This explains so much

paperburn1 · Post by **paperburn1** » Mon Nov 12, 2012 9:53 pm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/1 ... 17948.html

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Tue Nov 13, 2012 1:19 am

Yeah, this sad truth has been quite obvious to me for a few years now. Just look at the past elections and at the governments of this world. If this is the best we can offer in regards of leadership material...
Time to get into some genetic enhancement to guarantee the survival of the species for a few more millenia.

djolds1 · Post by **djolds1** » Tue Nov 13, 2012 1:43 am

Skipjack wrote:Yeah, this sad truth has been quite obvious to me for a few years now. Just look at the past elections and at the governments of this world. If this is the best we can offer in regards of leadership material...
Time to get into some genetic enhancement to guarantee the survival of the species for a few more millenia.

The increase in IQ over the last 120 years strongly correlates with the decline in reproductive rates, which increasingly threatens cultural and species survival.

Provolutionary genetic modification may not promote species survival. Indeed, species survival may require one of two innovations:

1) A neo-primitivism along the lines of the Imperium in Frank Herbert's "Dune," or

2) The industrialization of reproduction - humans as standard products ala dystopian movies like "The Island."

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Tue Nov 13, 2012 3:37 am

3) treatments that allow women to have healthy children up to a higher age... I think a lot more women would have children then (the wish often comes too late).
4) incentives for people to have children. A media that is not painting children as something undesirable.

djolds1 · Post by **djolds1** » Tue Nov 13, 2012 6:54 am

Skipjack wrote:3) treatments that allow women to have healthy children up to a higher age... I think a lot more women would have children then (the wish often comes too late).
4) incentives for people to have children. A media that is not painting children as something undesirable.

There are already instances on record of grandmothers giving birth to their own grandchildren. The problem appears to be keeping ova viable, not utilizing a "decommissioned" uterus post-menopause. Fertilized ova are relatively easy to store, but ISTR that unfertilized ova are notoriously difficult to store for any length of time. Stem cell research may help there.

Similarly, artificial wombs should not be inordinately difficult. They were a topic of common discussion and some noteworthy research c.1970, right alongside the mechanical heart. Yet whereas the artificial heart has progressed along several different and productive lines in the decades since 1970, the artificial womb has disappeared so completely from current research that I suspect it has become a pariah field for reasons unknown.

I doubt incentives will help much - some at the margins. Children are no longer an economic necessity for survival in old age - now they are an expensive personal indulgence. Similarly, with the advent of the pill they are not an inevitable and unpredictable outcome of sexual activity - now they are an event to be carefully planned and timed.