4 ms·
If we wait long enough, this problem will fix itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle Too
by araneae 17y ago
If we wait long enough, this problem will fix itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
Too bad evolution is so slow.
- Retric 17y agoHumans don't have a 1:1 M/F ratio. It starts at ~1.05:1 at birth and with men dieing off sooner.
- Rexxar 17y agoThe 1.05:1 probably permits to have a 1:1 ratio at the age of reproduction in a pre-industrial societies.
- araneae 17y agoExactly. The only individuals relevant to evolutionary processes are those that reach reproductive age.
- DaniFong 17y agoCompletely false. Consider bees. Almost all females in a bee colony don't reproduce, but if the other females left the whole colony would collapse, no work would be done.
- araneae 17y agoFirst of all, honey bees are an exception to Fisher's principle. Secondly, your reasoning is more generally completely irrelevant. What you said was analogous to this: Children can kill their mothers in childbirth, so obviously kids before reproductive age are still relevant! Ok, so obviously non-reproductive individuals can affect the transmission of a person's genes. So can hurricanes, viruses, and cows. However, when you're solving your nice systems of differential equations to look at the evolutionary dynamics of various genes, you only consider reproductive individuals, because these are the only ones that transmit genes. Yes, non-reproductives can have effects in evolutionary dynamics, but only as passive environmental elements. Dying because you have a gene that makes you susceptible to a virus is the same as dying in childbirth, to evolutionary processes. There's natural selection against the genes that made you weak to the virus, and natural selection on the genes that made your fetus too large. I hope that makes sense. It can be hard to communicate with people from different fields; they use words differently than you do. (I'm a graduate student in evolutionary biology)
- DaniFong 17y agoIf you paid closer attention to the physicists, you'd realize that exceptions break the rule: they're clues to a more general theory. Is it so inconceivable that a postmenopausal woman might provide some fitness benefit for their kin? What evolutionary basis could there be for a person risking their life for a stranger? There are many more forces at work here than strict biological decent.
- araneae 17y agoYou missed the point. The grandmother hypothesis doesn't contradict what I said at all. If you wanted to model evolutionary processes, you only stick in the reproductives, because they're the ones that will be producing more copies of their genes in the next generation. As for risking your life for a stranger, evolution doesn't always find the maximum; it often settles in local maxima. If a strategy works 51% of the time, it will persist. And yes, there are more forces at work than biological decent, but I don't see how that's relevant to anything I said. It's so imprecise it can't help but be true. So much for physicists.