Marriage Declines With the Onset of a Resource Glut – Human r/K Selection Theory

A reader emailed this link.

Now that we’ve explored the data, what year should we use as the marker for the beginning of the decline of marriage in the United States? I would argue for 1985, the last year that the marriage rate topped 10 percent. In only two years since then has the rate reversed course and increased more than the previous year (from 9.7 in 1989 to 9.8 in 1990 and 8.1 in 1998 to 8.4 in 1999). But both of those year-to-year increases were immediately followed by nearly decade long declines. The year 1985 may also mark the last year that America ever sees a marriage rate of more than 10 percent.

Free resources crush marriage rates. Interestingly, marriage rates alone are not the whole story, though. For that you should look to the entirety of reproductive behavior.

As evidenced by the decline in marriage during the Great Depression, extreme shortage also cuts marriage rates, as individuals focus more on survival than procreation, but this is a temporary effect. Individuals are not rejecting marriage, so much as delaying the entrance into it, to maximize their competitiveness and survival in the short term.

I suspect if you looked at age at first intercourse, you would find that during the Depression, age at first intercourse grew, as individuals pair-bonded later in life for monogamous marriage, while during the Eighties, age at first intercourse diminished, as individuals adopted a more sexually liberated, hedonistic behavioral pattern, and ultimate divorce rates soared.

I also suspect if you examined each cohort’s attitudes toward child rearing, you would also find that when those Depression survivors finally paired off, they were much more likely to feel that children should be raised in a traditional two-parent family, while the cohort from the eighties would have been more open to single mom’s rearing children alone, gay parents, and other rearing situations which were not designed to produce optimal rearing for the child or optimal ability and success on maturity, but which rather were simply designed to get as many children to adulthood as possible.

That effect would not just be part of a societal “progress” toward a hedonistic utopia of fat single mom’s riding the cock carousel and then raising their myriad of baby-daddy’s bastard spawns alone. This is humans adapting their reproductive strategy to resource availability, either exhibiting a K-selected reproductive strategy in response to shortage, or exhibiting an r-selected psychology in response to abundance. It is humans programmed like wolves morphing into humans reproducing like rabbits, once resource availability went from shortage to abundance.

It is also not unrelated to our political shift during those periods, from the K-selected ideology of conservatism, which emphasizes competition, freedom, family, and loyalty to pack/nation, to a more r-selected political ideology of liberalism, which emphasizes free resources for all, promiscuity, and rejection of group-competitiveness.

That it all really started in the mid eighties with the initiation of no-fault divorce was not coincidental either. No-fault divorce was initiated in response to this deeper shift in societal psychology, itself probably a result of the massive influx of resources produced by free deficit spending. Where once, governmental enforcement of permanent marriage suited a more monogamous, conservative, K-selected culture, suddenly a more temporary pair-bonding became more to our style. It was codified in our laws, and began to mix with the underlying psychological change to produce the rise of “non-traditional” (ie not quality-driven) reproduction and rearing styles.

Again, for the newbies, this wasn’t a genetic shift, as traditional r/K Theory, as described in evolutionary ecology would assert. It was a complex mix of the small effects of genetic selection, the larger effects of epigenetic modifications in response to stress reduction, and the similarly, if not greater effects of adapting neurotransmitter (especially dopamine) receptor transcription rates in response to the pleasurable neurotransmitter milieus that accompany the pleasurable state of existing in an environment of free resource availability and abundance. Add in additional dopamine-eliciting stimuli, from smart-phones, to movies like Avatar, to videogames, to the internet at your fingertips, to a sexually enriched culture, to free and available sex, to luxurious environmental factors, and you will only heighten the effect, as dopamine receptor transcription plummets to auto-regulate signaling levels. It is the addict effect, applied mildly enough to just slightly affect the hedonist/conscientiousness balance that governs sex drive, loyalty, and competiveness.

r/K doesn’t just explain the political divide. It explains our very history. It explains why one generation can look at another with befuddlement, almost feeling as if the new generation must be of another species. In a way, having adopted such divergent reproductive strategies, to a degree most commonly seen in different species, they might as well be.

Things like this is why I never doubt r/K will one day dominate the political debate throughout the world. You cannot have a concept, which explains so much about the most interesting mystery of all – who we really are and how we got this way, and not see it spread throughout the entire race. I have no doubt, if there are aliens on another planet somewhere, they too, probably adapt reproductive strategies somewhat. If they advanced enough they discovered r/K. Is so, it affected their civilizational and political structure, and eventually, the very realization of the idea itself molded their races in ways we will see here as time goes on.

It is exciting to think about. Until it has its effect, we will just put our heads down here, trudge on forward, and know that one day, this will change history.

For now, Apocalypse still cometh™