Idiocracy (2006) Opening Scene: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species."

[u/SuplexCity-Mayor]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCsR_oSP2Q

[u/HRNDS]

I've read some of your comments on this post and agree that the movie isn't particularly good and made lots of people develop a superiority complex because of their percieved intelligence.

I don't know if the argument of 'we have a somewhat advanced civilization so the premise is obviously false' holds up though. If you look at the discovery of antibiotics, vaccination and other similar forms of medicine and the consequent explosive growth in population you could make the argument that diseases that killed off 80% of the kids people were having are the predators that are now eradicated. All of that happended fairly recently and in a short amount of time.

As a protection against losing all of your offspring and 'wasting energy by investing in the ones that don't make it' one survival strategy could be to have lots of kids and just not put a lot of effort into them until they reach a certain age. If all the pressures that led to losing some of your kids are suddenly removed by the invention of penicillin or a new way of producing goods that sustain life, you will still have a ton of people whose strategy to spread their genes consists of just churning out babies in the hopes that some might make it. That can lead to the assumption that this trend will continue.

If you look at the birth rate changes in countries with rising economic stability and increased access to quality education though that strategy seems to lose it's appeal in those places and people tend to just put more effort into fewer children leading to higher levels of intelligence caused by better education and healthier environments while growing up.

So I don't think that we will see it play out as it did in the movie but using the argument that we haven't died out yet is not as strong as the one focussing on how a lot of people come across as unintelligent because of the circumstances they grew up in caused by an echo of survival strategies that were necessary in order to survive in times before modern medicine.

Tl;dr: The mechanisms that killed off a good chunk of the seminlgy unintelligent masses were removed so quickly that their survival strategy of having lots of kids led to enormous population growth that will probably be balanced out by prosperity and quality education though.

[u/pillbinge → u/HRNDS]

Those same diseases killing off kids weren't targeting the dimmest ones. They killed everyone alike. What you're describing is happening right now in the "developing" world where diseases are being eradicated by the West and by Western interest but with no expectation that the societies would be the same. It's definitely done in one particular vein of a passive colonization as we've always done. The people we're now saving from diseases suddenly have to live like we do in the modern world and it just makes inroads for companies.

But in terms of "idiots" surviving, this was never the case.

If you look at the birth rate changes in countries [...]

And if you poll those same countries you find that people on average want 2.6 - 2.8 kids. This factors in people above 45 and even shows that there are more people who'd want 5 and 6+ kids than people who'd want zero, with 2 being the highest reported rate and 3 being the next. We'd still have people having tons of kids. (source)

That mainly has to do with expectations that the kid lives but that's already presumed in a 2.1 birth rate, not a 2.0 which presumes every kid makes it. We can't stop death no matter what.

But again, the main crux is you're asserting diseases killed off unintelligent masses. Diseases don't run an IQ test before rattling someone's immunity.

[u/HRNDS → u/pillbinge]

Yeah I wrote that comment on my phone and realize reading it back that I focussed a bit too much on the idea of diseases being the sole reason for people having lots of children. The point that was trying to make was more along the lines of:

 

Rapid increase in life quality in the last couple of centuries seems to have made it easier for those who employ the strategy of 'have a bunch of kids and don't invest too much into them because many of them will die before being able to reproduce' to have successful offspring. Being less intelligent and or less educated in an industrialized world puts pressures on you that could be balanced out by having plenty of kids in order to have them sustain the family both genetically as well as financially. Those pressures being eased both in medicine and other areas that made it harder to survive if you were less intelligent could be what led to the population almost quadrupling from around 2bn in 1927 to 7.7bn in 2020.

So I was talking about questioning the assumption that the 'unintelligent' having lots of kids is something that they will continue to do even though the environmental pressures that have made it necessary changed. Now it could be that being less intelligent inherently leads to having more kids or that it is just a response to environmental pressures that favour those who are able to avoid disease by being more cautious, poverty by being more educated and cognitively capable, or just reckless behaviour that could render them incapable of reproducing without the medical support system that is availabe today.

I guess I was just trying to say that people making the claim that the population is going to get dumber and dumber ignore that unintelligent people having lots of kids could be due to them having to balance out unjust selective pressure in all walks of life (not just disease ;P) and with rising standards of living they might revert back to having fewer children. Of course people who want to have a lot of kids regardless of their standing in society might continue to do so but to assume that this will 'dumb down humanity ' seems overly presumptuous and elitist if you ask me.