Dysgenic Human Husbandry
From environmental toxicity to propaganda and the way back
Since paleolithic times modern humans have on average lost about a baseball-sized amount of brain mass.
Why would that be?
Well, life has gotten a lot easier, which means it doesn’t take as much brain power to get through it.
What about the famous Flynn effect, showing rising IQs every year over the last century since IQ testing began?
Well, first of all, does that really pass the sniff test?
Do people seem to be becoming more intelligent over time?
Most would say it’;s just the opposite, and in fact it’s suspected that the rising IQ test scores are simply due to various measurement errors.
One cause has been shown to be an increase in correct guessing, i.e. a change in test-taking behavior whereby test takers on average have become more comfortable guessing with each passing year on items they’re uncertain of.
If there are 4 multiple choice responses you would expect 1/4 of the guesses to be correct and thereby raise the average scores.
Other physiological measures, particularly reaction time, that directly correlate with intelligence by measuring the actual processing speed in the brain, but which don’t vary with familiarity, training or changes in test taking behaviors, have notably been dropping for the last 150 years since we started measuring them.
Is there any consolation to be had? Are we becoming dumber, but more muscular and athletic?
No such luck: along with losing our brains, we’re also losing our strength and physical prowess.
A study showed that just in the last 50 years in English 10-11-year-olds, standing-long-jump and vertical-jump distances dropped by 11.8 % and 16.9 %, respectively, even though BMI remained unchanged.
58 years of Japanese data showed that the generation with the strongest performance (1970–1993) scored at about +0.5 SD (across grip, sprint, jumps & throw), whereas the weakest cohort (2003–2021) averaged roughly –0.2 SD—a drop of ≈ 0.7 SD from peak to trough.
To put that in perspective, in IQ terms it would mean a drop from an above average IQ of 107.5 to a slightly below average IQ of 97, all in just 3 decades.
This is of course because physical activity levels are declining with every passing year.
When I was growing up we played outdoors in the real world every day for hours. Now most kids play indoors in virtual worlds all day and much of the night, meaning they don’t stimulate muscle building the way earlier generations did.
And with the advent of advanced AI systems and robotics our cognitive and physical prospects as a species are getting dimmer by the day.
Offloading progressively more physical work means people get progressively weaker.
Offloading progressively more mental work means people get progressively less sharp.
But what’s worse is that over long time spans natural selection does it’s job and since it takes less to get by, people invariably become less.
Along with changes in behavior we’re plagued by the pollution of our environment.
Not the bugbear CO2, that is after all just plant food, but real pollution like chemical waste products, pharmaceuticals, and hormones that persist in the water supply.
For example Atrazine, the most common pesticide contaminating groundwater, which can partially feminize male frogs, and in some cases even turn male frogs into fully functioning females that can mate with males and become pregnant.
RFK Jr, in a recent public appearance warned that todays teenage boys have lower testosterone levels than todays average 68 year old man (whose relatively high testosterone is a holdover from his more benign childhood and young adulthood).
Testosterone increases with exercise, competition and exposure to danger, but that’s only part of the story.
Xenoestrogens, environmental contaminants that mimic the effects of estrogen in the body, harm both boys and girls, accounting in large part for every common feminine malady, as well as many male ones, includinga trend towards less pronounced masculine development, in other words: feminization.
Xenoestrogens include plastics, forever chemicals, food and pharmaceutical additives, and cosmetics ingredients. Even something as seemingly benign as the ink on printed receipts transdermally introduces xenoestrogens into the bloodstream.
Some argue that the collapse of men and women towards a common phenotype is a good thing, but it’s certainly not a reflection of the inherent tension present in the natural order.
The universe is composed of complementary opposites that together comprise the whole of all natural systems.
Male and female, day and night, activity and rest, summer and winter. This observation has famously been encapsulated in the Chinese principle of yin and yang, but was noted by all ancient civilizations.
Natural systems fall apart when these distinctions become blurred or entirely obliterated.
When a man becomes less masculine, his sperm necessarily become less potent and the same for a woman and her eggs. This leads to collapsing birth rates, a trend that, if continued, obviously ends in extinction.
Balancing of masculine and feminine energies are also required for healthy societies.
There are situations like war where more masculine traits like aggression are necessary and feminine passivity would be misplaced. And there are situations like nursing babies where feminine empathy are necessary and masculine apathy would be counterproductive.
This isn’t to say that the opposites are entirely distinct.
Just as the yin and yang carry a seed of each other within themselves, the best men temper their masculinity with feminine characteristics, and the best women likewise.
But the fact remains that one aspect is ascendant over the other and leads to the natural gravitation (as opposed to compulsion) towards traditional gender roles.
