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Modernity and Cultural Decline: A Biobehavioral Perspective
This book argues that despite the many real advantages that industrial modernity has yielded--including large gains in wealth, longevity, and (possibly) happiness--it has occurred together with the appearance of a variety of serious problems. Chief among these are probable losses in subjective existential purpose and increases in psychopathology. A highly original theory of the ultimate basis of these trends is advanced, which unites prior work in psychometrics and evolutionary science. This theory builds on the social epistasis amplification model to argue that genetic and epigenetic changes in modernizing and modernized populations, stemming from shifts in selective pressures related to industrialization, have lowered human fitness and wellness.
307 pages, Hardcover
Published February 20, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 5, 2020
10/10: my seventh perfect non-fiction rating.
This book is on a level with MacDonald's earlier work (1998, 2002), Herrnstein and Murray, Julian Jaynes, and J-P Rushton. My review can't do it justice, but I will try - for once, with copious quotes. Even though we're only 30 years in to the long 21st century*, this may be the social science book that defines it. As an afterthought, it also manages to put the science back in to the social.
As expensive as this book is, it's worth every penny. Support Woodley of Menie et al. and buy it if you can: if not, brave the quarantine to get this through interlibrary loan.
This book explicitly claims it is not a work of philosophy, but like Einstein's theories, it demands a philosophical - even a reorientation of philosophizing - response.
Until I can review it, let me recite a few of the things I learned today: (PS: with it being 3am and my needing to be up in 6 hours, I thought I'd write one quick sentence below, but this book has so much amazing information in it and such a novel and powerful theoretical grounding that I couldn't stop writing and might as well have reviewed it.)
TIL: the extreme social impact of COVID is a result of a century and a half of increasing mutational load and dysgenesis amplified by social epistasis, and the sequelae might not be all bad - but we would have handled it without a second thought 150 years ago (and not just because of the high rates of infectious death). Just kidding: the authors never mention COVID, but this is readily deduced.
TIL why the demographic transition happened.
TIL the best purely naturalistic explanation for the Fermi paradox (if life is common in the universe and has been around for billions of years, why hasn't the earth been colonized repeatedly, or at least heard from aliens?) I've ever read, which is intuitively compelling and theoretically justified given only two facts: multiple abiogenesis and convergent evolution.
(The second-best I've ever read came from a fiction book, The Dark Forest, which posits all life hides itself to prevent its destruction at extrinsic hands because of a three-step process of chains of suspicion, communications limits, and the possibility of technological leaps. The dark forest hypothesis seems pessimistic, but is paradisaically optimistic compared to the theory presented by the authors here.) I still prefer the rare earth hypothesis with added theistic evolution. The authors' theory of convergent evolution with dual great filters on a eugenic/dysgenic cyclical seesaw is far more compelling than the standard great filter hypothesis, and has evidence for it, unlike the optimistic speculations of transhumanists who think all the aliens reached the singularity, run us in a simulation, or have advanced beyond our ability to detect in some mysterious way.
TIL that r/K selection and life history theory, my previous favored theoretical framework for thinking about modernization and inter- and intra-group differences, is nearly powerless to actually explain modernization as an effect of slowing life history. It's one piece of the puzzle, but needs to be seen in a very peculiar light. The authors provide that light and fill in the gaps.
TIL the relation of intellectuals to war, war to group selection, and the evolutionary-historical role of intellectuals (those high in g) to spiritual leadership.
TIL why the greatest minds used to buttress and adorn civilization (St Thomas Aquinas), and now tear it down: the much-bruited-about 'betrayal of the intellectuals' or 'revolt of the intellectuals', and why the intelligentsia hate bourgeois society so much.
TIL that geniuses have very low completed fertility, but benefit the group fitness of their ingroup, and that there are anti-geniuses who severely depress group fitness.
TIL that your fitness, phenotype, and even (epi)genetics can be influenced by group members whom you have never had contact with. Spooky sociological action at a distance!
TIL that modernity is not an unalloyed evil, but the same selection pressures that enabled modernity and peace stop once modernity and peace are achieved (the adaptations that enable modernity disable positive selection in modernity: we are literally dying from an embarrassment of riches), and enter an inevitable retrograde movement. The general factor of intelligence has fallen by about 1 sd over the past 220 years. Eventually the trend reverses to such a degree that modernity can't be maintained. (Say hello to the foundations for a synthesis of Rushton, Vico, AND Evola!)
