With all due respect to Mr. Trifkovic, if his latest piece on Islam was written by somebody of Jewish descent 90 percent of the commentators would’ve been telling the author that he was being hyperbolic and to fight his own battles.

I'm no fan of Muslim immigration. In fact, I think that best case scenario most European countries will have a significant Muslim minority hostile to their societies forever.

But here in this country -- and Trifkovic doesn’t seem to differentiate between the U.S. and Europe -- of a Muslim population of six million or so, there have been at most 50 arrests for terrorism in the last decade (most of which are probably fake). Considering U.S. support for Israel, the sanctions on Iraq and Iran and the bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yemen, American Muslims have behaved with incredible restraint. For comparison’s sake, and to see what a real problem population looks like, know that one in three black males can expect to spend time behind bars over his lifetime as can six percent of whites.

As I’ve written elsewhere,

And those ringing the warning bells of a “creeping Sharia” are even more moronic. Of 535 members of the US Congress, there is one Muslim and he supports homosexual marriage.  There are no Muslim governors, no Senators, no major media personalities, not even (probably) any Muslim police chiefs or mayors!

So there is no Muslim threat in America, from the position of either terrorism or a building up of institutional power. This couldn’t have been predicted beforehand, of course, so Muslim immigration was a bad idea from the start.  But the West’s problem is non-whites and enforced diversity, not Islam qua Islam, as the case of North American Muslims shows.

Trifkovic actually goes as far as calling for a “ban” on Islam if it doesn’t reform itself to his standards.  In this, he should know that he’s more fanatical than Osama bin Laden, who would let Christians live and practice their religion in Muslim lands.  Would he like to ban the Islam of Muslims indigenous to Europe like that practiced by Albanians and Bosnians, too? Or perhaps have the EU or NATO supervise each mosque to see if it’s sufficiently progressive, as they determined at what point the Serbs were badly enough behaved to be bombed?

We get the ominous warning,

If that loss is not reversed, the game is over anyway -- proving yet again that where God retreats, Allah advances.

I’m sure a man as intelligent and as educated on religious and cultural matters as the distinguished author knows that Allah is the Arabic word for God, a name which Middle Eastern Christians have been ascribing to their deity before the faith became that of Europe.  Literally, what the above statement says is “where God retreats, God advances.” If he’s speaking metaphorically, then we can interpret this as a linguistic point: Trifkovic worries that Arabic will replace the native European languages. But then again not all Europeans speak English. It would’ve made more sense to say “when God/Dieu/Gott retreats, Allah advances.”  Whatever the case may be, language differences with the new migrants is the least of Europe’s troubles.

The author states

America gave whole-hearted support to the worst nation on earth: Saudi Arabia, a veritable hotbed of raw barbarity that makes Kim Jong Il look eminently clubable.

This could only have been written by somebody who either knows nothing about North Korea or thinks sexual promiscuity is the only true freedom, in which case the author would have much in common with Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the tyrants from Brave New World, and Larry Auster (when it’s convenient for his ethnic interests.)  In Saudi Arabia, there’s no death penalty for using cell phones, the economy is freer than most other places in the world (it is in 65 on the Index of Economic Freedom, just behind France, compared to 179th, or last for the Hermit Kingdom), foreign TV shows and the Internet aren’t banned (though censored), citizens can leave the country and come back and there are no concentration camps filled with families of government enemies. Even Christians are better off in Saudi Arabia. Once again, aside from the issue of sex it’s hard to see in what way the Saudi Kingdom is within the same universe of totalitarianism as North Korea.

In Trifkovic’s conclusion, that more Europeans may convert to Islam as time goes by and the religion gains power, I actually think he may be right.  But most of them would be converting from Secular Humanism, not anything that can be called Christianity.  It would be a mistake to believe that whites would be Muslims in the same way Pakistanis or Saudis are; the faith would be molded to conform with the biological characteristics of its adopters, or “Europeanized” as Christianity was in the first place.  I don’t know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn’t be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today.  The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey.  Not that I advocate a European mass conversion -- such an event would have unforeseen consequences beyond what any mortal could predict -- though I could imagine a situation where a Muslim Europe was the least of all evils.

One thing we may consider: from the perspective of white survival, Islam may be the best bet. What would be lost to miscegenation would be more than made up for in higher birthrates. Whether a European Islam would have higher or lower rates of immigration is harder to say. Whites may sympathize with their new Arab and North African cousins, or they may become like other Muslim countries, i.e. restrictionists. Once again, too many variables to make solid predictions. We must have a realistic picture of the Muslim people though and not turn the abstraction "Islam" into some sort of Satanic prototype we expect people to conform to. 

