In industrialized nations, particularly in the US (the most advanced of all nations), scientific and technological progress increasingly protects people from the environmental forces (such as famine, predators, extreme weather, and disease) that have plagued humanity since its origins. Such progress, however, also increasingly relaxes the forces of natural selection, which in turn, allows a growing number of harmful mutations to survive in the human gene pool. Many experts believe that their accumulation could spell catastrophic doom for the western world. We may be but a few generations from extinction.
This, of course, is speculation. However, since the evidence to support such a theory is no less flimsy than the evidence to support climate catastrophe, the evidence to support genetic catastrophe will strike liberals as compelling. Further, given the declining fertility and mental health in their ranks (see below), liberals are likely to adopt mutational overload as the next existential cause celebre. For the accumulation of deleterious mutations in the American genome seems to be growing the fastest in the DNA of extreme liberals. It’s as if nature selected them to lead us down the path to extinction. This, of course, is also speculation..
In his paper ‘Mutation and Human Exceptionalism: Our Future Genetic Load’, geneticist, Michael Lynch examined this growing mutational load and “the long-term consequences of the accumulation of mutations whose phenotypic consequences can be transiently minimized through medical intervention and/or a sheltering environment”. For the US, in particular, Lynch notes that “the incidences of a variety of afflictions including autism, male infertility, asthma, immune-system disorders, diabetes, etc., already exhibit increases exceeding the expected rate.” Given that the brain is an enormous mutational target (84% of the 20,000 genes in the human genome are active in the brain), one can only imagine the horrors, and ironies, of a nation propelled to the heights of scientific and technological success by its cognitive elite, being driven to the depths of social and biological failure by its babbling morons.
This sort of thing happened to mice in John Calhoun’s “Mouse Utopia”, a famous experiment conducted in the early 1970s. Calhoun built a habitat designed to accommodate as many as 3,840 mice. The occupants had plenty of food and water; there were no predators; there was no harsh weather. He initialized the experiment with four disease-free breeding pairs, carefully selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. After a brief acclimation period, the colony thrived. It grew rapidly, its population doubling every 55 days. But without natural selection to cull them from the population, less fit offspring were born, survived to maturity, and remained in the colony. Their social behavior became increasingly dysfunctional, to the point where they could no longer perform basic mouse society functions: courtship, maternal care, and territorial defense. The population peaked at only 2,200 mice, only 560 days into the experiment.
Many female mice acquired an aggressive nature to compensate for declining protection by male mice. They lost interest in sex and prematurely rejected their young. Calhoun called the male counterparts (to these non-reproducing females) the beautiful ones', noting that “they never engaged in sexual approaches toward females, and they never engaged in fighting.” At least not with the fit males who remained territorial. Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, they would violently attack each other. Failing to establish a social niche, they became physically and psychologically detached, confining themselves to the open center of the structure, where “their behavioural repertoire became largely confined to eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming”.
The aberrant behavior increased as more unfit mice were born, and it rubbed off on the fit mice. A mutation that degrades the fitness of the carrier, but that additionally degrades the fitness of non-carriers via social transactions, is known as a “spiteful mutation”. In ‘Of Mice and Men: Empirical Support for the Population-Based Social Epistasis Amplification Mode”, the authors describe a 2017 experiment in which a spiteful mutation caused a breakdown of normal social hierarchies in a mouse population, as well as a marked decline in the testosterone levels of male mice. They indicate that spiteful mutations were at play in the extinction of Calhoun’s colony, and suggest that “the carriers of behavior-altering mutations in contemporary human populations reduce the fitness of their noncarrier counterparts and depress group-level fitness overall.” As an example, the authors cite behavior that imposes “sociocultural conditions that disincentivize procreation”. It’s not much of a stretch to see how the frenzied sociocultural demands of the Occupy Wall Street Movement or the Annual Women’s March (any of them) could cause a nationwide testosterone decline, or an outbreak of celibacy.
In Calhoun’s experiment, signs of the effects of spiteful mutations appeared as early as Day 315, when the influence of aggressive, but negligent, females and “beautiful”, but hapless, males began to stifle procreation, and population growth began to slow. Amid spreading social disruption, the colony lost its ability to reproduce, becoming senescent on day 600, the day that the last surviving birth occurred. With the death of the last mouse on day 1780, it became extinct.
It may be that the signs of America’s coming demise are visible in the dysfunctional behavior of far left liberals. These individuals can’t seem to find a niche in America – a country that comes closer than any other to being a human utopia. They are unhappy with America; always unhappy. Their discontent is expressed by deeply bitter, non-stop outrage (against capitalism, individual freedom, Federalism, law enforcement, guns, religion, free speech, to name but a few). They even plan ahead for future unhappiness. For example, they are already promising to be sore and violent losers if their presidential candidate, Joe Biden, fails to win the election in November. And they are scheduling additional unhappiness, when a conservative Supreme Court justice replaces the recently deceased, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a diligent, old-school liberal, who, unlike today’s Left, possessed a delightful sense of humor and a palpable contempt for angry thugs. If Calhoun was alive to observe this behavior, he would naturally jot down its similarities to the neuroses that destroyed his mouse colony. If he examined the far left’s incidence of mental illness and its birth rate, especially among those bearing the white “woke” phenotype, he might frantically scribble, “holy shit, it’s Day 315!”.
