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Strange7 comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure I understand what you mean. This isn't a matter of interpersonal communication, it's just individual married couples more-or-less rationally pursuing the 'pass on your genes' mandate by maximizing the survival chances of one or two children rather than hedging their bets with a larger number of individually-riskier children.
If a gene leads to greater fertility rates with no drop in survival rates, it spreads. Similarly if a meme leads to greater fertility with no drop in survival rate and is sufficiently resistant to competing memes it too spreads. Thus, those memes/memetic structures that encourage more reproduction have a selection advantage.
In this case, the meme in question leads to a drop in fertility rates, but increases survival rates more than enough to compensate.
I don't really think your characterization of the global drop in fertility rate is right (farmers with big families survive just fine!) but that isn't really the point. The point is, mormons aren't dying and neither are lots of groups which encourage reproduction among their members. Unless there are a lot of deconversions or enforced prohibitions against over reproducing the future will consist of lots of people whose parents believed in having lots of children and those people will likely feel the same way. They will then have more children who will also want to have lots of children. This process is unsustainable.
I'm expecting a lot of deconversions. Mormons already go to a lot of trouble to retain members and punish former members, which suggests there's a corresponding amount of pressure to leave. Catholics did the whole breed-like-crazy thing, and that worked out well for a while, but catholicism doesn't rule the world.
I think the relative zeal of recent converts as compared to lifelong believers has something to do with how siblings raised apart are more likely to have sexual feelings for each other, but that's probably a topic for another time.