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Ask The Jolly Heretic anything!
I believe South Korean society is eugenic, particularly as regards IQ, and I would like to hear your thoughts.
1) You have explained the West's IQ decline in terms of two mechanisms:
a) modern medicine and sanitation leading to a drastic decline in infant mortality, removing darwinian selection pressures and leading to an increase in mutational load
b) welfare systems promoting dysgenic fertility by increasing the number of children had by low-IQ people, while cultural changes decrease the number of children among higher-IQ families
2) These mechanisms are not operative in South Korea, for the following reasons:
a) South Korea only began to seriously industrialise (and radically reduce its infant mortality) in the late 1960s. The high 6+ TFR, declined almost immediately, down to a sub-replacement TFR in the 1980s. This means there has been no extended period (as in the UK's late 19th century) of low infant mortality combined with high fertility. Indeed, the rapid industrialisation followed a war in which over 10% of the population was killed, largely by disease (creating a selection pressure on the first cohort born after the war).
Despite industrialisaton, cultural and environmental factors create a selection pressure in favour of healthy, happy, and intelligent offspring. Widespread parasitic diseases (eg soil helmynths) have only recently been brought under control (Koreans eat a lot of raw food, and sewage was still being used as fertiliser in rice farming), while the worst air pollution in the developed world means that developmental disorders and cancer among young people are relatively common. This is selective, because:
b) The West's welfare system and culture of dependency do not exist in South Korea. Poor people have few or no children, and certainly not out of wedlock. Korean women are extremely hypergamous, and will choose not to reproduce, rather than marry a sub-standard man. This creates the ultra-low birthrate, but is also highly selective. The culture is hyper-competitive: from birth, a Korean child is in a high-stress environment, under enormous pressure with almost no leisure time, forced to attend extra classes outside school in order to gain an edge. The Korean system is supremely meritocratic: all Korean students take the same final exams, and there are no interviews or extra-curricular advantages in the university application process. The whole population for each cohort is sorted and ranked according to their abilities. A child with a sub-standard immune system, or with mutations associated with mental or physical ill-health, will not be able to withstand the combined pressures of competitive social stress (with widespread bullying), academic workload, PM 2.5 particulate pollution (creating constant inflammation across the body, including the brain), chemical pollution in poorly-regulated food, and pressure from parents demanding perfection. Weak teenagers often end up killing themselves.
Following high school, the Korean man must endure a similarly competitive university system, with the high-stress environment of military service (more bullying, more adversity) captioning the final years of their youth, followed by long work-hours, high stress, more bullying, and more competition in South Korea's hyper-capitalistic white-collar environment. Blue collar jobs are looked down on as low-status; young Koreans will do everything they can to avoid them; if they lack white collar capabilities, they will innovate as skilled entrepreneurs (again, selecting for positive physical and mental traits).
Women must endure an extremely anti-natal feminist culture, emphasising self-realisation (partly through liberal application of plastic surgery). Only the most positive, most beautiful, and most family-oriented Korean women will be able to secure a husband who meets the socially ordained standards. Their fertility must also withstand the pollution problem.
To have a child, the new couple will need significant financial resources to afford the enormous deposit on expensive property. They must also pay for the extra-curricular education, so their child can also gain the competitive edge required to succeed. Government social support is simply insufficient to provide the standard of living required to raise a son who will themselves be able to attract a wife and have children. Small families are therefore the norm: to have more than two children requires real wealth. Meanwhile, the feminist and individualist culture selects for women with a strong nurturing instinct (who resist the careerist and childfree mores), along with religious belief (as in the West).
Korean society is therefore selective and eugenic; however, the mechanism by which this selection occurs is differential fertility, rather than infant mortality. Weak Koreans do not die in infancy, but their immune and nervous systems must be sufficiently strong to endure everything South Korean society throws at them, and achieve the increasingly rare feat of marrying and having children of their own.
You have previously explained the low South Korean birthrate in terms of high environmental sensitivity. I think it is the opposite: South Koreans have low environmental sensitivity (hence preference for strong and spicy food), it's just that Korea's dystopian environment and culture create an enormous disincentive to reproduce.
3) South Korea is partly mitigating its fertility crisis with immigration. I believe South Korea's immigration policy is also eugenic: guest workers really do have to leave and go home, while securing residency (and subsequent social benefits, and then citizenship) is extremely difficult, because it requires Korean-language literacy, which functions as a difficult IQ test (I would conservatively estimate that a 105+ IQ is required to pass the language test). Being a Subject-Object-Verb language, Korean is essentially a test of backward digit span and working memory capacity: long sentences with multiple clauses must be maintained in working memory until the meaning is secured by a final verb. Meanwhile, having discarded Chinese characters in writing, the meaning of highly homophonous Korean requires sensitivity to context and creativity in interpretation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8153686/
I asked the following at the last AMA but they must not have been visible to you for some reason:
Hi Ed, long time drinker at the JH, glad to see the boost in production quality.
Do try to get Peter Hitchens on, I think having the pair of you chat on both religion and the sexual revolution would be very interesting.
Here's my question: Natural selection is clearly a scientific fact, but I have not been convinced beyond reasonable doubt that all living organisms today came about solely through "random mutation" from a common ancestor. From what I have read, there isn't any concrete evidence that this is the case. Could you convince me otherwise?
Do have a look at this, I'd appreciate if you try to poke holes in the argument presented here: https://youtu.be/NetQrus79aM
Also, when are you gonna be in London for an IRL meetup?