Based Camp - The Genetics： How Brits Went From Tribals to Industrialists

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here today. Today we are going to be talking about a controversial theory that I hadn't heard before, but recently was backed by a new study that came out.

00:00:12.100 So the gist of the theory goes like this.

00:00:14.120 In Britain, as disease continually killed off the poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the descendants of the wealthy.

00:00:21.920 And that way, according to Clark, the less violent, more literate, and more hardworking behavior middle class values were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population.

00:00:33.180 This process of quote-unquote downward social mobility eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap.

00:00:43.680 So essentially, what he argued was something unique about the environment of Britain during that period, and in part, but to a lesser sense, the other countries where the Industrial Revolution caught on, created an evolutionary effect that altered the populations within these environments at a genetic level, making them more capable of creating something like the Industrial Revolution.

00:01:09.220 More specifically, he said that what normally happens in history is as a population advances in technology, it produces more food, and then more people exist, and then those more people start to just starve and die.

00:01:26.580 And so you don't really get the opportunity for this flourishing.

00:01:30.480 But what was happening in Britain was a unique situation in which the poor were dying at a much faster rate than the rich, and the rich were maintaining their wealth in a way that led their higher fertility rates.

00:01:44.580 And note, he brings data to this in the original explanation, which we'll get into, in such a way where their descendants filtered down through the social ranks.

00:01:53.640 So it was more like you had this wealthy class that was producing way more children, and those children were filtering down through the other classes, whereas at the other end, at like the bottom of the poor, there's like this giant cyst cutting off, cutting off, cutting off every iterative generation.

00:02:10.400 And the big new study that came out that was so cool on this looked at the polygenic scores for educational attainment, which today is associated with high educational attainment, which is probably associated with a number of other positive things, potentially, in the British population.

00:02:27.840 So looking at samples of dead bodies, basically, from, you know, the year 1000 AD, 1100, 1200.

00:02:35.700 And what you see here is basically no change in the rate that this appears from 1000 to around 1700.

00:02:45.760 And then you go from 1700 to the mid 1800s, and it jumps a ton, it jumps, if you look at this graph.

00:02:52.340 And to get an idea of what this means, if you go to the 1000 population in England, the top score, I don't know what this is, it might be like IQ test here, average IQ test.

00:03:05.780 Okay.

00:03:06.020 The table compares mean score and upward distribution for educational attainment.

00:03:10.020 Okay, not IQ, this is the educational attainment scores.

00:03:12.680 They're correlated.

00:03:13.960 Correlated, right.

00:03:14.800 So the mean score in the 1000 CE population was 95.8.

00:03:20.560 In the 1850s population, it was 107.5.

00:03:24.980 Whoa.

00:03:26.440 So you see, it completely jumped there.

00:03:28.900 And you see a gradual rise across the population over time.

00:03:32.180 If you go to the top 5%, you go from 120 in the CE population, 1000 CE, into the 1850s population, 132.2.

00:03:42.760 And then if you look at the above 150 CE population, 5% score, this is what percent of the population is above the 5%. 0.63

00:03:56.720 Like if you're looking at the top 5% in the 1850s, right?

00:04:00.000 Okay.

00:04:00.400 Score-wise.

00:04:01.320 In the 1850s, obviously 5% is above the top 5%.

00:04:04.760 All right.

00:04:05.120 That makes sense.

00:04:05.780 But the percent that was in the 1000s population was only 0.75%.

00:04:15.240 Oh my.

00:04:19.200 Okay.

00:04:20.260 Yeah.

00:04:20.760 If you go to the 1600s, it's 3%.

00:04:22.980 So no, what's above the top 1%, right?

00:04:27.660 Okay.

00:04:28.060 So above the top 1% for the 1850s is obviously 1%.

00:04:32.640 But if you go to the 1000 CE population, it's 0.093%.

00:04:38.580 And then the top 1%.

00:04:40.620 So you would have had, you know, 10 people in that range in the 1850s population for every one person born in that range in the 1000 CE population of intelligence.

00:04:54.480 Wow.

00:04:56.120 Wow.

00:04:56.600 This matters because, and note here, I'm not saying this theory is true, but it's a very interesting theory because it looks at the development of a society without comparing different ethnic groups, which I always try to avoid doing when I can.

00:05:12.540 It just looks within one ethnic group, which is really interesting.

00:05:17.360 It is only comparing British people of one time period that didn't have an industrial revolution to British people of another time period, which did have an industrial revolution.

00:05:27.460 Yeah.

00:05:27.600 And I note here that the British people of this other time period, like you go to a 1000 CE or something like that, like they did not seem capable.

00:05:34.580 These are my own ancestors I'm talking about here.

00:05:37.280 So don't accuse me of racism, of creating large scale civilization.

00:05:41.900 As I point out in my one civilization video, my ancestors, if you're like, oh, what did the ancient Brits build?

