Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author.
What we see within human populations is that those who rise in status through skill and industriousness, whether in good times or bad, will tend to have an increasingly easier time of it than the competition.
Indeed, the higher one’s status—and the greater one’s access to resources and protection from threats of all kinds—the easier life becomes.
However, this is when dysfunctional mutations increase, as there is little or no culling force to keep them from doing so.
Indeed, unlike the deliberate pace at which this can be expected to occur for nonhuman species that are much more or entirely dependent on genetic modification for adaptation, humans are able to modify their behavior more rapidly via decision-making and cultural behavioral modification—for better or worse.
Therefore, it is typical within a family that a highly successful generation may not keep up the same high behavioral standards that led to success.
Whatever the case, those in the next generation will almost certainly have an easier time of it than their parents, and are less likely, on average, to develop the same levels of talent, motivation to succeed and drive that their parents had.
For this reason, it is rare for highly successful parents to produce offspring that perform at the same level, let alone at a higher one.
In fact, this second generation tends to more or less keep the momentum created by their parents going. By the time the third generation rolls around, the performance ethic of the first generation will have suffered a second round of deterioration.
By the fourth generation it is common for the regression to be complete.
Return to Escaping the Trap – Part 2 or go to Escaping the Trap – Part 4
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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.
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