Britain 'is experiencing same decline as Rome in 100BC'

[Viggen]

..so fellow Brits, apparently in about 500 years it is all over....

 

Britain is experiencing the same decline as Rome in 100BC, with the collapse of civilisation inevitable, a scientist has warned.

Dr Jim Penman, of the RMIT University in Melbourne, believes Britons no longer have the genetic temperament to advance because of decades of peace and a high standard of living. He claims that the huge success of the Victorian era will not be repeated because people in the UK have lost the biological drive for innovation.

 

via The Telegraph

 

[GhostOfClayton]

I'm certainly feeling lacking in biological drive this afternoon.

[Onasander]

I've been wondering about certain countries like Britain and the Netherlands, they more or less experienced a very sharp and brutal selective curtailment of their best breeding stock due to the success of their empires and ease to immigrate away.

 

Yes, both built large empires, but the kind of guys motivated to do as pioneers so largely just left, didn't come back. Your military population has a hugh overlap with the former, and did return, but in both countries cases, they suffered a series of devastating wars back to back. After a while, only the weaker ones who stayed behind made up the breeding stock.

 

So I expect to see a general cognitive and physical decline of select features in such societies. Right now, they are benefitting from scientific advances that their previous generations made in food, economics, and pharmacology, but they've long since given up on this. Europe has become more socialistic, which cut down painfully on medical advances (a few universities have research staff still working on this, but numbers much lower now than before), they rely more and Kore on food imports, but insist irrationally on organics, which are more prone to the effects of crop failures and are carriers of disease, and less wholesome and nutritious, and the industrial base is being systematically undermined.... but they insist they are more "innovative". Yeah....

 

I think the US is set to inherit some cities rather peacefully here in a few generations, after the main European population reasons itself to death.

[GhostOfClayton]

I've been wondering about certain countries like Britain and the Netherlands, they more or less experienced a very sharp and brutal selective curtailment of their best breeding stock due to the success of their empires and ease to immigrate away.

 

<snip>

So I expect to see a general cognitive and physical decline of select features in such societies.

 

It's all well and good getting Darwinian on our asses, but how would your theory account for me:

 

a ) being a Brit

b )  having a telephone number IQ?

Edited May 5, 2015 by GhostOfClayton

[Onasander]

Yes, we have speed dial here too, I'm 7 on my works' speed dial, but I wouldn't identify my IQ with it.

 

You ever seen the movie "Children of Men"? Its a British movie about this very subject.

 

We'll finally have a place to keep all our nuclear waste and criminals. It would be a cross between Mad Max and Escape From New York, and the warden can have a omnimous dark tower overlooking Birmingham, where the flying heads from the movie Zardoz can fly about keep order by chucking the filthy natives shotguns and packets of English Breakfast Tea to keep them content.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kbGVIdA3dx0

Edited May 6, 2015 by Onasander

[caldrail]

So an academic in Australia has indulged in a spot of pom-bashing? Nothing new. But then Australia still has to catch up, and Britain remains a world leader in many spheres with innovation a major part of British success in engineering around the world. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to run for a bus....

[Onasander]

Opening up a graphite research facility hardly counts. Just about any country can produce ceramic engineers. You make the graphite as thick as a atom, and it becomes a superconductor. However, its going to be extraordinarily hard to patent legally any discoveries, as graphite is internationally accessible, and easy to toy with, and different countries merely gotta show they have a unique way of making a certain array of molecules to get around patent infringement. This strategy never works in the long term. You end up socializing everyone else's scientific endeavors.

 

I really am unaware of anything, outside of firearms and graphite, the Brits are being innovative at.

[GhostOfClayton]

I really am unaware of anything, outside of firearms and graphite, the Brits are being innovative at.

 

Well, I’m not sure you’re looking in the right place.  But let’s assume you’re not going down to your local library to do your research.  You’re probably using the world wide web to do that, which was an invention of Tim Berners-Lee.  And you’d be doing that on hardware whose design can be traced in an unbroken line through Alan Turing right back to Charles Babbage.

 

But what have the Brits done for us lately?  Let’s limit our thoughts to the last half century (it would be cheating if we were allowed to include such things as the BBC or the NHS).  I’m going to start with my local wonder of the modern world, the Humber Bridge.  When it went up in 1981, it was the longest bridge in the world (1.4km; a record it was set to hold until as late as 1998).  To this day, it is longer than any bridge in the Americas.  While we’re talking about bridges, there’s the highest bridge in the world, the Millau Viaduct in France.  Designed by Norman Foster (who also gave us the Hearst Tower in New York).  Sticking with engineering, I really should mention the only rotating boat lift in the world, the quite remarkable Falkirk Wheel.

 

If you live in the US, and would like to see the Falkirk Wheel, it will take you bloody ages to get there, because you’d have to fly at sub-sonic speeds.  Back in the day, of course, you could have chosen to fly on the world’s only ever supersonic passenger jet, Concorde.  No-one has managed to get a supersonic passenger jet up and running since.  And who invented the jet engine?

 

Best leave the field of Engineering behind (otherwise, we’d be here all day), let’s move on to DNA.  Obviously, Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin discovered DNA (2 of whom were Brits), but that’s too early.  DNA fingerprinting was invented by a Brit, and human DNA was sequenced by British researches.  All that stem cell research (e.g. stem cell replacement into bone marrow for cancer sufferers)?  British.  MRI and CT scanners?  British.  The cancer gene map?  Brits.  Omega-3’s effect on the brain?  Discovered by a Brit.

 

Fermat’s last theorem?  Solved by a British mathematician.

 

The iPod?  Designed by a Brit.

 

I could go on, but you get the idea.

 

I'll leave you with a fascinating statistic:

 

Around half of the US population have a below average IQ, whereas conversely, the same proportion of UK citizens have an ABOVE average IQ.

[GhostOfClayton]

I take it all back.  Watching the Brexit fiasco unravel over the past 3 years had lead me to think my fellow country-men and women are not the giants I'd previously thought them to be.  The whole thing is humiliating, and the rest of the world have every right to laugh heartily at us.  I can only apologise profusely in embarrassment.  Sorry!

PS The worst may be yet to come.  Boris Johnson is odds-on favourite to be the UK's Prime Minister within the month!  The shame of it all!

PPS If you don't know what 'Brexit' is, it's a contraction of BR (BRitain), EX (EXit), and IT (all turned to s*IT).

[caldrail]

That sort of parallel has been on forums for the last twenty years.  Strictly speaking, the context is wildly different thus a true comparison is not possible. However, the recent indecisive politics in British Parliament has made me wonder about the parallel with the senate of the late Republic. Of itself, merely a phase we're going through, since really it's effective and charismatic leadership we lack. But on the other hand, the chaotic factionalism makes me wonder if we're risking extremist government in the same way that the Senate failed to obstruct the rise of warlords in the period I previously mentioned. If so, we're in danger of a government we really don't want. On the other hand, as has been said a number of times on television interviews with politicians and members of the public, we're British, and therefore will eventually muddle through irrespective of the ridiculous situation we've created for ourselves.