FORUM VOŠ Domažlice

Childless female university graduates

New trends in evolution of humans

This morning Google has brought to me an article from British Internet Newspaper Telegraph showing that there is increasing number of female university graduates who will never have children. Researchers have compared several groups of women with university degree who were born in different years and found out that the number of childless female university graduates increases.

I myself divide people into “memetic” and “genetic” people, though I know this division is highly imprecise. But I see that we humans are driven by two factors: one being genetic drive which basically every creature must have in one or the other way, otherwise there would be no genetic development. The other I call memetic drive, though I know many thinkers have already abandoned the term “meme” and memetics as well.

The only one who slightly suggests some dialectical fight between these two is Blackmore, who says approximately that genes and memes fight in us to gain the power over the other to guide us.

Back to the findings of British researchers: it seems that the life shows at least some shift from genetically driven people to mimetically driven people as these findings suggest. This might be a shock for some people to find out that their “normal” behavior is actually animalistic type of behavior. The mimetically driven people might be the next stage in the evolution of humans, but we will have to solve a problem, with passing on our genes in some other way than we are used t now.

Female university graduates with no children do contribute to the total wealth of nation or mankind as such but they do not pass their genes onto the next generation, which can cause some problems in the short run; especially, the lack of smart children in the next generation. This, of course can be solved technically in the future, and we are heading straight into the type of society described by Huxley in his book “The brave new world”.

In the long run this problem will be solved “technically” and socially as well, some other female or “machine” will “create” the child with the genes of smart women, and some other woman will take care of such child when it is “born”.

It is an evolutionary trap, genetic information is formed and passed over extremely slowly, whereas Memetic” information can be passed over extremely fast, within few seconds, or days compared to many and many generations needed until some kind of genetic change really occurs.

The influence of memetic information will gain more power in the evolution and genetic information along with genetic way of passing such information further will be used only as long as we stay unable to overcome this shortcoming of slow speed of this genetic transfer of information.

I think that the following can be viewed as an example for the difference in speed of passing information over, comparing genetic way and memetic way of passing information. What I mean is the speed of emancipation that happened in last 50 years. When we compare several thousands or even millions of years of evolution in mammals or primates then we can see that females were always, with some minimum of exceptions, subordinated to males, and genetic information was passed over in the slow and old fashioned way. Today with females having access to high memetic information the number of females preferring to bear no children is increasing. These women prefer the memetic type of gaining, processing and transferring information.

This in turn shows that Blackmore had really a good feeling about that, though she was unable to pursue the clue. She may have not fully understood what she actually came across. The idea of fight between genes and memes seems to be a mistake at first sight but it is not.

The very basis of evolution is information, its gathering, processing and passing onto the next biological generation. Genetically encoded information is changing really slowly, from our stand point; the memetic information can be changed within seconds. This difference might be the reason for some females to decide not to have children. Such decision actually is nothing else than a choice what kind of information and how they want to deal with, the memetic or the genetic way.

For working purposes I have made the division into memetic and genetic people already several years ago, based on Blackmore’s correct vision of the dialectic fight of memes and genes. Now this article in telegraph shows I was most probably right, there is a continuous drive for more memetic information.