00:05:48.580 And it's like, well, there is some really nice and detailed ruins in ancient Britain.

00:05:53.520 You know, people are like, oh, great.

00:05:55.360 Where are they?

00:05:56.100 And I'm like, it's the Roman bath.

00:05:58.000 The Britons didn't make anything like that for about a thousand years after that.

00:06:04.680 Yeah.

00:06:04.860 Like they, they, they, they seemed incapable. 1.00

00:06:08.900 They were basically idiot tribals in mud huts bringing poo at each other. 1.00

00:06:14.740 It was a little stark. 1.00

00:06:16.340 Yeah.

00:06:17.340 Well, I mean, we need to be honest.

00:06:19.700 This is one of these things where I'm always like really annoyed when people are like, my people were colonized.

00:06:24.460 And then you're a white supremacist because you laud Roman culture.

00:06:29.160 And I'm like, well, Roman culture isn't my culture. 0.99

00:06:31.740 They colonized me.

00:06:33.420 Me lauding Roman culture is no different from a black person lauding Roman culture or an Asian person lauding Roman culture.

00:06:42.100 It was the descendant of the group that colonized my ancestry.

00:06:45.600 It was my ancestry.

00:06:46.480 Your ancestral culture.

00:06:47.540 They're together.

00:06:48.480 Yeah.

00:06:49.300 Like we can all, all men can look back.

00:06:52.000 There's a great meme that's like all the men of like different ethnic groups are looking back at like ancient Rome.

00:06:57.480 The, the, how often do you think you've got our, our Roman helmet right there with the Greek helmet in, in frame right here that I got for father's day, very father's day gift.

00:07:07.300 But I found this to be a very interesting theory.

00:07:09.940 And again, I want to be clear.

00:07:11.360 I'm not saying I support it.

00:07:12.360 I'm saying it's interesting.

00:07:13.300 So Clark begins by describing the pre-industrial world from 10,000 BCE to 1800 CE as a Malsusian trapped named after the economist Thomas Malsus.

00:07:25.500 In this era, technological advances improved productivity and living standards temporarily.

00:07:29.840 However, population growth quickly outpaced those gains, driving incomes back to substance levels.

00:07:34.560 People who don't know who Malsus was.

00:07:35.980 That was the guy who thought that the worst world's population was going to grow forever. 0.99

00:07:39.440 And what we needed to do was kill people. 0.99

00:07:41.160 He's basically the enemy of all pronatalists. 0.99

00:07:43.800 No, he was, he was very much, he was the original population bomb dude. 1.00

00:07:47.720 What is it that he wrote?

00:07:49.000 The, did he wrote the, a modest proposal?

00:07:51.480 He, like when people talk about Malsusian situations, he was basically just like, we're not going to be able to feed everyone.

00:07:56.980 This is dire.

00:07:57.860 Too many people.

00:07:58.700 He was the original popular, popularizer.

00:08:02.140 The modest proposal one was a bit, it wasn't just about population.

00:08:05.620 It was mostly about the Irish because at the time they were breeding like Irish.

00:08:10.380 And now they barely have kids at all, you know, as, as we've pointed out, they're going to be going extinct soon.

00:08:15.880 The Irish are one of the populations that's definitely going to go extinct soon, which is sad, but whatever. 1.00

00:08:20.140 Birth rates were high, but death rates from disease, famine, and violence kept populations in check.

00:08:26.320 Societies worldwide, including England, were stuck in the cycle with no sustained per capita income gross.

00:08:31.580 Clark notes that England was no exception until around the 1800s, when productivity finally outran population growth, enabling the Industrial Revolution.

00:08:40.920 The question is why this breakout happened in Britain first.

00:08:44.860 A central pillar of Clark's argument is that in pre-industrial Britain, particularly from the 1200 to the 1800s, economic success directly translated into reproductive success, creating a form of natural selection favoring certain trades.

00:08:59.900 Yes. Wealthier individuals from middle and upper classes had more surviving children than the poor.

00:09:04.860 For example, data from English wills shows that men with assets over a thousand pounds left nearly four surviving children on average, compared to fewer than two for those with under 10 pounds.

00:09:15.600 Oh, wow.

00:09:16.520 That's really stark difference.

00:09:18.360 And that is the reason why this is important to note, if this really was the reason why Britain became so successful,

00:09:24.540 is that if we have the exact opposite happening today, if we really are heading into an idiocracy, we really can lose our civilization.

00:09:32.500 Yeah, this shows that selective pressures both change the makeup of the genetic makeup in addition to downstream of that then culture of a society,

00:09:45.840 but then also the output and development of that society.

00:09:49.400 That's what this is all about.

00:09:50.220 Yeah. And keep in mind that the change can happen quickly. It appears that most of the change happened between the 1700s and the 1800s.

00:09:56.240 So that's something to watch out for if this is really happening.

