Bret Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, was on Joe Rogan’s podcast a few weeks ago. Weinstein’s wife, Heather Heying, a fellow evolutionary biologist, made a brilliant insight that Weinstein relayed. Her take is chilling.

As summarized by Camus at X, November 27:

For the first time in 300,000 years of human evolution, we removed the cost from the single biggest reward nature ever invented -- sex and pair-bonding.

Reliable birth control + abortion = you can now cash the evolutionary lottery ticket without paying the 20-year mortgage of pregnancy, diapers, sleepless nights, and college funds.

Result? An entire generation of 18-35-year-olds walking around with the energy, libido, hormones, and protective instincts that evolution spent millions of years calibrating for child-rearing… but with zero actual children. That energy didn’t disappear. It got redirected.

Heather Heying’s observation is brutal: young women especially began treating ideologies the exact way evolution wired them to treat babies. Climate change, social justice, whatever the cause of the month is -- it gets defended with literal mama-bear ferocity, the same neurochemistry that once guarded a toddler from predators now guards an abstract idea from wrong think.

The takeaway? Messing with nature has unintended, adverse consequences. Legions of females are practically cultists. Many are as barren as the Sahara.

Basic biology: young women are hardwired to bear children. Yet, that simple fact is shrugged off by progressives. Instead of having kids, too many females are adopting malignant social causes.

“Manmade” climate change is one such cause, as Weinstein cites. Woke ideology is another. Socialism? Mamdani won the NYC mayorship in no small measure thanks to younger voters, particularly younger women, who backed him lopsidedly. What about “fascist” Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Left-leaning females were in the forefront cheering Kirk’s murder on social media. Not only is that creepy, but it exposes a growing social pathology.

Government has become a spouse substitute for self-proclaimed empowered females. Government may provide some protection -- in terms of a social safety net -- though little in the way of emotional sustenance and meaning.

A feminist tenet is that not only can women do anything that men do but do it better -- and do it without men. In a common-sense world, that’s good for laughs.

Eschewing nature and evolutionary development are conceits. The interdependence -- the complimentary nature -- of the male-female bond are dismissed. Humans are putty. Gender is assigned at birth. Differences between the sexes? Only if feminists care to assert female superiority. Do hardcore feminists despise men? Appears so.

But feminists may not hate males as much as they do masculinity. Masculinity -- as in strong, resolute males -- is toxic. Goes the trope, women -- invariably left-of-center -- are put off by Donald Trump. He’s a bully, they charge. In fact, Trump is a quintessential alpha male. These women are intimidated by a manly man.

Masculine males are targeted for elimination. For years now, education has been about wringing out the maleness in boys. Ritalin and ample timeouts kickstart the process of rendering boys eunuchs.

Beta males are the feminist beau ideal. Chest-feeding infants (if any are around) and tampons in boys’ restrooms are swell ideas to them. Betas are blends of Pete Buttgieg and Tim Walz.

Decoupling sexual pleasure from commitment made the latter optional. With contraception -- abortion as a backstop -- children needn’t factor any longer. With the 1960s’ counterculture and the 1970s Me Generation ethos, self-preoccupation and pleasure-seeking became totems. Without marriage and children as aspirations and norms, social pathologies have festered and spread.

While unmooring young women and men from traditional roles is taking an increasing toll socially -- and downstream, politically -- there’s another deeper, dire consequence of modern choices. Too few babies being born in the U.S. translates to an epic birth dearth. Replacement rate in western or westernized societies is pegged at 2.1 live births per female. In the U.S., in 2024, the birthrate dropped to 1.6 births per woman. A record low.

Per a CBS News report, July 24:

The U.S. was once among only a few developed countries with a rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself -- about 2.1 kids per woman. But it has been sliding in America for close to two decades as more women are waiting longer to have children or never taking that step at all.

Plummeting birthrates are pushing the U.S. toward a “demographic death spiral.” Fewer babies means fewer productive adults in the pipeline. Society will destabilize. Social strife arises. Societies that skew older mean more consumption and heavier burdens on smaller pools of producers. Social Security is facing demographic-related funding quandary in the early 2030s.

Not that the U.S. is alone. The West and advanced Asian nations face acute problems from fewer births. It doesn’t take a math whiz to appreciate that South Koreans aren’t replacing themselves. The current replacement rate there is 0.85 -- half of the woeful U.S. rate. But that number has ticked up from a low of 0.72 in 2023. South Koreans have a long way to go to save themselves.

One other example, Italy. Italians have a 1.18 birthrate, one of the lowest on the planet. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni considers this a national emergency.

Reversing the trend can be done, but not in short order. Birthing two or more babies per woman would need to be sustained for years. Reaching maturity takes 20 years or longer, defined here as a person engaged productively. But what’s the alternative? Continued mass immigration? Britian, France, Germany, and Sweden are trying that with disastrous results. Third World migrants and Muslims -- often one and the same -- share little in common with their hosts. Uneducated and unskilled migrants are societal drags, as we're seeing, and will be for many years.

Elon Musk and others claim to have the solution: AI and robotics will fix things. Who needs babies? For the record, Musk is a staunch proponent of more births. He commented on X, September 1: “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West, followed closely by migration. There will be no West if this continues.”

In the near future, smart machines will fill manufacturing and service jobs, we’re told. They’ll eventually fill so many niches that work and purpose will need to be redefined. Leisure, not labor, will be the new norm.

Technological advances have solved problems and improved the human condition. We can go as far back as stone tools and, later, the wheel as proof. The world changed with the Gutenberg press. The Industrial Revolution was transformative. But there’s a whiff of utopianism -- “Too good to be truism” -- about claims that smart machines are a panacea.

Moreover, while technology delivers benefits, costs attend. A knife can peel an apple or kill a neighbor. The Age of AI will surely usher in many advantages and solve problems, but as Glenn Beck points out, in the wrong hands -- and AI will fall into the wrong hands -- great harm can be done to our freedoms. Safeguards are critical.

While ramping up of AI and robotics may solve the productivity dilemma, both present new challenges. What sort of society lies ahead if intelligent machines further disincentivize childbearing? A shrinking population of self-absorbed oldsters is valuable how? Organic virtues -- marriage (a ratification of natural order), childbirth, and child raising -- are societal bedrock.

What gives authenticity to the human experience isn’t found in technology, however valuable. Technology is supposed to be a helper, not a replacement. Society is people, not machines.

In the children’s story The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince says, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Perhaps it’s time to rediscover that truth?

J. Robert Smith can be found at X. His handle is @JRobertSmith1. At Gab, @JRobertSmith. He blogs occasionally at Flyover.

Image: Bertha Wegmann