If you’re worried that stupid people have more kids, don’t be (yet)

(credit: Universal Pictures)

It’s a common perception that less-educated people have more children. The idea causes much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over the possibility that human populations might become stupider over the course of generations. But it’s actually pretty difficult to confirm whether there really is a reproductive trend that would change the genetic makeup of the human population overall.

Jonathan Beauchamp, a “genoeconomist” at Harvard, is interested in questions at the intersection of genetics and economics. He published a paper in PNAS this week that provides some of the first evidence of evolution at the genetic level in a reasonably contemporary human population. One of his main findings is slight evolutionary selection for lower education—but it’s really slight, just 1.5 months less of education per generation. Given that the last century has seen vastly increased education across the globe, and around two years extra per generation in the same time period as Beauchamp’s study, this genetic selection is easily outweighed by cultural factors.

There are other important caveats to the finding, most notably that Beauchamp only looks at a very small segment of the global population: US citizens of European descent, born between 1931 and 1953. This means that we can’t generalize the results to, say, China or Ghana, or even US citizens of non-European descent.

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