00:10:01.100 And what it means is that if you want humanity to continue to thrive, you essentially need to genetically isolate yourself from people who aren't thinking about this type of stuff.

00:10:12.960 Yeah.

00:10:13.380 Which is, you know, another reason why we work so hard to source potential mates for our children, because, you know, you have got to be careful about them breeding with the gen pop.

00:10:23.060 And this is going to become a bigger problem intergenerationally.

00:10:26.420 You're already getting so much trouble for saying that.

00:10:28.820 Ew. Ew.

00:10:29.780 Well, look, if you look at the numbers, okay, the single genetic trait that is, because, you know, I can look at genetic polygenic scores and say these traits correlate with X or these traits correlate with Y.

00:10:42.740 Yeah.

00:10:43.060 The single one that has the highest correlation with low fertility is intelligence.

00:10:49.880 Well, obesity too.

00:10:51.480 And I think our...

00:10:52.080 Obesity was the next highest correlation.

00:10:54.360 Yeah.

00:10:54.560 So you're going to get one population that's, like, low intelligence, high obesity, you know, some other likely negative traits that are very genetically successful.

00:11:03.600 And I love it when people are like, oh, how dare you call these, like, negative if they're what is genetically successful was in the current environment.

00:11:09.900 And it's like, something can be successful in a current environment and obviously not be successful was in the wider meta.

00:11:16.700 Like, it's like becoming a hyper-specialized species before a mass extinction event.

00:11:22.140 You can say, well, the species isn't genetically, like, it's not having problems genetically because it's having lots of kids.

00:11:28.860 And the species was sentient.

00:11:30.700 One of them could say, actually, these kids are very non-adaptable to changes in the environment.

00:11:35.380 And so while they are winning within this environment, they are not likely to succeed within multiple potential environments.

00:11:42.040 And worse, you could say, here's this other iteration of the species, which appears to specialize in taking advantage of the way that this species is specializing.

00:11:55.880 And that's sort of what's happening to humanity right now.

00:11:58.860 If any faction of humanity does break out and doesn't fall into this, you know, idiocracy sort of spiral, that faction is going to have a hugely disproportionate amount of power.

00:12:09.520 Because as I said, in many other things, people are going to be bringing AK-47s to an automated drone swarm fight.

00:12:15.860 It's just not going to be relevant what non-technologically engaged cultures do, even if they are, it's just happening to them.

00:12:23.020 Yeah.

00:12:23.180 If you're a culture that thrives because you exclusively or largely depend on exploiting social services of a government,

00:12:34.820 you're going to quickly stop thriving when that government is no longer capable of providing those social services,

00:12:40.620 which is going to happen with demographic collapse.

00:12:43.540 Yeah.

00:12:44.740 Okay, to continue here.

00:12:45.860 This wasn't due to higher birth rates, but better child survival.

00:12:49.000 The rich could afford better nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare, reducing mortality and diseases that disproportionately affected the poor.

00:12:55.460 In contrast, the poorest families often failed to replace themselves.

00:12:58.020 Demographically, their lineages died out and their social positions were filled by the downwardsly mobile offspring of the rich.

00:13:05.420 Clark contrasts this using research with hunter-gatherer societies, the Yenomi, where violence or aggressive traits correlated with higher fertility or with aristocratic classes.

00:13:18.500 In England, whose warfare involvement led to lower reproductive success.

00:13:22.940 So specifically, he pointed out that if you look at tribal groups, what you often see is engaging in warfare and being aggressive towards your neighbors leads to higher reproductive success by the research.

00:13:34.640 But if you were in medieval England, the exact opposite was true.

00:13:38.280 And what led to higher reproductive success was accumulating capital. 0.99

00:13:42.840 Yeah, that's interesting.

00:13:44.780 Now, this seems like potentially an overstatement to me.

00:13:47.560 Like, I would be very surprised.

00:13:49.980 I mean, I guess not that much.

00:13:51.360 If you're talking about a totally decentralized clan-based structure, but then why not, you know, higher reproductive success in, like, Islamic cultures, for example, right?

00:14:01.300 Like, you could have even higher reproductive success by being wealthy in Islamic cultures because you could have multiple wives, right?

00:14:07.940 So, like, if this was in effect, it should have affected them even more.

00:14:11.920 Yeah.

00:14:12.300 Yeah.

00:14:13.200 Actually, good point.

00:14:14.920 Don't know what his counter to that would be.

00:14:17.080 This survival of the richest meant that traits associated with economic success, such as discipline, thrift, and long-term planning, literacy, and nonviolence, were selectively favored and passed potentially through both cultural transmission, e.g. educational values, and genetic inheritance.

00:14:32.160 Downward social mobility and the spread of bourgeois traits over...

00:14:37.120 Bourgeois.

00:14:38.160 Oh, bourgeois.

00:14:39.120 You see, I didn't get those traits.

00:14:40.960 Bourgeois.

