And has been for the many generations over which humanity has gotten more secular.
> So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
But for generations that hasn’t been what has happened, despite the correlation between religiosity and fertility not being a novel thing that developed this century? Why could that be? Because religion isn't a genetic trait. Fertility of populations and popularity of ideas and practices have some interaction, sure, but not in the simplistic “spread of a genetic lineage determines spread of culture and ideology” way you are trying to push here.
The second thing is that you're likely dramatically overestimating the secular population. Gallup has been polling people on religion since 1948. Here [1] are those data. As recently as 2004, the percent of people with no religion was in the single digits, so the overall relevance was low. And the inverse correlation between secularity and fertility is also quite new driven by a rather large number of new factors - antagonistic attitude towards gender roles, the embrace of non-marital sex largely enabled by the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, and so on. So in general, we're entering into relatively uncharted waters, but it's not hard to see what lies ahead as consequences of fertility decisions lag behind those decisions themselves by ~60 years.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
(That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
This is one (of many) reason why having children is so rewarding. The idea of 'transferring ones consciousness' into something is nonsense - at best you die and then have a chatbot that does a questionable imitation of you. But with children you directly transfer many of your genetic and physical/mental characteristics, and you can then instill your environmental characteristics into them. It's about as close as you can realistically get to 'transferring your consciousness.'
Interestingly this, like many things, also only becomes even more true as we age. Depending on your age, you might find yourself having more similarities with your own parents than you might care to acknowledge, depending on your relationship with them.
If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation.
The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population.
These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate.
> For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%.
These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors.
Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities.
Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.
Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised!
The sad thing is that culture will probably have less concern over individual rights and freedoms, and much more likely to be collectivist and religious.
Not sure I like where this is headed, honestly, but I hope I'm not around to see the fall of liberal democracy.
You make the same mistake as GP in confusing memetics with genetics. Cultures survive by ideas and behaviors spreading, not by genes. People can spread ideas without having children, and people can have lots of children and have their ideas die out.
This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.