Another Evolutionary Paradox?

The IDiots are remarkably good at uncritical thinking. When you couple this tendency to ignorance of evolution, you come up with some remarkable conclusions.

Take, for example, the well-known fact that rich people tend to have fewer children than poor people. What this means is that poor people are better at passing on their genes (alleles) to the next generation than rich people. If there is a genetic component to richness and poorness then poor people are "more fit" than rich people and, eventually, the poorness alleles will become fixed in the population. That's just a fact and it doesn't matter what you might think about the genetic advantage of being rich.

Of course there may not be any significant difference in the genetic compositions of rich people and poor people in which case the argument becomes moot.

Let's see how an anonymous IDiot deals with this information on their main blog site, Evolution News & Views (sic) ... [Survival of the Poorest: Another Evolutionary Paradox].

Here's another evolutionary paradox: the "demographic transition." We've alluded to this before, but why not recall the point? Darwin notwithstanding, it seems to support the view that the meek shall inherit the earth.

By all accounts, the rich should be, in Darwinian terms, the fittest. They have the most resources, and the most opportunities for advancement. Yet they leave fewer offspring. That's the finding of a large study of Swedish families that's just been completed.

Nature recently recognized that this has been a known contradiction to evolutionary theory.

"Fitness" is defined in all evolutionary biology textbooks as ...

The fitness of a genotype is the average lifetime contribution of individuals of that genotype to the population after one or more generations ... A general term for this number is reproductive success, which includes not simply the average number of offspring produced by the reproductive process, but the number that survive, since survival is prerequisite to reproduction.

Futuyma, D.J. (2009) Evolution p. 306

Do the IDiots ever read basic introductory evolution textbooks or do they just pull out "evolutionary paradoxes" from their nether parts? There's no contradiction with evolutionary theory and there's nothing in "Darwinian terms" that defines fitness as anything but reproductive success.

The only "puzzle" might be the naive presumption that rich people should have more reproductive success than poor people but we've known that this isn't true for over one hundred years.

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[Photo Credit: Ten children of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy (the 11th child was born after Bobby was killed). This is the exception that proves the rule. Prompted by last night's viewing of the remarkable documentary Ethel which also prompts the question, "Why doesn't America have principled politicians like Bobby Kennedy any more?"]