TIL why big inventions (macroinnovations) seemed to cease at the dawn of the computer age, in the interwar period, a question that has puzzled me for ages, even though the Flynn effect says we're getting smarter based on full-scale IQ scores. Hint: the Flynn increase is in specialized subtests that don't load on g, and is even at that reversing (See above.)
TIL that modernity and industrialization are biological phenomena, and liberalism and individualist moralities are adaptations to enable a society to hold together in face of increasing mutational load and decreasing GFP and general factor of fitness, but ironically accelerates the centrifugal process by enabling social epistasis amplification (SEAM).
... and so much more.
This book rightly rises to the third-standard-deviation-above-the-mean rank by getting my seventh ever perfect, 'seven out of five' rating, out of over 1,200 books reviewed: books that are necessary to understand and insightfully engage with the internal and external worlds we, as inhabitants of late modernity, find ourselves in. (Whoa, is 'late modernity' given a new meaning after reading this!)
It goes to the top rank of those books in virtue of single-handedly tearing away from me one of my most treasured theoretical frameworks that I've used for copious amounts of my own work, and reorienting me on to a better and more fruitful path even though it means I have to throw out a goodly portion of my own work and thought up to this point (following Socrates' dictum).
Reading this book is not interrupted by revelatory experiences: it's a revelatory experience interrupted by the mundane.
Caveat lector: the conclusions of this book are very pessimistic on the racial, national, civilizational, and cosmic scales, especially if you are irreligious. Imagine nothing but a civilizational rat wheel which has the Great Filter at both top and bottom, which due to convergent evolution is run in circles by every possible life form anywhere which is intelligent enough to give rise to civilization. Run up in to one great filter, run down in to another.
It also presumes a lot of familiarity with secondary literature. I don't think it would have had the impact it did if I didn't know at least the gist of some important works in the footnotes and the arguments (especially between environmentalists, culturalists, and hereditarians), though even I only know about a tenth of them.
*1990-present; like the short 20th century which ran from 1914-1989 or even 1914-1968, or the long 19th century which ran from 1776/89-1914. On purely calendaristic grounds, this is the defining social-science book of the 21st century as Spengler (1918, 1922), Herrnstein and Murray (1994) and MacDonald (1998) were the defining books of the 20th, and Weber (1905), Pareto (1916), and Tocqueville (1835) defined the 19th.
This book is on a level with MacDonald's earlier work (1998, 2002), Herrnstein and Murray, Julian Jaynes, and J-P Rushton. My review can't do it justice, but I will try - for once, with copious quotes. Even though we're only 30 years in to the long 21st century*, this may be the social science book that defines it. As an afterthought, it also manages to put the science back in to the social.
As expensive as this book is, it's worth every penny. Support Woodley of Menie et al. and buy it if you can: if not, brave the quarantine to get this through interlibrary loan.
This book explicitly claims it is not a work of philosophy, but like Einstein's theories, it demands a philosophical - even a reorientation of philosophizing - response.
Until I can review it, let me recite a few of the things I learned today: (PS: with it being 3am and my needing to be up in 6 hours, I thought I'd write one quick sentence below, but this book has so much amazing information in it and such a novel and powerful theoretical grounding that I couldn't stop writing and might as well have reviewed it.)
TIL: the extreme social impact of COVID is a result of a century and a half of increasing mutational load and dysgenesis amplified by social epistasis, and the sequelae might not be all bad - but we would have handled it without a second thought 150 years ago (and not just because of the high rates of infectious death). Just kidding: the authors never mention COVID, but this is readily deduced.
TIL why the demographic transition happened.
TIL the best purely naturalistic explanation for the Fermi paradox (if life is common in the universe and has been around for billions of years, why hasn't the earth been colonized repeatedly, or at least heard from aliens?) I've ever read, which is intuitively compelling and theoretically justified given only two facts: multiple abiogenesis and convergent evolution.
