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> This is not, at all, what biology would predict. Why isn't it? Afaik in biology, healthy populations tend to be stable populations. Populations that shrink
by freeflight 8y ago
> This is not, at all, what biology would predict.
Why isn't it? Afaik in biology, healthy populations tend to be stable populations.
Populations that shrink or grow too fast are often a sign for something going very wrong, usually having to do with sustainability.
That's why I think people in rich nations having fewer children is a feature and not a bug. It's the result of increasing living standards because when you have very low child-mortality rates you don't need to "try" several times to get one into adult age, just like the availability of contraception allows for more reliable family planning.
The same applies to having a social security net: Without that, you have to depend on your offspring to take care of you when you get too old to work/sick.
In a situation like that, more off-spring is always better, as long as you get them through childhood into productive adulthood. Each child is a future potential care-taker and each one of them could end up being a big earner. In that context, a whole lot of people treat getting children like playing the lottery.
- toasterlovin 8y agoBiological organisms are machines for turning energy into additional copies of the genes that created the organism. People in the developed world have access to an obscene amount of energy. Yet fertility rates are below replacement level in basically every developed country (if you don't count first generation immigrants). And when you zoom in, you notice that poor people have more children than all but the top several percent of earners (so fertility goes down as access to resources goes up). If you saw something similar in any other species, it would be the biggest unsolved riddle in biology. Something truly strange. And yet here we are basically not paying attention to it at all.