Whether you believe in intelligent design or natural evolution, what’s clear from animal husbandry is that within species variability is quite broad and can be directed by artificial as well as natural selection.
Humans already have a wide range of variability based on eons of optimization for their varied natural environments, but unintended “human husbandry” via chemical and electromagnetic toxins and intentional social engineering for uncritical acceptance of official narratives, passivity and “tolerance” could dramatically drive the devolution of humanity in the future.
Much lip service is paid to diversity nowadays, but the actual agenda is the end of diversity. Genetic diversity in a species helps deal with black swan events, since some subset of the population has traits that better help deal with an unexpected drastic changes to the environment. Those traits then spread through the population, benefitting everyone. Genetic diversity is a form of wealth and lack of it is species poverty. If everyone is already the same when the black swan hits, all our eggs are in one basket. We might have what it takes to survive and we might not.
Encouraging diversity does not mean mixing every one together until within a few generations they’re all genetically and culturally the same. Encouraging diversity would actually mean encouraging the maintenance of naturally coded barriers to mixing.
Diversity is beautiful and diversity is strength, but what we call diversity is neither.
What’s wonderful about travel is experiencing something different. Traveling across the melting pot of America is different than traveling across the segregated countries of Europe. In America you can go coast to coast and never see anything different. Most of the country, with some minor exceptions, has become one identical monolith of construction styles, cuisines, and cultures.
At an individual and family level fighting back against the modern world’s inexorable tide of dysgenic human husbandry takes daily sustained effort and purposefully abstaining from some of modern life’s conveniences.
Many of these conveniences have definite benefits, but they’re often outweighed by their harms.
The good news is that reversing these trends may not be that difficult.
Domesticated dog breeds, including highly specialized ones like Bulldogs or Dachshunds, swiftly revert back towards a generalized feral "village dog" body shape and behavior within just a single generation with their offspring becoming characterized by leaner, medium-sized builds, upright ears, and curled tails.
The feral dog’s coat coloration tends toward patterns like brown, yellow, and brindle, and their coats become notably thicker, coarser, and more weather-resistant.
Behaviorally, these formerly docile, dependent pets rapidly form territorial packs with clear hierarchical structures and become cautious scavengers and aggressive hunters, much more like their distant ancestors.
This highlights the profound importance of our environments, and provides hope, not just inter-generationally, but also individually, because normalizing the environment is not just what renormalizes sexual and behavioral differentiation, but what cures disease.
The approach to this basically boils down to detox and nutrition.
But given the choice between comfort and disease vs struggle and health, most people choose the former.
Most people choose to be the caged lion dependent on it’s captors, rather than the free roaming king of the jungle dependent on it’s own strength and wiles.
If you’re ready to break free of your self imposed limitations and take a higher, harder road, then there’s no time like the present. One way that I know works is to talk to my own family healer, Shahbaz Ahmed at mygotodoc.com/hakim.
There are two popular conceptions of history: that it’s a linear progression from primitive, backwards societies to more advanced and enlightened ones, or that it’s a linear decline from more natural, enlightened societies to more artificial and disconnected ones.
But the ancients saw history as more cyclical, an idea fleshed out in the book The Fourth Turning, and perhaps more famously simplified and memetically encapsulated to some extent in the hard times meme above.
It seems we have come upon hard times, but we can hope that they will eventually forge strong men and women to lead us out of them and begin the cycle anew. And perhaps there is a way to create an upward sloping series of cycles rather than restarting at the same place or lower each time…
It may take well over a thousand words to begin to do justice to a picture, and while pictures can help illustrate ideas, truly complex and nuanced ideas can only be fleshed out in extended written format, with pictures serving only to help elucidate, rather than fully encapsulate them.
So, if there’s any truth to the meme then one sign that our hard times have created strong men will be the reversion back to communicating complex ideas instead of relying on imperfect memes, a return to reading The Fourth Turning rather than being satisfied with a memetic distillation, a tweet or a podcast.
But the most obvious sign will be that men are men again and women are women.
A great post Dr. Haider!
I appreciated your alluding to the premise that diversity is really homogenization, clothed in virtue signaling subversion and intentional dismantling of true genetic and cultural diversity.
I hope you are correct about our ability to elevate these cycles/turnings, with each evolution, but history has shown the opposite.
It will take an awakening of a larger remanent than we have now, in order to raise the baselines across societies - globally.
This post is a great call, to that end.
Meant to have strong lives by nature's laws (based on abundance), yet weakened by an existential (lifeless symbol-riddled) central banking system (based on debt and scarcity).
Factor this. Otherwise, we were never wise.