Oct 1, 2021 02:56 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 1, 2021 03:56 PM by C C.)
Whatever happened to the population bomb?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/whatever-happe...ation-bomb
EXCERPT: . . . The decline has been underway for some time in villages and small towns, where the sequence is much the same everywhere: First they lose their school, then the post office, gas station, and grocery store. Finally, a settlement is administratively amalgamated with its similarly fated neighbors.
You can see what is left behind without leaving your room by taking Google Street View tours of desolate mountain villages in Tohoku, the northern (and the poorest) part of Japan's largest island, where almost every third person is now over 65 years old. Or look at the forlorn places not far from Bucharest, Romania's capital, where all but a few young people have left for Western Europe and the TFR is below 1.4.
This process can be found even in certain parts of countries that are still growing, thanks to immigration. The United States is losing people across much of the Great Plains, Germany throughout most of the former German Democratic Republic, Spain in Castile and Léon and in Galicia. Shrinking population together with a higher average age erodes the tax base, raises infrastructure costs, and leads to social isolation, as settlements dwindle and die. It is all very depressing to contemplate.
Of course, in a truly long-range perspective this is hardly surprising. Ten thousand years ago there were perhaps just 5 million people on Earth—too few, it would have seemed, to become the dominant species. Now we are closing in on 8 billion, and the total may peak at more than 10 billion. We may start losing that global primacy sooner than we think, leaving more room for bacteria, birds, and bears... (MORE - missing details)
The Hidden Link Between “Genetic Nurture” and Educational Achievement
https://nautil.us/blog/the-hidden-link-b...chievement
EXCERPTS: . . . Take educational attainment, or how much schooling a person has (primary, secondary, etc). It’s a common metric used in social genomics, a field that looks at the relationship between genes and individual and societal outcomes. [..] There’s the raw computational power your brain has. Your personality (how conscientious are you?) As well as the myriad social, political, and cultural forces which buffet the choices you make in terms of when and if to obtain further education. Interestingly, the genes that shape how educated you eventually become don’t necessarily have to be passed on to you.
A new paper, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, highlights the fact that genes your parents didn’t transmit to you still matter—the phenomenon of “genetic nurture.” [...] The genetic nurture effect for years of education, they found, is about 50 percent of the value of direct genetic effects. ... Genetic nurture is clearly not a factor you can ignore.
How does it work? Some parents may have personalities that have them prioritizing the short-term over the long-term. Rather than investing in their offspring’s educational outcome, by investing in a college fund, say, they may prefer spending the money on vacations to Europe, which have a great deal of short-term utility. [...] The same is true in the converse situation, where parents make decisions that would increase the likelihood of their offspring going to college. This is a situation where the offspring may not have inherited the gene (or cluster of genes) that gives their parents the long-term vision, but they themselves benefit from that disposition.
This reality is missed out in classical studies, which look just at the correlation in characteristics between parents and offspring. Obviously parents and offspring can correlate in educational attainment due to factors unrelated to their genetic relationship, but the subtle aspect of genetic nurture is that the genetics of the parent strongly impact the non-genetic inputs into the outcome in the offspring. With modern genomics, we can actually look at which genetic copies are transmitted or not directly, rather than having to guess.
Arguably, given how educational attainment shapes important economic and social outcomes, understanding the forces that drive and impede how educated people become is one of the more important tasks societies should undertake... (MORE - missing details)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/whatever-happe...ation-bomb
EXCERPT: . . . The decline has been underway for some time in villages and small towns, where the sequence is much the same everywhere: First they lose their school, then the post office, gas station, and grocery store. Finally, a settlement is administratively amalgamated with its similarly fated neighbors.
You can see what is left behind without leaving your room by taking Google Street View tours of desolate mountain villages in Tohoku, the northern (and the poorest) part of Japan's largest island, where almost every third person is now over 65 years old. Or look at the forlorn places not far from Bucharest, Romania's capital, where all but a few young people have left for Western Europe and the TFR is below 1.4.
This process can be found even in certain parts of countries that are still growing, thanks to immigration. The United States is losing people across much of the Great Plains, Germany throughout most of the former German Democratic Republic, Spain in Castile and Léon and in Galicia. Shrinking population together with a higher average age erodes the tax base, raises infrastructure costs, and leads to social isolation, as settlements dwindle and die. It is all very depressing to contemplate.
Of course, in a truly long-range perspective this is hardly surprising. Ten thousand years ago there were perhaps just 5 million people on Earth—too few, it would have seemed, to become the dominant species. Now we are closing in on 8 billion, and the total may peak at more than 10 billion. We may start losing that global primacy sooner than we think, leaving more room for bacteria, birds, and bears... (MORE - missing details)
The Hidden Link Between “Genetic Nurture” and Educational Achievement
https://nautil.us/blog/the-hidden-link-b...chievement
EXCERPTS: . . . Take educational attainment, or how much schooling a person has (primary, secondary, etc). It’s a common metric used in social genomics, a field that looks at the relationship between genes and individual and societal outcomes. [..] There’s the raw computational power your brain has. Your personality (how conscientious are you?) As well as the myriad social, political, and cultural forces which buffet the choices you make in terms of when and if to obtain further education. Interestingly, the genes that shape how educated you eventually become don’t necessarily have to be passed on to you.
A new paper, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, highlights the fact that genes your parents didn’t transmit to you still matter—the phenomenon of “genetic nurture.” [...] The genetic nurture effect for years of education, they found, is about 50 percent of the value of direct genetic effects. ... Genetic nurture is clearly not a factor you can ignore.
How does it work? Some parents may have personalities that have them prioritizing the short-term over the long-term. Rather than investing in their offspring’s educational outcome, by investing in a college fund, say, they may prefer spending the money on vacations to Europe, which have a great deal of short-term utility. [...] The same is true in the converse situation, where parents make decisions that would increase the likelihood of their offspring going to college. This is a situation where the offspring may not have inherited the gene (or cluster of genes) that gives their parents the long-term vision, but they themselves benefit from that disposition.
This reality is missed out in classical studies, which look just at the correlation in characteristics between parents and offspring. Obviously parents and offspring can correlate in educational attainment due to factors unrelated to their genetic relationship, but the subtle aspect of genetic nurture is that the genetics of the parent strongly impact the non-genetic inputs into the outcome in the offspring. With modern genomics, we can actually look at which genetic copies are transmitted or not directly, rather than having to guess.
Arguably, given how educational attainment shapes important economic and social outcomes, understanding the forces that drive and impede how educated people become is one of the more important tasks societies should undertake... (MORE - missing details)