00:14:41.320 I love you so much.

00:14:44.940 I love you so much.

00:14:46.200 Why?

00:14:47.720 There's something about, you know, how, like, Elon Musk can't meet a pun he doesn't fall in love with.

00:14:53.280 I can't fall in...

00:14:54.320 I can't...

00:14:55.320 When people mispronounce things, it just kills me.

00:14:58.320 I love it.

00:14:58.780 It's great.

00:15:01.260 It shows I'm American and don't care.

00:15:04.520 Yeah.

00:15:05.320 It's good.

00:15:06.080 So, the rich produced more children than they needed to fill the late positions, so many offspring were demoted socially, becoming artisans, farmers, or laborers.

00:15:15.160 These descendants carried the middle class values and possible genes of their forepowers, enriching the lower classes. 0.96

00:15:22.520 Enriching the lower class. 0.98

00:15:23.620 I didn't write this.

00:15:24.280 It's traits like patience, evident by falling interest rates from 10% in medieval times to 4% to 5% by 1800s.

00:15:32.880 Harder work.

00:15:33.700 We see longer hours, the working class in England, over that time period.

00:15:38.260 Literacy rising from low levels to widespread in the 18th century.

00:15:42.060 And reduced interpersonal violence.

00:15:43.580 Homicide rates dropped dramatically.

00:15:44.700 They pointed out that if you go to the beginning of this period, that the homicide rates in the UK, in sort of the medieval period, were today equal to the highest homicide rates in the world in some country in Africa.

00:15:58.040 So, like, the homicide rates were quite high in the UK back then.

00:16:01.220 And I found actually very interesting that he used interest rates as evidence here.

00:16:06.320 Showing that interest rates had to be competitive in the early medieval period, 10%.

00:16:11.080 And then by the 1800s, it was only 4% to 5%.

00:16:13.080 Which is actually a pretty strong argument outside of how sophisticated the banking system was.

00:16:17.740 It's how much do people within the middle classes actually pay back their loans.

00:16:22.380 And what you're seeing here is they paid back them with a higher probability over time.

00:16:27.160 That's interesting.

00:16:29.080 Clark estimates this process operated over 20 to 30 generations, about 600 to 900 years.

00:16:35.480 Gradually transforming the population's average characteristics.

00:16:38.760 By the 18th century, England had a workforce that was more productive, innovative, and oriented towards saving and investment traits essential for industrial capitalism.

00:16:49.200 Clark suggested this was an evolutionary adaptation from hunter-gatherer instincts, impulsivity, short-term thinking, to those suited for agrarian and eventually industrial economies.

00:16:58.340 He leans towards a genetic component, though he acknowledges cultural mechanisms, arguing that the changes were deep enough to alter human nature itself.

00:17:09.180 Why Britain specifically?

00:17:10.800 This was a question I followed, but I was like, yeah, but why not other places?

00:17:13.740 What happened in Britain that was so unique?

00:17:15.780 Yeah, versus, I don't know, like the Netherlands or Sweden.

00:17:19.280 Well, I mean, all those places industrialized really early.

00:17:21.280 So you need to choose a place to industrialize more slowly.

00:17:24.360 Yeah, I don't know.

00:17:25.600 That's in the area, I would want to think.

00:17:28.000 But, yeah.

00:17:29.160 Or Russia.

00:17:29.960 Russia, I think, would be a better, like, kind of example.

00:17:31.960 Yeah.

00:17:33.340 Okay.

00:17:33.980 So, Clark attributes Britain's primacy to its unique historical condition that amplified its evolutionary process.

00:17:41.020 Institutional stability.

00:17:42.000 From the Norman Conquest in 10,066 onwards, English enjoyed relatively politically stable as an island nation, with secure property rights and low internal violence.

00:17:52.920 This allowed for selective pressures to operate consistently, unlike more turbulent societies like China or India, where invasions or instability disrupted the process.

00:18:01.500 Hmm.

00:18:02.500 Hmm.

00:18:03.600 I don't know if I buy that.

00:18:04.600 Maybe.

00:18:04.780 You don't buy it?

00:18:06.160 Maybe.

00:18:07.380 Early capital.

00:18:08.120 I mean, I guess I'm just more like, yeah, but the Muslim countries it should have been had a louder effect in. 0.59

00:18:13.740 Early capitalist orientation.

00:18:15.600 England's economy rewarded economic trades, e.g. thrift and innovation, more than martial prowess, accelerating the speed of bourgeois values.

00:18:28.420 Thank you.

00:18:29.720 I needed that.

00:18:30.920 Bourgeois.

00:18:32.240 I've got all those bourgeois values.

00:18:34.940 Yeah.

00:18:35.240 What a bourgeois restaurant to go to.

00:18:38.760 Mr. Stanford graduate degree.

