The British are evolving to be less educated and poorer because smart smart people have fewer children, a new study has suggested.
Researchers have found that natural selection is favoring people with lower incomes and poorer education, and the next generation is likely to be one or two percentage points lower in their educational attainment than they are today.
The evolution also appears to favor people at high risk for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), major depressive disorder, and coronary artery disease, as well as younger parents and people with more sexual partners.
Professor David Hugh-Jones, principal investigator in the Faculty of Economics at the University of East Anglia, said: “Darwin’s theory of evolution stated that all species develop through the natural selection of small variations. inherited that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.
“We wanted to know more about what characteristics are selected for and against contemporary humans living in the UK.”
Economic theory of fertility
The team analyzed data from more than 300,000 people in the UK, extracted from the UK Biobank, a long-term project investigating the contributions of genetic predisposition and environmental exposure to disease development.
Each participant receives a polygenic score: an estimate of their genetic responsibility that roughly predicts a person’s health, education, lifestyle, and personality.
They then mapped the score to the number of siblings and children over two generations to see how populations change over time.
They found that scores correlated with lower income and education were related to having more children, meaning that these people were being selected from an evolutionary perspective.
In contrast, scores that correlated with higher incomes and education were related to having fewer children, meaning they were selected.
The researchers said the findings corresponded to the economic theory of fertility, which was developed more than 60 years ago and found that genes related to high income predict fewer children, because children meant a relative loss of fertility. higher wages.
Flynn effects
Professor Hugh-Jones said that although the effect was small, it could grow for several generations.
“Will we all become poorer, less healthy and educated? I would say maybe to some extent, but more research is needed, ”he said.
“Remember that the environment can be pushing the other way: in the long run, the world is getting richer, more educated and healthier.
“For example, there’s the famous Flynn effect, which shows that the IQ has increased over the last few decades.”
The Flynn effect has shown that there has been a continuous and linear growth of intelligence since the IQ was first measured. For example, between 1942 and 2008, the average IQ score of the British child increased by 14 points.
But the researchers said their findings showed that society could become more unequal in the future, with more low-income and less educated people.
“Our results suggest that natural selection is making the genetic lottery less fair,” Professor Hugh-Jones added.
Writing in the journal Behavior Genetics, the authors concluded: “Many people would probably prefer to have a high level of education, a low risk of ADHD and major depressive disorder and a low risk of coronary artery disease, but natural selection is pushing against the associated genes.with these traits.
“Potentially, this could increase the health burden of modern populations, but that depends on the size of the effect.”