) highly likely, then common sense will be much weakened and destroyed to a lesser or greater extent.

This seems inevitable as a consequence of accumulation of deleterious mutations which get worse with each generation, and which act like a shotgun blast against the genome - each 'pellet' smashing a gene, and the mass of pellets breaking functions here and there. Each new generation inherits the genetic damage and adds more damage.

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The key point here (as Michael A Woodley realized in our conversation yesterday^)  is that in mutation accumulation it is not only adaptations which are transmitted from the parent and inherited by offspring, but non-adaptations, broken adaptations, wrecked and useless remnants of adaptations.

Parents do not just transmit 'fitness' to their offspring, but also the accumulation of unfitness. Common sense is - or was - presumably, to some significant extent, a suite of interconnected and mutually-supportive adaptations supported by genes; and therefore damage to common sense may have a genetic cause, and will be heritable.

The 'nightmare scenario' would therefore be a human population which not only lacks the intelligence to sustain and operate complex modern civilization, but lacks the common sense to function even in simpler societies.

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The main message is that although common sense used to be near universal and something which could be taken for granted - and which would re-emerge in situations of crisis - this is much too complacent a view. We cannot just assume that the people who survive crisis or collapse and re-emerge from the rubble will be armed with the levels of intelligence and common sense which we take for granted from history. Common sense is vulnerable, at the biological level.

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(^Note: Michael Woodley's insight yesterday concerned the difference between on the one hand heredity of functional and fitness-enhancing adaptations, which has always been the focus of evolutionary theory, and the way that modernity has selected-for non-adaptation, for broken adaptations. And furthermore, damage, hence dysfunction, is not merely inherited but is added-to with each new generation - with each generational wave of new and un-purged mutational damage, with each failure to eliminate the cluster spontaneously occurring deleterious mutations. This is not a matter of offspring inheriting fitness from their parents, but inheriting 'anti-fitness'; and it is not only inherited - because offspring will differ from their parents in having novel and added and extra forms of heritable anti-fitness. In is not an adapted genome which is being selected-for, but a broken genome. In sum, modernity has not selected for a population who are 'adapted' to modern conditions; but for a population whose adaptations are being  destroyed, progressively and generation upon generation. Modernity has not selected for fitness, not even for a new kind of fitness - but modernity has selected for a lack of fitness - for the destruction of complex functional adaptations. And this loss of fitness, of adaptations, is objective and in principle measurable and quantifiable. Such a situation may be unique to human society in the modern world - where humans created an artificial environment which destroyed a critical mechanism for purging deleterious mutations from each generation, and therefore both allowed the survival off, and also positively selected in favour of, high-mutation-load humans who could not sustain that artificial environment which allowed them to survive and reproduce. Clearly the situation is not stable - is meta-stable as WD Hamilton said. We are, at present, in the lag phase when the inertia has allowed modernity to continue after the fundamental basis for its continuation has gone. The uniqueness of this situation, enabled by the truly massive effect the human species has had upon the environment for the selection of the human species during the past few centuries, could explain why the phenomenon has apparently not been previously noticed by biologists - not even the greatest ones. Nonetheless, this is a fundamental attribute of natural selection - http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-primacy-of-red-queen-or-what-does.html.)