00:18:40.800 In comparison to other societies, in places like Japan or China, similar Malsusian dynamics existed, but less downwards mobility or differing selective pressures, favoring conformity over innovation, delayed breakthroughs.

00:18:53.760 Poor countries today, Clark controversially implies, may lag due to incomplete adaptation of these traits, whether genetically or culturally.

00:19:01.820 And if he's right, it means that feeding the poor or preventing poor people from dying is genetically sabotaging many countries. 0.74

00:19:13.160 And that when wealthy countries do this to other countries, essentially they're trapping them in a cycle of intergenerational poverty.

00:19:19.840 And that the UK did well because the poor did die.

00:19:24.860 It didn't help them.

00:19:26.240 He argues that this...

00:19:27.660 It's a bad look, Malcolm.

00:19:29.220 What?

00:19:29.880 It's a bad look.

00:19:30.720 Look, I'm not arguing it.

00:19:32.680 I'm not arguing.

00:19:33.540 I'm just saying that other people are arguing this.

00:19:36.160 I've even argued against his explanations here at times, you know, people.

00:19:40.420 He argues this explanation, not just the Industrial Revolution, explains not just the Industrial Revolution's timing and location, but also persistent global income inequalities.

00:19:51.640 Ooh.

00:19:53.440 Okay.

00:19:53.920 So, before we go into this more, because I think that this is interesting, Clark argues that the transformation took hundreds of years because natural selection and cultural transmission operate slowly across generations.

00:20:05.880 The process began in earnest in the medieval times around 1200 to 1250 post-Norman conquest in 1066, which established institutional stability, when England's economy rewarded traits like thrift, discipline, and literacy with higher reproductive success over 20 to 30 generations, approximately 550 to 900 years.

00:20:25.420 So, the bourgeois traits spread downwards through society.

00:20:29.560 Okay.

00:20:29.900 So, let's try to seal man this.

00:20:32.620 How would this work specifically in England?

00:20:34.760 Really, what he's arguing here is stability in England over this period meant being martial did not lead you to have more children.

00:20:43.580 And he's arguing this was not the case in other regions.

00:20:47.600 And I agree with, I do think, like, if you're looking before this period in England, England was like a bunch of warring clans.

00:20:54.040 It was, like, just as warlike as anywhere else in the world.

00:20:56.940 Yeah.

00:20:57.140 And after this period where England was normalized, it really did suffer a lot less war than other regions.

00:21:02.920 So, like, this extended period of peace in which poor people are allowed to die allowed for this, which plausibly, and then in – but I don't know.

00:21:17.220 I push back because I think that, you know, there was a lot of conflict across the European continent throughout this period, even if people were under large states.

00:21:26.680 And Europe industrialized, like, way faster than other locations.

00:21:30.140 And I don't know if you had this same phenomenon playing out in the American frontier as much.

00:21:36.260 And America industrialized super early, too.

00:21:38.740 But maybe.

00:21:39.540 America, I think, industrialized because so many of the areas where you saw that early industrialization was, like, for example, in the South, where you had a bunch of people who literally moved there to create businesses to make money.

00:21:55.760 And so they would be –

00:21:56.760 You had the selective pressure of only taking the most industrious people.

00:22:01.720 Yeah.

00:22:02.040 And people who were literally only there just to make money instead of to, say, survive.

00:22:06.820 And you had a very different set of – also, like, you had slaves who were working instead of, like, people kind of farming their own land in a much more –

00:22:15.720 The South didn't industrialize for a long time because of slavery.

00:22:19.180 Yeah, it was slower.

00:22:20.100 It was slower because of the – yeah.

00:22:21.360 Yeah.

00:22:21.680 But still.

00:22:23.160 A lot of people don't realize that when they argue that slaves, like, built America or whatever or, like, helped the South economically, that they're basically arguing for slavery.

00:22:34.600 They're basically saying slaves were an economically beneficial institution, when if you actually look at the data, slavery almost certainly economically hurt the South and prevented the South from economically developing.

00:22:46.780 But the wealthy parties and the entrenched power structures within the South benefited from keeping the institution of slavery around because they were in positions of power in part because of the existing economic structure that had been built within the region.

00:23:00.300 But slavery was not good for the South.

00:23:02.080 It wasn't good for the overall economy of the South.

00:23:04.220 It was bad.

00:23:04.980 But after slavery ended, the South rapidly economically developed.

00:23:08.680 And it's not like it was, like, a poise to be about to do this.

00:23:13.260 But to this larger point, a lot of people – if you look at the selective pressures, because we can see by looking at the apologetic scores that we associate with educational attainment, we can see how quickly they're disappearing from population samples today.

00:23:28.600 There was an Icelandic set that shows this well.

00:23:31.160 You can also look at the dropping IQ of people who go to college, and it's dropping by about 0.1 points per year.

00:23:36.360 This was both in a French and a United States study.

00:23:39.000 And so we're looking at about a one standard deviation drop in the average IQ about every 75 years.

