You have said it.

Ponder how when the bearers of a culture allow it to be changed, unintended lethal effects follow fast.

This is one of the great insignts of conservativeism, that the ways of the ancestors are not to be dispensed with lightly, even if we see no immediate hard and possible short-tem advantage in so doing.

Nonsense, OJ. This validates Dawkins theory of Punctuated Eqililbrium, where things change slowly or not at all, except when they don't. You just don't understand Science......

It's Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium, which is just a scientific name for what appears to be periodic intervention by a designer.

Thanks OJ. I guess I was laughing too hard the first time I read the theory, and got the name wrong.

It gets better. When sociobiology came along and Gould realized that Darwinism refuted his own Marxism and supported Nazism he became a crypto-creationist:

www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm

I completely missed that. Better and Better!

"It also shows that while people still think it is best to have children while young, they are being forced to delay family life by career pressures and the growing difficulty of finding a partner."

"Forced" huh? Give me a break. Make the choice if you wish, but don't pretend it's not your own choice.

This shows what happens in the socialist paradise which is Labour's UK. Faced with the lifetime of pettifogging rules they'll have to follow if they tie themselves down by taking on responsibilities, young people say 'to hell with it,' and just party. Compare alcoholism in the Soviet Union, it's the same story.

As this survey shows, children have become a 'fashion accessory' which some people feel they can afford, but many others don't.

While I decry the attitudes and behaviors expressed in the article, and agree with b, I must also admit to feeling a small amount of satisfaction when I read things like this, since it means that my people's genes and memes are ever-closer to ruling the Earth.

Among my family, of my generation, we're averaging 4.5 children per couple, and counting.

How is "Culture matters--nature doesn't" a conservative insight? That's the central plank of every radical left group that wants to dispense with "so-called human nature" and remake society.

And isn't nature, in OJ's view, 100% the work of God? So the human creation of culture always trumps God's work? I'm not being snide, I honestly don't understand what he's trying to say here.

Yes, there's no such thing as Nature, just Creation.

Ah, but culture is our nature. We rule the earth as co-creators, and we do so by culture. Go back and read the creation story.

My point, the conservative point, is that we may not lightly tamper with the ways of the ancestors, with prejudice and prescription.

If we stray too far from those ways we run the risk of a lethal loss of nerve. Such a collapse is well along in Japan, by many accounts, following the forced reformation of Shinto.

Britain is reeling under the downfall of class privilege, and old Europe is in ruin concomitant to loss of Christian faith.

Some among us might may find any of the foregoing cultural modifications desireable, not anticipating that the change someone has engineered would wreck the seamless web of a folk's culture.

Thus far, America's culture of the perpetual West, of God, guns and guts, we call it, has proven resistant. Multiculturalism, the idea that every culture is as good as every other,is our great enemy.

The conservative point though only applies to our own culture. The rest we should tamper with and do.

Good point.

It is indeed our people's culture ". . .beneath the starry flag [to] civilize 'em with a Krag*."

*U.S. military rifle from the Spanish-American War era.

"Both men and women, according to the poll, believe it is more important for women to enjoy themselves than to have children"

What an odd thought. I thought I was enjoying myself by HAVING children. I mean, when I die, it isn't my clients that will mourn me.

Sharon, thank you for your thoughts. The equation goes like this: 'Women should have children' = 'Women should stay home and make babies' = 'Men are pigs'.

We should be urging white females to NOT have kids; the fewer of them around, the better it is for everyone