If we are going to reject this scenario, and stick it out with Christianity no matter how much it's failed or try for a revival of Paganism, we have to understand that the hostile minority in the heart of Europe is there to stay. The BNP used to favor repartition. Imagine how much money it would take to convince your average Pakistani or African immigrant (or one who was born in the West and doesn't even speak the language of his ancestors) to go back to his country of origin, multiply it by the number of non-whites and you would easily see that such schemes are impractical for all countries but those maintaining the largest white majorities (you think entitlement programs are expensive!). Genocide should be off the table; the same with regards to crazy ideas like banning Islam or the Koran which would lead to civil war and be incompatible with civilized society.  What options are left? I have no good answers, and neither does anyone else.

Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children in The Wall Street Journal.

The main problem with parenting pessimists, though, is that they assume there's no acceptable way to make parenting less work and more fun. Parents may feel like their pressure, encouragement, money and time are all that stands between their kids and failure. But decades' worth of twin and adoption research says the opposite: Parents have a lot more room to safely maneuver than they realize, because the long-run effects of parenting on children's outcomes are much smaller than they look.

Think about everything parents want for their children. The traits most parents hope for show family resemblance: If you're healthy, smart, happy, educated, rich, righteous or appreciative, the same tends to be true for your parents, siblings and children. Of course, it's difficult to tell nature from nurture. To disentangle the two, researchers known as behavioral geneticists have focused on two kinds of families: those with twins, and those that adopt. If identical twins show a stronger resemblance than fraternal twins, the reason is probably nature. If adoptees show any resemblance to the families that raised them, the reason is probably nurture.

Parents try to instill healthy habits that last a lifetime. But the two best behavioral genetic studies of life expectancy—one of 6,000 Danish twins born between 1870 and 1900, the other of 9,000 Swedish twins born between 1886 and 1925—found zero effect of upbringing. Twin studies of height, weight and even teeth reach similar conclusions. This doesn't mean that diet, exercise and tooth-brushing don't matter—just that parental pressure to eat right, exercise and brush your teeth after meals fails to win children's hearts and minds.

Parents also strive to turn their children into smart and happy adults, but behavioral geneticists find little or no evidence that their effort pays off. In research including hundreds of twins who were raised apart, identical twins turn out to be much more alike in intelligence and happiness than fraternal twins, but twins raised together are barely more alike than twins raised apart. In fact, pioneering research by University of Minnesota psychologist David Lykken found that twins raised apart were more alike in happiness than twins raised together. Maybe it's just a fluke, but it suggests that growing up together inspires people to differentiate themselves; if he's the happy one, I'll be the malcontent...

If you enjoy reading with your children, wonderful. But if you skip the nightly book, you're not stunting their intelligence, ruining their chances for college or dooming them to a dead-end job. The same goes for the other dilemmas that weigh on parents' consciences. Watching television, playing sports, eating vegetables, living in the right neighborhood: Your choices have little effect on your kids' development, so it's OK to relax. In fact, relaxing is better for the whole family. Riding your kids "for their own good" rarely pays off, and it may hurt how your children feel about you.

I've known for years that science has shown parenting within a normal range means almost nothing but when I read what cross-adoption studies tell us I'm still in awe.  Then again, we are biological animals, so why should such a thing be surprising?  It's most likely because of the extent to which we've been misled, sometimes purposely and sometimes not.  The Left needs environment to matter because they want to remake society and acheive equality while conservatives need to stress the importance of parenting to defend the traditional family.  Though while your kids are financialy dependent on you you should be able to control their behavior, and it's sad how many parents can't, culture, their social group and genes will determine what kind of adults they become.

I made the same argument in a book review I wrote for The Occidental Observer after comparing the results of middle and lower class child rearing case studies and reviewing the exhausting and expensive regimes many of the better off subject their children to.

Environmentalist ideology has led society’s genetic elite to absurdly overestimate what a stimulating environment can do for their children, and needlessly fear a less managed existence.  After giving a son or daughter the basic necessities of life and educational opportunities, further investments likely result in diminishing returns.  If intelligent parents knew this, they would be less busy, have much less anxiety and possibly have more children, since doing so would be more financially feasible and enjoyable.

Caplan puts it in economic terms: as parents are artificially imposing a higher cost on themselves for each child the demand goes down.

So on this Father's Day to all readers with a decent IQ (if you read a site like this for pleasure it's likely adequate) and no hereditary diseases, criminal record or monstrous deformities, know that the most important thing you can do to have successful children is make sure they come into existence in the first place.  Nature will take it from there. 

According to statistics released on May 17, Germany’s birthrate is now at an all-time low of 1.38 children per woman.  Every year there are 190,000 fewer Germans.  The news is rarely much better anywhere else in the high IQ world.  South Korea and Japan are at 1.25 and 1.37 respectively.  I don’t want to go into why this is the case here, but express surprise from an evolutionary perspective at the fact that such low birth rates persist.