00:23:44.200 But what you can see from his data is that this means a way faster drop in the number of people who are born in the top one or 5% of people's IQs.

00:23:52.980 Because you get – that's where things disappear when you get this center moving.

00:23:56.400 It's at the long tail distributions.

00:23:58.900 Yeah.

00:23:59.080 Well, things just seem to be accelerating really quickly and moving faster on all fronts.

00:24:04.040 So we have a – I mean, with this level of technological advancement, it wouldn't surprise me that the changes would be much faster.

00:24:11.920 But I don't know.

00:24:12.320 I mean, like, in general, the concept of evolutionary pressures changing the composition of a population, which in turn changes the way that that population engages with technology and commerce and capitalism.

00:24:29.380 I mean, it makes a lot of intuitive sense.

00:24:31.700 I don't know how you couldn't have that happen.

00:24:34.260 Well, people would say it might take longer than this.

00:24:37.720 But as we can see from the data, it clearly doesn't seem to.

00:24:40.600 I don't know.

00:24:40.940 No, like, literally, like, people who – I don't know.

00:24:44.040 Not to use such a blunt comparison, but people who breed dogs.

00:24:49.040 Like, if you stop breeding dogs with floppy ears, you're going to get no more dogs with floppy ears.

00:24:55.560 You know, like, if you just don't.

00:24:56.800 Yeah.

00:24:57.040 No, I hear you.

00:24:57.640 And there was another interesting study on this.

00:24:59.700 If you're like, oh, like, has IQ ever gone down before after the collapse of a civilization?

00:25:02.940 We see this in a study that came out that looked at Roman populations, and it showed that the Roman IQ reached – or it was propensity for educational attainment, which is what he was studying as well.

00:25:16.720 So IQ is the wrong study.

00:25:17.640 Propensity for what is associated with higher educational attainment today.

00:25:21.040 It went up, like, if you're talking about, like, the early Roman Empire, and then it went up, up, up, until you get to, like, the middle of the Roman Empire, and then it starts to collapse.

00:25:30.120 Yeah, so it precipitated the fall.

00:25:32.840 It precipitated the fall.

00:25:34.100 The collapse in IQ happened before the collapse of the Roman Empire.

00:25:37.060 And after the collapse, it started going back up again.

00:25:39.860 But even today, the average Roman IQ is not as high as it was during the height of the Roman Empire, which is – I mean, it shows how dramatic these effects can be.

00:25:49.480 And so I think one of the things – like, when I talk about the average IQ dropping likely by one standard deviation over the next 75 years, you know, people can hear this, and they're like, well –

00:25:59.760 and I'm talking basically three generations is what I'm looking at here.

00:26:03.060 People can look at this, and they can be like, well, I'm still not going to engage with your weird genetic technology or screening or whatever.

00:26:10.660 And it's like, if you don't find another way to present some form of genetic selection and prevent this from happening within your own population, your population is going to go that pathway as well.

00:26:20.880 Well, people already engage in genetic selection by choosing who they have kids with.

00:26:27.380 That is very hard to do intergenerationally with fidelity around these sorts of things when one of your son has some hot girl who comes from gen pop flirting with them, right?

00:26:37.740 You know, especially if your son is more economically successful.

00:26:40.360 So you really need to culturally impart this.

00:26:45.260 And if you don't culturally impart, like, genes are real and you have to pay attention to them, you are going to end up in the Ungabunga tribe. 0.95

00:26:53.020 You know, the people who are so rabidly against the forms of genetic technology that we use, I do not think that they realize the horrors that they are committing their children to.

00:27:02.860 Now, of course, they'd say about us, like that Addams Family scene, you know, your family is like some sort of weird medical experiment.

00:27:10.360 And I'm like.

00:27:10.620 And we are.

00:27:11.800 Probably.

00:27:12.980 Probably. 0.78

00:27:15.260 I think that's disgusting. 0.96

00:27:17.760 I think their whole family is like some weird medical experiment. 0.98

00:27:21.180 I think they're like circus people.

00:27:24.080 Anyway.

00:27:24.640 I'm down with that.

00:27:26.180 I love you too.

00:27:27.160 I'll point out just one little caveat, too, that any trait that's correlated with success now, it could be intelligence, it could be anything else, could be a death sentence, depending on the conditions you're living with, you know.

00:27:40.800 So to make any blanket value statement about these are good and these are bad genes is dumb, because as soon as the environment changes, that could completely flip. 0.54

00:27:54.940 And so. 0.93

00:27:55.580 I completely agree.

00:27:56.380 I mean, culturally speaking, we would have thought, you know, being Amish is is bad, right? 1.00

00:28:01.980 Like it's not useful if we're talking about like cultural evolution.

00:28:04.420 Yet it turns out that it's really useful in today's environment.

00:28:07.120 I would have thought growing up being an Orthodox Jew isn't useful.

