Of the 19 issues tested, not a single one has moved towards the traditional social conservative position since Gallup first began asking about them in 2001. Thirteen of the 19 have seen opinions grow more liberal/libertarian over time — among them biggies like premarital sex, single moms having kids, doctor-assisted suicide, and gay and lesbian relations — and six have seen no significant change. For some reason they haven’t yet added legalizing marijuana to their list of cultural hot buttons. If you want to toss that one in there, it’s another win for the liberal-tarian position. And there’s every reason to believe that some numbers will continue to shift. With pornography and social isolation ubiquitous in the Internet age and younger Americans who oppose the death penalty and medical testing on animals replacing older adults who are more supportive of those practices, it can’t be very long until porn passes capital punishment and animal testing in acceptability. Within 15 years, the only sex/marriage issues that may lack majority moral approval are adultery and polygamy.
You can see the increasing r. It makes interesting thought experiments as you ponder the people who hold conflicting beliefs. Abortion of unknowing humans with some form of consciousness is OK, but animal testing and the death penalty for mass murderers is bad. Only r/K could make sense of that.
They didn’t ask about “consensual pedophilia,” but I bet it would have gotten three or four percent, and be rising, along with premarital sex, divorce, single parent rearing, and so on.
But notice how many of the issues will undercut the reproduction of r. Birth control, homosexuality, Abortion, suicide, divorce, all will diminish the numbers of r-strategists who believe in those things. It is like the drop in the use of Caitlyn as a baby name:
A year after Caitlyn Jenner announced her new name and gender, the popularity of the name Caitlyn plummeted more than any other baby name, according to Social Security’s annual list of the most popular baby names.
In fact, the four names that dropped the most were all variations of the same name: Caitlin, Caitlyn, Katelynn and Kaitlynn. All four versions of Caitlyn fell out of the top 1,000 baby names.
These are the people who are reproducing. Don’t get me wrong. Rabbits at the bottom of the bell curve are reproducing too, but all it will take is one period of real K-selection and they will be dead in two minutes. But the r-strategist genes at the top of the bell curve are sterilizing themselves, and due to their very psychology, they can’t make the sacrifices necessary to save their ideology.
This won’t be a fast process. Culling genes takes time. For now, the epigenetic, Hebbian, and neurochemical processes are moving the species r faster than the genetic culling is moving it K. But the foundation of the species, the genes, are being aggressively culled. In the long term, that will render the r-strategy near-extinct, and greatly amplify the K-selecting effects of the Apocalypse when it hits.
Spread r/K Theory, because we want it dominant when the last human rabbits go extinct
