[nhchris]

A movie was filmed to answer your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

A comedy, but based in fact - e.g. educational attainment is inversely correlated with fertility. For a less individual view, you can visit Wikipedia's list of countries by fertility rate, and sort them by said rate.

[zem]

There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly — if you sneer at the underclass and think your line is superior, I suspect you won't have to go back very many generations to find your stock comes out of that same seething mob. Do you have any Irish, or Jewish, or Italian, or Native American, or Asian, or whatever (literally—it's hard to find any ethnic origin that wasn't despised at some time) in your ancestry? Go back a hundred years or so, and your great- or great-great-grandparents were regarded as apes or subhumans or mentally deficient lackeys suitable only for menial labor.

Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they're breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.

Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn't enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain.

-- https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/05/08/there-are-no-...

[rcme]

> Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it

As a parent, I grapple with this often. I want to believe that I can influence my child's intelligence. But there are some studies on same-age unrelated siblings in the same household that show IQ has a very weak correlation compared to biologically related siblings in the same household: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06271-015

[skinnymuch]

> Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they're breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs. Presuming you propagate at all, your genes are destined to disperse into that great living pool of humanity. Get used to it.

This is so bigoted.

[nhchris]

Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80% - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

> Are you staring aghast at the latest cluster of immigrants in this country, are you fretting that they're breeding like rabbits? That generation of children will be the people your kids grow up with, go to school with, date, and marry. It may take a while, but eventually, your line will merge with theirs.

Please don't spread the great replacement conspiracy theory.

> There are no grounds to argue that there are distinct subpopulations of people with different potentials for intelligence. Genes flow fluidly

I don't see why we need to talk about "distinct subpopulations" at all, when individuals suffice. Besides, if you think "gene flow" means intelligence is immune to evolution, doesn't that apply to every other trait as well? What you're arguing is that evolution doesn't happen.

[slaw]

The first few minutes is documentary.