2 ms·

yes people with longer lifetimes will put off having children which means conception events for each generation will have longer time intervals in between

• sho 7y ago
  Ah, fair enough, I didn't think of that. It's still a moot point however. There is no meaningful human evolution anymore in terms of adaptation to anything in nature. Human biological fitness these days, outside hunter gather societies I suppose, is about beauty or intelligence and not a whole lot else.
  • radford-neal 7y ago
    So, war has now been abolished, so there's no advantage to being healthy enough to run away from the fighting and survive to reproduce? And famine is no longer possible? Being small enough to survive on limited food is no longer of any use? (Or alternatively, being big enough to take other people's food...) And a deadly pandemic is now impossible? So a good immune system doesn't give you any advantage? And an innate tendency to behaviours that reduce the chance of infection won't help you? And the big one... Do all the beautiful and intelligent people now have the same number of children? Or do some have none, and some have ten, for reasons that may well be genetically influenced?
    • sho 7y ago
      Your first three examples are speculative edge cases, to say the least. But your last is interesting - and touches on something I was going to type but didn't. Yeah, evolution might be happening there, and not in a good way. There's evidence that smart couples have less children, because they're busy with careers. There's evidence that religious people have more children than non-religious. So yeah, to the extent that evolution is still in play in modern society - we're probably going backwards.
      • ptah 7y ago
        Religions seem to be ideas that know how to propagate well and ensure their hosts multiply faster too