In a recent Pew Research survey (of 11,537 adult Americans), 26.4% of white liberals and 38% of white, very liberal liberals reported that they had been diagnosed, by a doctor or a healthcare provider, as having a mental health condition. In comparison, only 14.8% of conservatives reported such a diagnosis. A histogram displaying the results was posted here on Twitter by Zach Goldberg. Being dramatically less afflicted by mental illness than liberals, conservatives may be tempted to gloat that they are much more genetically fit to propagate their DNA. Except that the far left could have the final say. In theory, if spiteful mutations reach a critical prevalence among liberals, it will adversely affect the fitness of noncarriers. The daily, nationwide violence (looting, vandalism, arson, etc.) by stroppy Antifa and Black Lives Matter mobs, suggests that the critical prevalence is near. As does the inability of narcissistic liberal mayors and governors to quash it. Their priorities seem to lean instead toward “eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming”.
More alarming, astoundingly alarming, is the reported incidence of mental illness among young, white, liberal females – which includes many of the future leaders of the Democrat party. Their policies, not to mention their irritating offspring, will shape US social behavior for generations. For the 18 – 29 year-old cohort, a frightening 56.3% report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition; 39.7% for the 30 – 49 year-old cohort. In contrast, only 26 – 27.3% of young, white, conservative females reported such a diagnosis. Even 26% seems too high. But 56.3% is, well, crazy.
For any species, the ability to reproduce is the ultimate determinant of its survival. Alas, American fecundity is in serious decline. Led by the far left, the US fertility rate has been falling -- to an average of 1.7 infants per woman in 2019, well below the population replacement rate of 2.1. From the analysis presented in ‘Political Attitude and Fertility: Is There a Selection for the Political Extreme?’, extreme liberals have lost interest in procreation (see Figures 5A-E, extracted from the General Social Survey of the United States 1972–2014). Until 1990, they were our most prolific procreators. For instance, during the 1980s, the average number of children by extreme liberals was 3.15. But it has plummeted since, to 1.95 during the 2000s, and to 1.8 during 2010-2014. Conservatives and moderates, in contrast, are holding their own, averaging more than 2.25 children; extreme conservatives the clear reproduction winners, averaging more than 2.75.
Why the abrupt and growing decline on the part of liberals? Perhaps habitual bitterness ruins the mood for sexual intercourse. And who can procreate when your spouse is sobbing about white privilege or frothing over a statue? Or maybe, rancorous leftist shrews are no longer aroused by hapless leftist beauties. There’s nothing like chronic unemployment to snuff out romance. Then there is the challenge of child-rearing. The thought of raising increasingly nasty offspring is bound to favor sub-replacement fertility. Who knows?
It is clear, however, that the accumulation of deleterious mutations is taking its toll on America. Fertility and mental health are in decline. We are starting to look like Calhoun’s mouse colony, when it started down the road to extinction. It could be a fate worse than climate change. The behavior-altering attrition of spiteful mutations will take everyone; global warming will only take those still tethered to sea level habitats. Although they appear to be the dominant carriers of spiteful mutations, liberals have thus far been surprisingly silent on this emerging threat. Ordinarily, they are the first to exploit an incipient crisis (such as climate change, Donald Trump, COVID-19, systemic racism, Russian collusion, Donald Trump, immigration enforcement, Middle East peace, American exceptionalism, and Donald Trump). But the declining mental health and fertility of extreme liberals, to say nothing of their increasingly aberrant social behavior, cannot be dismissed. Once it sinks in that relaxed natural selection has chosen them as its early victims, on the fast track to early extinction, they will spring into action.
We can then expect wild projections of the coming genetic havoc, incessant moral grandstanding, violent demonstrations, and frantic demands for immediate government action. Emboldened by the willingness of Americans to comply with the overreaching lockdown rules concocted by the ‘The Sociopaths Who Rule Society’ to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, new spiteful sociopaths will impose much more draconian rules to control mutational overload. The likes of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will promote a Gene New Deal. As will the likes of a Joe Biden, with a Build Back Better DNA scheme. These plans will be designed to radically transform American social behavior. They will no doubt feature measures such as germline DNA editing, testosterone injections, fertility enhancement therapy, and dysfunctional behavior management classes – all mandatory. The health care system will be revamped to treat maladies such as schizophrenia, intermittent explosive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, and narcissism. Since the occurrence of somatic mutations increases with age, sex after 40 will be banned. But to offset the limitation, Viagra and movies ranging from ‘Deep Throat’ to ‘Cuties’ will be available at no charge. Pornography and psychotropic drugs will become as pervasive as stupidity. It (the transformation) will be the ultimate example of a spiteful mutation.