Let’s agree that the following propositions are indisputable.

-Evolution is about survival and reproduction.  Let’s say the equation is (S)(R) where S is either 0, died before being able to reproduce, or 1, living long enough, and R how many children one has.  
-In first world countries all but a negligible few are alive at puberty and for a good many years after that.  For all practical statistical purposes, S is 1 for everybody and can be removed from the equation.    
-This is unique in evolutionary history, even among humans.  In the United State at the beginning of the twentieth century 10% of babies died within their first year, compared to about 0.5% today.
-For at least a generation now reliable contraception has been available for the masses.  
-TFR is not about financial incentives/disincentives as we see the fewest babies in the wealthiest countries and culture (being Muslim) and HBD factors (being black) seem to predict fertility better than econonmics.

Considering these points, there are five, and only five, things in the modern world being selected for or against assuming that these traits are heritable.

1) Ability/willingness to find (and settle for) a heterosexual partner
2) Number of children desired
3/4) Against IQ/conscientiousness, as it takes foresight to use contraception consistently and effectively
5) Virility/fertility

Unique living circumstances make for unique selection pressures.  Think of all that a bird living in the wild has to contend with for its offspring to be born and survive.  For the S part of the equation it must avoid diseases, outwit/outfly predators and find food.  To do this it depends on its brain, limbs, wings and senses to be in working order.  It then needs to find a partner and have the offspring itself avoid predators and disease.  Even in our hunter-gatherer past a full thirty percent of males died violently.  A significant percentage of people died young from disease up until the last several decades.   All that has been neutralized.

Modern human evolution resembles husbandry more than it does anything in the state of nature.  Since a conscious breeder has the advantage of taking luck out of the equation and equalizing S (sometimes prey or a murder victim is just unfortunate!), the animals under his control evolve much more rapidly.  Just look at how quickly dogs and cats have appeared compared to the time it naturally takes for a species to develop.  With practically no humans in first world countries being unlucky from a survivalist perspective, personalities and predispositions are almost all that count in how we are being selected.

To go back to our five big traits, we see that the first and last have little variation within a population.  Most people find a partner and are able to reproduce.  Pace the “gamers,” 90% of white men still get married at some point, making number one all but irrelevant.  And only a small minority are impotent, asexual, exclusively homosexual or unable to have children for some other reason.  These traits have always been selected against. This leaves intelligence, conscientiousness and desire for children as the big three being selected for/against.  We’ve seen from more than a few studies that IQ is falling about 0.8 points a generation, or 3-4 points a century.  A little multiplication will tell us that at this rate of decline whites would become as simple as Australian aboriginals in a millennium, a heartbeat considering that the major races have been separated for 50,000-100,000 years and have about 50 points between the most and least intelligent populations.  It would take less than 200 years for whites to equal Mexicans.  As I said before, our grandchildren could see one of the racial achievement gaps closed!  I’m sure something similar would be found for conscientiousness.

As for birth rates, the desire for children should be growing at least as fast as IQ is dropping.  In West Germany the pill was released in 1961.  Two generations should be enough to see a slight up tick in the TFR not just for Germans, but all first world populations.

I believe we are seeing here the demographic equivalent of the Flynn Effect for the trait of wanting children.  Throughout the twentieth century in the Anglo-American word the lower classes had a higher birthrate than the wealthy, but regardless IQ increased.  This would be a refutation of the dysgenic hypothesis, if the evidence and logic behind it weren’t impeccable.  What seems to be the case is that while genotypic intelligence dropped, i.e. the potential average a population can be expected to reach in any given environment/culture, phenotypic IQ went up as improvements in nurture outpaced the deterioration in the gene pool.

There is some emperical basis to my speculation.  Harpending, Cochran and others found in 2007 that evolution has been speeding up ever since the switch to agriculture.  Extreme changes in living conditions and bigger populations have served as catalysts for rapid biological tansformation.  As the world population has never been larger and technological advancement never faster the rate of change is likely to be accelerating still.

So while we can be certain that in the same environment/culture the German population of 2010 would have more children than the German population of 1961, the cultural changes of the last fifty years mask the genotypic increase in desire for children.  The low overall birthrates among more intelligent and responsible populations will eventually rebound though, as culture swings in many directions but strong selection for wanting to be a parent will remain as long as nobody in the West is starving or otherwise dying too soon.  In the long run, we can simply close the borders and not worry about Western nations becoming underpopulated no matter how bleak things look in the immediate future.  Now if only the drops in IQ and conscientiousness had such a simple solution.