Britons are evolving to be less well-educated and poorer because smart rich people are having fewer children, a new study has suggested.

Researchers have found that natural selection is favouring people with lower earnings and poorer education, with the next generation likely to be one or two percentage points lower in educational attainment than today.

Evolution also appears to be favouring people with a high risk of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), major depressive disorders and coronary artery disease, as well as younger parents and people with more sexual partners.

Prof David Hugh-Jones, lead researcher from University of East Anglia’s School of Economics, said: “Darwin’s theory of evolution stated that all species develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive and reproduce.

Darwin probably does explain ADHD, depression, coronary arteries and clearly sexual voracity is going to have an influence. But propensity to education? That’s a cultural thing, not genetic, and is therefore Lamarckian, not Darwinian.

It’s still of interest of course. Greg Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms” is based upon the idea that the bourgeois outbred the proletariat, but it’s the cultural inheritances which mattered, not the genetic. So, we might indeed claim that the reverse is true now.

But then if education is something that reduces evolutionary success then perhaps we’ve got too much of it? We’re above that optimal point in the quantity delivered?

A cheeky - but still containing a certain truth - proof of this being that the stagnation of the British economy that folk shout so much about correlates with the expansion of the university system. Pulling the young out of doing something productive for three years only works if what is learnt then increases productivity for the rest of the working life.

This not something greatly in evidence. Arts degrees for men, for example, on average reduce lifetime earnings. Grievance studies of near any kind reduce lifetime earnings - they’re unproductive investments that is. Another test would be the rate of student loan repayments. Some vast percentage of them aren’t, given that the holders of these degrees don’t manage to raise their incomes even to median UK income as a result of that education.

All the measures that we have of the economic productivity (without saying anything at all about whether it’s nice to have three years as a student) of education say we’ve got too much of it at present.

Add in that reduction in fertility which is reducing that cultural, Lamarckian, inheritance which was, as Clark insists, the very cause of the rise of the economy in the first place and it would seem that we’d do well to reduce the amount of education in society.

Of course, this has been said before as Kingsley Amis pointed out, more means worse. A useful proof being those who have been hired to teach at Islington Technical College once it was upgraded to a “university”.