00:28:09.940 And yet they're absolutely thriving if you're looking at like fertility rates and intergenerational cultural fidelity.

00:28:17.040 So it's very hard to predict what's going to be good and what's going to be bad.

00:28:20.880 That's why it's good to only make these decisions, not from a eugenic perspective, i.e. an absolute perspective, but from a polygenic perspective, i.e. from the perspective of your own family.

00:28:29.700 Yeah, you need to make that judgment and you need to understand that you might be wrong and that people should have a right to make their own decisions.

00:28:37.220 Love you to Desmond.

00:28:38.420 I love you too.

00:28:39.160 So just pasta with pesto tonight or anything else?

00:28:43.560 Just pasta with pesto tonight.

00:28:45.240 If I want something else, I may do like some salsa or something, but pasta with pesto sounds really good.

00:28:51.120 And it was extra pesto because it's so yummy.

00:28:54.500 Okay.

00:28:54.800 And do we have any Parmesan left?

00:28:56.300 Maybe.

00:28:57.040 We definitely have a hard cheese from Trader Joe's.

00:29:00.600 Yeah, we got to cut off the parts of it that went bad, but I love that hard cheese on the pasta with pesto.

00:29:05.080 Perfect.

00:29:05.800 Okay, I'll get out the little wheelie grater.

00:29:09.420 We can put it on after it's cooked up.

00:29:11.380 Yeah, I'll let you know as soon as we're ready.

00:29:13.500 You are my princess.

00:29:15.100 I love you.

00:29:16.120 Why do I get to be married to someone as special as you?

00:29:21.040 Because you made everything in our lifestyle the way it is.

00:29:24.500 You built this up.

00:29:25.500 You got the fixer-upper wife, and now you get to enjoy the beautiful renovated house of a wife.

00:29:31.200 Of a wife.

00:29:32.100 That's what you are, the renovated house of a wife. 1.00

00:29:34.000 Yeah.

00:29:34.340 No, you invested a lot, though.

00:29:36.520 Like, fixer-uppers require a ton of work, and I hate the idea of getting fixer-uppers, and you did that on the human level.

00:29:44.840 I mean, you invested in a graduate degree and a complete, like, several complete makeovers, tons of education, aside from formal school education.

00:29:54.360 So I'm just saying, yeah, you earned it.

00:29:57.240 Yeah, yeah.

00:29:57.920 I really rock-tumbled that rock to get a big, shiny stone out of it.

00:30:04.100 Seriously.

00:30:04.700 I can't believe how long you have to do that.

00:30:07.540 When we bought that rock tumbler for the kids, I thought it was like, well, three hours, and it'll be done.

00:30:11.780 And it was like, no, leave this on for days.

00:30:14.880 That was horrible.

00:30:15.940 It's so loud.

00:30:16.820 Who buys the?

00:30:17.580 Why did we do that?

00:30:18.820 And then, remember the kids crying over who gets the red rock after we finally opened it? 0.97

00:30:26.900 Like, the collective grief in our households that we caused simply by doing this whole process of rock polishing and the stupid little plastic discovery education rock tumbler? 0.98

00:30:37.740 It was horrible. 0.99

00:30:38.920 At least we didn't get a nice one.

00:30:41.580 Yeah, I guess.

00:30:42.640 Fair enough. 0.92

00:30:43.080 Just watching a home ads video on women being the worst. 1.00

00:30:47.600 I really feel like, you know, after we did that episode that, like, chilled me on the New York Times writer who was driven crazy by feminism, and I've been reading other articles about, like, what it's like to date these days.

00:30:58.600 And I just feel so, a sense of despair for young people in this generation who don't have their parents actively helping them date.

00:31:05.420 Like, obviously, we're trying to set things up for our kids.

00:31:08.980 We work with other, you know, high-profile parents who are, like, super competent and agentic and orthogonal and try to, you know, keep track of them when they have kids around our kids' age.

00:31:19.140 And we have a big CRM of this, and we're going to be working on building those relationships.

00:31:22.760 I think that that's really the only way to secure a spouse for our kids anymore.

00:31:27.960 That, and I think really underrated is the extent to which parents always did that in the past.

00:31:39.980 They were always pretty involved in their kids' dating.

00:31:42.700 Yeah.

00:31:42.820 And it's only really recently that parents became super hands-off on that front, on average.

00:31:49.920 This expectation that there are these third spaces or there's this dating culture, which I think really saw its big rise in the 1950s, that will facilitate finding a partner, is just crazy.

00:32:05.500 I have been listening to these historical biographies, and, you know, there's, like, there are maybe five men that you meet in, like, a 10-year period who might be people you could marry, you know, if you're a woman.

00:32:18.900 Like, there just wasn't that much choice.

00:32:21.500 Yeah.

