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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2349 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 11, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Any country that passes through this population bottleneck experiences immediate and intense natural selection for increased fertility, which means that those nations that started earlier (France in the case of Europe and Japan in the case of East Asia) will revert sooner to a more sustainable birthrate. There is also more variation within Japan itself than Korea, with minorities such as Okinawans bringing up the average fertility. Lastly, Japan has in recent years implemented a more liberal immigration policy, with large numbers of Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Indonesian, etc. workers (or mail-order brides) moving in to maintain the integrity of the labor force and having more children than the natives.

I keep seeing this heritability of fertility argument repeated especially with respect to France but is there any real evidence for it at all?

France was demonstrably the first country in Europe to undergo the demographic transition and has a higher fertility rate today than its neighbors (I picked a source from before the recent migration wave to eliminate that confounder).

Yes I am aware of that but one country having a slightly higher rate of a single metric really doesn’t indicate an evolutionary process

What part of this fertility is white people? Which are the only relevant for me.

Most of it.

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