My point is that Valenti goes out of her way to make sure her writing is extremely unlikely to be perceived that way, even by antifeminists.

I do have a question though… what writings have you read where the author sounded like a “whining perpetual victim?”

Thanks for the reply. Hasn’t it always been the case that the poor have more children than the well-off? And yet we’ve always muddled through somehow. One reason is poor does not equal stupid.

IQ is somewhat heritable. But it is possible for children to exceed their parents. Or fall below them.

@PartisanEntity

What are you talking about? What is “Middle East, where islamically speaking”? There are a whole bunch of different groups of people there, and these groups have different naming traditions than we do. I don’t think this statement is accurate.

And who are “‘westernised’ Arab or Muslim women who are hip”? Are they arab muslim immigrants to the West, arab muslims born in the west, white muslims who converted in the west, black muslims in the west, christian arabs, ba’hai arabs, etc you get the point.

Sorry to pick on you. I just like to squabble about inaccurately grouping people together, especially when it comes to westerners talking about muslims.

Feel free to clarify.

And you are quite right, they generally do not measure innate intelligence, but rather more specific things more like problem solving instead.

I can’t speak for other countries, like the USA, but here in Canada the majority of married couples under 35 now are choosing not to have children. There are exceptions to this and we do have high birth rates in some minority populations, particularly natives and some specific immigrant populations. Unfortunately this does result in relationship between education and reproduction.

I wasn’t even alluding to “college” educated people as you supposed when I said “educated”, but high school. In Canada the birthrate amongst people with high school and up is quite low. Below that level the birthrate is much higher. Because IQ is quite heritable, that is a scary thought to me.

What you describe is called “social Darwinism” and is the basis for the pro-eugenics arguments that were made in the early 20th century.

It is incorrect that “most” educated people choose not to have children.

People who do not choose to attend college are not all “stupid”. That’s a tad condescending.

When IQ tests are “renormed” occasionally, it is because over time, around the world, human IQs are getting higher generation by generation. As societies become more complex, the average member of society can score higher than previous generations. Our grandparents would have scored so low on our current renormed IQ tests that they would have been classified as below average. It is clear that IQ tests don’t measure “intelligence” in general, but a specific kind of intellligence.

We have nothing against people who have kids, and we love other people’s kids.

@Adam
Yes, that is unfortunate. Nevertheless, it’s the truth. People, many people, have accused us of being selfish. I have read quite a bit of literature suggesting that having fewer or no kids is actually one of the most environmentally responsible things you can do to care for the planet. In the whole “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” scheme of the environmental movement, Reduce is the most effective measure. We’ll see how much this planet can take of human consumption.

It is also kind of funny that most educated people these days choose not to have children. In fact there is a Darwinian problem here in that a significant amount of the human reproduction that is going on is amongst those people who are too stupid to figure out birth control. Since IQ is highly heritable this means that we are naturally selecting humans to become stupider over time.

Ironically IQ testing is always normalized on an on-going basis so that it averages out to 100, so most testing won’t even pick up this problem.

When Stephen Hawking was asked a few years ago why we hadn’t been contacted by more advanced civilizations, he responded by saying that he thought it was because when civilizations got just beyond our stage they destroyed themselves. Now that is funny and probably quite insightful!

I’m sorry for the personal question, but may I ask why? You seem like you’d be a great father, your opinions are sound and moderate, and the experience being a teacher would probably help. Honestly kind of reminds me of my father.