Are Babies for Idiots? Maternal Urge Decreases in Women with Higher IQ

[GliderGuider]

86. I actually don't think that any amount of human preaching will get people to change their behavior.

Certainly not on anything as fundamental as having children. I tend to agree with the findings of American anthropologist Marvin Harris. His framework called "Cultural Materialism" views every human culture as having three layers: the infrastructure, which is our interface with our physical environment; the structure, all the organizations we put in place to operate the mechanics of culture; and the superstructure - the level of values, beliefs etc.

Harris made a key observation: in every culture he examined, cultural changes flowed probabilistically up from the infrastructure, not down from the superstructure. What that means is that our behavior is shaped most strongly by changes to our physical circumstances. It also means that if the infrastructure supports one type of behavior, any attempts to change the cultural belief and value systems to go against that behavior will have very little power. Beliefs and values acquire a lot of strength when they are in support of the required (aka socially approved) behavior, but have little when they oppose it.

Ask the hippies, the population activists, the climate activists, the ecological activists. To paraphrase, "Nothing is so weak as an idea whose time has not yet come."

So I don't think that any type or amount of preaching will change our behavior around kids unless/until we come to see overpopulation as a threat. We're not there yet, even though it's probably too late already. As the reaction to my posts clearly demonstrates.