00:32:21.780 And so either you would marry the person who's kind of obvious and who would propose to you or you would propose to them because you kind of don't have any other choices, or your parents would get involved and try to help.

00:32:35.640 And now, I don't know, I, we have to get involved again because those third spaces and that dating culture is gone.

00:32:44.900 And it was really unusual in the 1950s when we had this age in which there was almost this manufactured dating culture because I think to a certain extent it was outsourced to the state and schools would literally run videos, like propaganda videos, teaching you how to date and being like, this is how you do it.

00:33:02.580 This is how you get partners.

00:33:03.660 And there was just, there was structured language around it.

00:33:06.240 There was the concept of going steady versus just dating people.

00:33:09.940 And the way to escalate where you would have, you'd get their leather jacket or.

00:33:17.060 Leatherman jackets, there were promise rings.

00:33:19.480 Yeah, there was, it was, it was very, I mean, similar to like the London season, you know, there were, there were, there were signals and things meant something.

00:33:25.740 Except in this case, the parents had abdicated their responsibility and the state slash larger society had taken it on.

00:33:33.920 But then society.

00:33:34.380 This is a really good point.

00:33:35.380 The state took over dating for a period and then it abdicated that.

00:33:39.000 We decided his job was actually to prevent sex in dating, which is really what happened was the, the period of abstinence only and everything like that.

00:33:46.780 That's a really good point.

00:33:47.860 Yeah.

00:33:48.000 The state took over dating and courtship from the family.

00:33:52.500 And then it abdicated that during the abstinence only movement.

00:33:56.720 It was really, really harmful for, for our culture because it, it, it normalized the demonization of human sexuality, which unfortunately just made it cool for kids and allowed kids to develop their own culture around what sexuality was.

00:34:14.880 Which then they went into this period of total debauchery and then everyone was like, well, that's, that's wrong.

00:34:20.580 And now they seem to have forgotten how to have sex, which, you know, we go over on their video, you know, the rates of sex are plummeting.

00:34:27.420 Anyway.

00:34:28.540 Oh, what were people saying on the comments of the video today? 0.98

00:34:30.680 I think in general, it was something along the lines of honestly, just women are terrible. 1.00

00:34:42.780 Women don't realize this, you know, how bad they are. 1.00

00:34:45.820 I think a lot of men didn't actually engage or a lot of viewers didn't actually engage with the topic of this being more about social class than about gender wars.

00:34:55.580 And instead, many are still like repeating as though they're broken records. 0.84

00:35:01.300 Women are delusional and they're, they're hypergamy. 1.00

00:35:04.080 They're trying to get high value men that they don't warrant. 0.98

00:35:08.780 And I agree that that's true, but let's stop beating the dead horse.

00:35:14.160 Okay.

00:35:14.500 Like we're trying to look at this from different angles.

00:35:17.760 I mean, some of these people aren't smart enough to do anything else.

00:35:19.940 They're just like NPCs at this point.

00:35:22.420 Still appreciate the comments.

00:35:25.180 Yeah.

00:35:25.560 I mean, I am.

00:35:27.020 It's great to see you.

00:35:27.940 Thank you.

00:35:28.840 Yeah.

00:35:29.420 Yeah.

00:35:31.040 Anyway. 0.99

00:35:31.440 I mean, you're, you're clearly a terrible woman. 1.00

00:35:33.940 I'm, I'm, I'm so. 0.99

00:35:35.020 Obviously. 0.96

00:35:35.880 And I'm, I'm obviously going to screw you over somehow soon.

00:35:40.920 No, you're fully domesticated at this point. 0.54

00:35:43.220 I don't think that you're not a domestic wife. 0.70

00:35:45.200 You're a domesticated wife. 1.00

00:35:46.900 I had to, to, to break her will.

00:35:49.980 Anyway.

00:35:50.300 How are the berries guys?

00:35:56.740 Do you like them?

00:36:01.640 Good. 0.55

00:36:04.640 Fire in the hole.

00:36:06.220 My hands are getting dirty.

00:36:08.040 Of course.

00:36:08.780 You're outside.

00:36:09.840 Pick a berry and eat it.

00:36:11.400 Octavian, do you want any berries?

00:36:13.240 I'm going to pay my gun up.

00:36:15.400 Octavian, Octavian, are you guys done picking blackberries?

00:36:17.820 Yeah.

00:36:18.960 You want to go back inside?

00:36:20.240 We're going to put water guns.

00:36:22.240 Well, then you need to get on your water shorts.

00:36:24.740 Okay.

00:36:25.100 Let's go.

00:36:27.760 Let's go.

00:36:29.180 And daddy, can you put this somewhere safe?

00:36:33.080 Put it on daddy desk and it'll be somewhere safe, okay?

00:36:36.100 Okay.

00:36:43.100 I don't want to go.

00:36:44.100 I don't want to go.

Based Camp - July 31, 2025

The Genetics： How Brits Went From Tribals to Industrialists

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