(The second-best I've ever read came from a fiction book, The Dark Forest, which posits all life hides itself to prevent its destruction at extrinsic hands because of a three-step process of chains of suspicion, communications limits, and the possibility of technological leaps. The dark forest hypothesis seems pessimistic, but is paradisaically optimistic compared to the theory presented by the authors here.) I still prefer the rare earth hypothesis with added theistic evolution. The authors' theory of convergent evolution with dual great filters on a eugenic/dysgenic cyclical seesaw is far more compelling than the standard great filter hypothesis, and has evidence for it, unlike the optimistic speculations of transhumanists who think all the aliens reached the singularity, run us in a simulation, or have advanced beyond our ability to detect in some mysterious way.
TIL that r/K selection and life history theory, my previous favored theoretical framework for thinking about modernization and inter- and intra-group differences, is nearly powerless to actually explain modernization as an effect of slowing life history. It's one piece of the puzzle, but needs to be seen in a very peculiar light. The authors provide that light and fill in the gaps.
TIL the relation of intellectuals to war, war to group selection, and the evolutionary-historical role of intellectuals (those high in g) to spiritual leadership.
TIL why the greatest minds used to buttress and adorn civilization (St Thomas Aquinas), and now tear it down: the much-bruited-about 'betrayal of the intellectuals' or 'revolt of the intellectuals', and why the intelligentsia hate bourgeois society so much.
TIL that geniuses have very low completed fertility, but benefit the group fitness of their ingroup, and that there are anti-geniuses who severely depress group fitness.
TIL that your fitness, phenotype, and even (epi)genetics can be influenced by group members whom you have never had contact with. Spooky sociological action at a distance!
TIL that modernity is not an unalloyed evil, but the same selection pressures that enabled modernity and peace stop once modernity and peace are achieved (the adaptations that enable modernity disable positive selection in modernity: we are literally dying from an embarrassment of riches), and enter an inevitable retrograde movement. The general factor of intelligence has fallen by about 1 sd over the past 220 years. Eventually the trend reverses to such a degree that modernity can't be maintained. (Say hello to the foundations for a synthesis of Rushton, Vico, AND Evola!)
TIL why big inventions (macroinnovations) seemed to cease at the dawn of the computer age, in the interwar period, a question that has puzzled me for ages, even though the Flynn effect says we're getting smarter based on full-scale IQ scores. Hint: the Flynn increase is in specialized subtests that don't load on g, and is even at that reversing (See above.)
TIL that modernity and industrialization are biological phenomena, and liberalism and individualist moralities are adaptations to enable a society to hold together in face of increasing mutational load and decreasing GFP and general factor of fitness, but ironically accelerates the centrifugal process by enabling social epistasis amplification (SEAM).
... and so much more.
This book rightly rises to the third-standard-deviation-above-the-mean rank by getting my seventh ever perfect, 'seven out of five' rating, out of over 1,200 books reviewed: books that are necessary to understand and insightfully engage with the internal and external worlds we, as inhabitants of late modernity, find ourselves in. (Whoa, is 'late modernity' given a new meaning after reading this!)
It goes to the top rank of those books in virtue of single-handedly tearing away from me one of my most treasured theoretical frameworks that I've used for copious amounts of my own work, and reorienting me on to a better and more fruitful path even though it means I have to throw out a goodly portion of my own work and thought up to this point (following Socrates' dictum).
Reading this book is not interrupted by revelatory experiences: it's a revelatory experience interrupted by the mundane.
Caveat lector: the conclusions of this book are very pessimistic on the racial, national, civilizational, and cosmic scales, especially if you are irreligious. Imagine nothing but a civilizational rat wheel which has the Great Filter at both top and bottom, which due to convergent evolution is run in circles by every possible life form anywhere which is intelligent enough to give rise to civilization. Run up in to one great filter, run down in to another.
It also presumes a lot of familiarity with secondary literature. I don't think it would have had the impact it did if I didn't know at least the gist of some important works in the footnotes and the arguments (especially between environmentalists, culturalists, and hereditarians), though even I only know about a tenth of them.
*1990-present; like the short 20th century which ran from 1914-1989 or even 1914-1968, or the long 19th century which ran from 1776/89-1914. On purely calendaristic grounds, this is the defining social-science book of the 21st century as Spengler (1918, 1922), Herrnstein and Murray (1994) and MacDonald (1998) were the defining books of the 20th, and Weber (1905), Pareto (1916), and Tocqueville (1835) defined the 19th.
