The merits of large families

[vorlon13]

I always wanted an older brother, but my parents wouldn't get me one of those either.

As a grown up, I sate my need by boinking older men.

[bennyboy]

It seems to me that there is an interesting dance between evolution and free will these days. So many educated or ambitious people choose not to have many children, but those children get more resources: private school vs. public school, maybe, better health care, or the general wisdom that comes from parents who understand the world with less superstition.

On the other hand, poor catholics are winning the DNA-majority war by pumping out broodlings every 12 months. So the chance that a given grandparent of a catholic family will have at least one or two grandchildren that are wildly successful is still pretty good. I mean, if I have 10 kids, and they each have 10 kids, that's 100 goddamned secondary offspring, where as if I have 2 kids, and they each have 2, that's just 4 rolls at the "success" dice.

In the end, I think the bigger family has to be the better evolutionary strategy, even if it leads to hardship and hard feelings among many of the offspring. But this is the educated liberal dilemma: you succeed today by removing yourself from that evolutionary process, and this condemns humanity in the future to an intelligence-diluted gene pool.

My view is this: educated or high-IQ people have an obligation to society to reproduce as much as possible.

[MTL]

It seems to me that there is an interesting dance between evolution and free will these days.  So many educated or ambitious people choose not to have many children, but those children get more resources: private school vs. public school, maybe, better health care, or the general wisdom that comes from parents who understand the world with less superstition.

On the other hand, poor catholics are winning the DNA-majority war by pumping out broodlings every 12 months.  So the chance that a given grandparent of a catholic family will have at least one or two grandchildren that are wildly successful is still pretty good.  I mean, if I have 10 kids, and they each have 10 kids, that's 100 goddamned secondary offspring, where as if I have 2 kids, and they each have 2, that's just 4 rolls at the "success" dice.

In the end, I think the bigger family has to be the better evolutionary strategy, even if it leads to hardship and hard feelings among many of the offspring.  But this is the educated liberal dilemma: you succeed today by removing yourself from that evolutionary process, and this condemns humanity in the future to an intelligence-diluted gene pool.

My view is this: educated or high-IQ people have an obligation to society to reproduce as much as possible.

Rent the movie "Idiocracy" starring Luke Wilson.

It's a shitty, shitty movie, but it speaks to that very phenomena and the effect it's having on America.

Watch the movie and tell me if it doesn't, sadly, pretty much hit the nail on the head about modern-day USA.

In the movie, Randy "Macho Man" Savage is voted President of the United States,
World Heavyweight Title Belt, and all,
and I thought it was a comment on George W. Bush being in office at that time,

....but if Trump gets in,
it will resonate even more.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I come from a family of seven children (6 boys, 1 girl). This is not a particularly large clutch as Irish farm families go. I had a gloriously happy boyhood, but I had two remarkable, amazing parents.

Family size has bugger all to do with happiness. Good parents make good kids.

And, for the record, Joe Kennedy was a career criminal, whose family respectability was paid for by bootlegging.

Boru