r/K selection & abortions

[shkrobius]

I've mentioned that in the US, the abortion rate among black women is > 4 times this rate for white women; the rate for Hispanics is also much higher. If one looks at the historical trends for, say, teenage girls, the ratio of abortion to birth rates for Blacks and Hispanics stayed virtually constant since 1990. Eg

Comments

[vdinets]

I still think it's mostly cultural differences than biological. Separating cultural evolution from biological one is very difficult here. Besides, I am not convinced that K-types are currently favored by biological evolution, considering that poor people still have more children than the rich. To me it seems that the traits currently favored by biological evolution are the inability to properly put on a condom and the tendency to be deeply religious.

[vdinets]

In any case, biological evolution simply cannot be fast enough to account for rising IQ scores.

[poltorazhyda]

if you're talking about the Flynn effect, those scores are rising across the board, regardless of race, so the gap is unaffected

[vdinets]

That's not clear: some papers claim that Blacks are closing the gap, others say they do not.

[shkrobius]

Then what is going on? Telling that X is cultural is not telling. I'd like to know why a particular culture leads to X. This Guttmacher Institute article on the disparities is telling. After some going around they honestly admit that the reasons for the disparities are unknown and most likely ethnicity-based. Then they say: oh, it is less important to know what causes these disparities then finding a way of overcoming those. Then they suggest the very measures that failed to eliminate these disparities or even change these however minutely after 20+ years. I think they are addressing the problem from the wrong end. One needs to know the cause of these disparities, only then one can hope of addressing the problem.

Poor people have long been eclipsed by the middle class in the US.

[vdinets]

I don't know, but it seems to me that some cultures just occupy a social niche that makes it difficult for them to move away from low-class mentality. Gypsies in Europe, Blacks in the US. Note that black West Indian immigrants don't have any of those social problems. Queens is the only county in the US where Blacks have higher income than Whites - and only because most Blacks there are from the Caribbean.

[shkrobius]

You seem to view these problems as solely income problems. Part of these are income problems, but it goes much beyond that. I do not think it is a class thing. This "mentality" made perfect sense in the r-world; it is not abnormal or deficient or asocial or faulty; it just belongs to a different time and a way of life. It is being heavily penalized by the encroaching K-world which is decimating it in every imaginable way, including negative eugenics. There is not even a word characterizing this situation: perhaps r-cism? It makes sense to me: yes, the K-world would do precisely that to the r-minority, because this minority, by the fact of its very existence, threatens and undermines K-dominance. This should result in two cultures: in the dominant K-culture, every r-trait will be pictured as asocial and hostile. The r-culture will be the denialism of K-values. The K-world will impose and enforce its stereotypes on the r-folk trying to rob them of their chief genetic advantage. If you look at it from this perspective (the collision of r

[vdinets]

Not at all, I'm just using income as an indicator of the ability of a certain culture to adapt to the society surrounding it. I think we are converging on the same thing here. But I am not sure that K strategy is being biologically selected for at the moment (if it ever has been).

[shkrobius]

I do not think it is. That is the horror of the situation: because K cannot enforce its domination through entirely natural means, it is doing it through cultural means, using its own chief genetic advantage. Logically, each group will try to use their strongest weapon against each other.