December 19, 2021
This book reminds me of a certain phrase of Oswald Spengler: "Strong pessimism". Strong pessimism is the *knowledge of the wise of their fate*, whereas weak pessimism is the *infantile revulsion of reality*. What Sarraf et al. show is that (like Spengler says) civilizations have a natural rise and fall. When environmental conditions are tough - when it is very cold, when resources are scarce, when hungry bands of ravaging humans are near - groups need to form strong bonds, and are therefore group selected. These conditions mean that 30-50% of children die before adulthood, but - alas! - the group becomes more cohesive and strong. Furthermore, group selection selects for *general intelligence* - i.e. geniuses - because geniuses actually have extremely low individual level reproduction: they fail to have many kids. But in groups, they are selected for because *they can make civilizational advancements which help the group vis-a-vis another group: grand art which unifies the group for a singular purpose or weapons, ships, or defenses that take very high intelligence to devise*.
Anyways, group selection stops when the group no longer has scarce resources. I.e. a warmer climate, better agriculture, medicine, abundant food - all of which come starting in the 1700s and accelerating ever since - lead to depressed group selection. Which is very, very bad. Why? Deleterious mutations are now *not wiped out of the population through death*. Which means they accumulate. More and more and more. And general intelligence drops; and mental health decreases; and schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and narcissism skyrocket; and people begin to not reproduce.
Alas! 'Tis our society. What can you do about it? Learn more about thy decline! Face it, realize it, embrace it. Be a "strong pessimist," as Spengler says to do. Throwing thy head in the sand when a hurricane comes will not save you.
Anyways, group selection stops when the group no longer has scarce resources. I.e. a warmer climate, better agriculture, medicine, abundant food - all of which come starting in the 1700s and accelerating ever since - lead to depressed group selection. Which is very, very bad. Why? Deleterious mutations are now *not wiped out of the population through death*. Which means they accumulate. More and more and more. And general intelligence drops; and mental health decreases; and schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and narcissism skyrocket; and people begin to not reproduce.
Alas! 'Tis our society. What can you do about it? Learn more about thy decline! Face it, realize it, embrace it. Be a "strong pessimist," as Spengler says to do. Throwing thy head in the sand when a hurricane comes will not save you.
June 15, 2020
Amazing, absolutely worth anyone’s time to read.
March 2, 2020
A very interesting and somewhat sobering look at what modern indutrialized “progressive” society is doing to our brains and gene pool. I particularly liked the chapter that eviscerated Steven Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now”
February 3, 2025
Its one of the best books Ive ever read. It serves as a foundation for everything else you will read on the subject of our decline and it explains it so clearly and well that I couldnt help nodding in agreement all the time. No more natural selection, no more strong in group bonds, lowering of intelligence, destruction of our civilization and possible extinction of our people through mixing or failure to breed. We are victims of our own success.
February 3, 2025
This book is one of the best books I have ever read, when I picked it up back in my freshman year of high school I fell in love with it. It's the climax and magnum opus of my learning and it perfectly and accurately explains the problems with White Nordic Civilization and not only does it cover the scope of the West and the implications of that, but also the rest of the world and possibly other organic civilizations in other parts of the universe with a possible answer to the fermi paradox. We must as a civilization brutally work to eradicate dysgenics, spiteful mutations, and other apocalyptic issues leading to the breakdown of civilization and societal order.
October 13, 2021
The most important book
January 22, 2025
Wow.
Pessimistic and convincing in equal measure.
It's so over...
Pessimistic and convincing in equal measure.
It's so over...
September 15, 2024
The core of the book starts in chapter 6; the rest is standard fare about why leftism is bad, skippable for most people who are up to date on this but handy as a reference.
In the core of the book, I found the evidence lacking and actually overly complicated compared to the data available. It mainly consisted of a theoretical model and a dubious general factoring of traits associated with mutational load to try to provide a mutation index.
However, I give it 5 stars because it inspired me to write a couple of papers correlating leftism with paternal age. I cite this book in those papers, and it was certainly worth reading.
In the core of the book, I found the evidence lacking and actually overly complicated compared to the data available. It mainly consisted of a theoretical model and a dubious general factoring of traits associated with mutational load to try to provide a mutation index.
However, I give it 5 stars because it inspired me to write a couple of papers correlating leftism with paternal age. I cite this book in those papers, and it was certainly worth reading.
Want to read
February 29, 2020Recommended by Fadi
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews