4 ms·

Are people who have more than one child (or 2.1, if you’d like for monogamous couples) selfish too?

Ericson2314 6y ago
No, or not nearly as much. The needs of a child are mediated by productivity, which has been wildly different throughout history. E.g. maybe we'll have practical fusion in 100 years and can support 100 billion people no problem. But the surface area of the earth is fixed. If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it with a giant seastead.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  That’s not my point. And you didn’t answer my question. You spoke of commons as collective inheritance. A serial breeder..say..someone who has a couple of children with different women more selfish than someone who has 1-2 children. The commons will be saturated by the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels. Is that selfish? Since we are talking about selfishness and commons as a collective inheritance, define commons.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    I really don't care about individual-morality questions that do not show up in the aggregate. These are perhaps good philosophical problems to ponder, but the legacy of liberalism is such that we think that they imply questions to how society should be run. Nope, they don't. These serial breeders do not show up in the aggregate in any country I've every been too. If you are worried about population rates in dirt poor countries, the per-capita consumption is so much lower you shouldn't bother. > The commons will be saturated by the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels. Do you have evidence to think this numerically insignificant behavior is so genetically hereditary we should worry about it?
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      Yes. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2019/demo/sehsd-wp2019-07.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa... : census for 2019 and men’s fertility
  - 8note 6y ago
    This parent does not get that benefit though, each child does usually when you say somebody is selfish, they're actually doing stuff that gains benefits for themselves.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      Parents pass down their genes. They benefit.
      - perilunar 6y ago
        The genes benefit. The individual doesn't really. Dawkins wrote a book about it: 'The Selfish Gene'.
        jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        The book came out in 1976 and there has been a lot of discussion and debate around it since then. Wikipedia can update you and is easy to look for links in the reference : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene [..] The view of The Selfish Gene is that selection based upon groups and populations is rare compared to selection on individuals. Although supported by Dawkins and by many others, this claim continues to be disputed.[33][34] While naïve versions of group selectionism have been disproved, more sophisticated formulations make accurate predictions in some cases while positing selection at higher levels.[35] Both sides agree that very favourable genes are likely to prosper and replicate if they arise and both sides agree that living in groups can be an advantage to the group members. The conflict arises in part over defining concepts: "Cultural evolutionary theory, however, has suffered from an overemphasis on the experiences and behaviors of individuals at the expense of acknowledging complex group organization...Many important behaviors related to the success and function of human societies are only properly defined at the level of groups".[34] In The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), the entomologist E. O. Wilson contends that although the selfish-gene approach was accepted "until 2010 [when] Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and I demonstrated that inclusive fitness theory, often called kin selection theory, is both mathematically and biologically incorrect."[36] Chapter 18 of The Social Conquest of Earth describes the deficiencies of kin selection and outlines group selection, which Wilson argues is a more realistic model of social evolution. He criticises earlier approaches to social evolution, saying: "...unwarranted faith in the central role of kinship in social evolution has led to the reversal of the usual order in which biological research is conducted. The proven best way in evolutionary biology, as in most of science, is to define a problem arising during empirical research, then select or devise the theory that is needed to solve it. Almost all research in inclusive-fitness theory has been the opposite: hypothesize the key roles of kinship and kin selection, then look for evidence to test that hypothesis." According to Wilson: "People must have a tribe...Experiments conducted over many years by social psychologists have revealed how swiftly and decisively people divide into groups, and then discriminate in favor of the one to which they belong." (pp. 57, 59) According to Wilson: "Different parts of the brain have evolved by group selection to create groupishness." (p. 61)[..]
  - paconbork 6y ago
    > the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels I believe you mean the needs of actual human beings born of such people, to whom the God-given rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and yes, the collective inheritance of the commons, are owed.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      Can you please point out to me the original source where said ‘God-given rights’ are proffered?
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it with a giant seastead. And even then, the surface area of the Earth is still fixed. So is the volume (unless you're willing to destroy Earth as we know it in the process). So a seastead just kicks the can down the road. If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it in space.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    1. I agree that people need to be housed. 2. But I don’t agree that property rights ought to be snatched from owners. 3. I also don’t think we could keep on increasing the world population when we have clearly crossed carrying capacity. They are all different issues and points. Not necessarily related. You don’t need separate a person’s property from him just because a few million people are homeless. You don’t need to keep on breeding homo sapiens to out breed all other species and destroying habits and environment to support the extra billions of human beings. Because the apex predator can wipe out every eco system to support itself. And at a faster rate if it outbreeds the rest of the species. Half the planet needs to be uninhabitated and rewilded for species and habitat preservation, conservation and restoration. As apex predators, if we don’t protect habitat and other species below us, it is like sawing off the main trunk of a tree below us while perching on the top most branch. We will become extinct as a species. One day, I am going to be able to buy thousands and thousands of acres and let nature take it back. There is a better chance that we will survive as a species if we reduce our population rather than keep on increasing it exponentially. Because we are guaranteed to outbreed every other species upon whom we rely on for our survival. The planet survives because of a delicate balance between the ocean’s temperature and carbon levels in our atmosphere. We really don’t understand it fully yet. It’s premature to assume that we can keep on breeding to perpetuate our species. It’s the most unscientific, irrational and illogical way to solve a problem. It certainly is a sure way to erase ourselves from the universe as we know it.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      > But I don’t agree that property rights ought to be snatched from owners. Nobody's calling for any snatching of property rights. What's being called for is for landowners to internalize the opportunity costs they've externalized on the rest of society (and, indeed, the planet). > I also don’t think we could keep on increasing the world population when we have clearly crossed carrying capacity. As much as I agree, unfortunately humans happen to enjoy making more humans (and indeed, arguably have a biological drive to do so), so barring either the ability to move humans off Earth or some Malthusian catastrophe, global population will continue to increase whether we like it or not. > Half the planet needs to be uninhabitated and rewilded for species and habitat preservation, conservation and restoration. Which is a lot easier when people are penalized for contributing to suburban and rural sprawl.
chillacy 6y ago
If you’re hinting at taxing having more kids, I know it’s an unpopular idea but honestly it sounds decent to me. It just doesn’t mesh well with the declining birth rates in developed nations. Some countries are paying people to have kids, and it’s not working very well.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Well. It is a statistical certainity that we will hit a peak and the population numbers will fall off the cliff. My hope is that if we can manage population numbers before we run out of resources, we can stave off the severe resource crunch that will come when we don’t have a sufficiently large gene pool when the decline begins. The problem also is that our efficient supply chain has ensured that one or two rich deposits of xyz resource takes care of the whole world. Many rare metals and precious metals mined for electronics and phones come to mine. Phosphorous comes to mind. We use it as fertilizer but it’s not renewable. The river sand we use for construction. Top soil that is depleted and water sources that are poisoned due to Ag runoffs and Ag soils that are tilled away. And I am not even talking about global raising temperatures or carbon. Take insects for example. The bees we need for pollination. The frogs..especially insects and reptiles and amphibians need habitat to survive. Their disappearance shows that there is a tear in the web. It indicates that we have destroyed their environment or poisoned it or made it impossible for them to reproduce it sufficient numbers to keep their future generations up. They are on the other side of mammals like us or elephants etc..because we live so long, it would take a while and a lag before we see a decline. They have such short life spans and can have a couple of hundred generations within a matter of days, they are like early warning systems. Given this, we know that habitat is disappearing and ecosystems are in peril. Poverty is disappearing and we are expending huge amounts of energy to keep our soon to be 10 billion people by 2050. Even if population becomes stable before plummeting as the old people become more more numerous and are non reproductive and die off..even if we have sufficient young people to keep our species alive and even if we find it ways to live smaller and differently...the non renewable resources once gone are gone. Top soil once gone is gone. Soil phosphorus once depleted isnt coming back. Mining has to end some day. Oil will become scarce someday. Homes build on Ag land and forests cannot be razed down to become habitat and forests and environment and habitat again. This might not happen in your lifetime or mine, but our species extend beyond one or two generations. We owe it to generations down the line to preserve the planet. We can’t synthesize our own food. We rely on our environment and natural resources as an apex predator sitting on top of the food chain. The most urgent thing to do is multi part: 1. Find a way to preserve genetic material effectively and create a gene data base. We do that with seeds in Ag. There is a seed vault in Svalbard(don’t know if it still exists) 2. Invest in anti ageing therapies. And by this I don’t mean youthfulness of looks but ageing is the slow decline of cognitive faculties and organ failure and cell aging. 3. Have a half-earth philosophy as promulgated by E.O.Wilson to keep intact our environment and habitat that relies on that environment. I am not attempting to suggest that we have to become Luddites or start controlling population numbers. If we just back off and stop incentivizing high birth rate, within 120-150 years, we might get this under control. No need for coercion or mandatory depopulation methods. Stop encouraging people who can’t afford children to keep having children. That will do. China supplies most of the developed world with what we need at cheap prices. These are mass produced products. In return, through belt and road initiative, China has the entire Southern Hemisphere trading food and Ag products to support its 1.4 billion. It’s easy to make 10 billion iPhone chips. It’s not as easy to feed 1.4 billion people pork with available resources. So with declining populations, the world still needs to deploy and deplete its resources to trade due to our higher consumption habits. But exponential population increases are a funny thing. Exponentially 1.4 increases faster than 350 million. Some resources don’t increase at all and in fact non renewable. What do we do now?

No, or not nearly as much. The needs of a child are mediated by productivity, which has been wildly different throughout history. E.g. maybe we'll have practical fusion in 100 years and can support 100 billion people no problem. But the surface area of the earth is fixed. If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it with a giant seastead.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
That’s not my point. And you didn’t answer my question. You spoke of commons as collective inheritance. A serial breeder..say..someone who has a couple of children with different women more selfish than someone who has 1-2 children. The commons will be saturated by the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels. Is that selfish? Since we are talking about selfishness and commons as a collective inheritance, define commons.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  I really don't care about individual-morality questions that do not show up in the aggregate. These are perhaps good philosophical problems to ponder, but the legacy of liberalism is such that we think that they imply questions to how society should be run. Nope, they don't. These serial breeders do not show up in the aggregate in any country I've every been too. If you are worried about population rates in dirt poor countries, the per-capita consumption is so much lower you shouldn't bother. > The commons will be saturated by the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels. Do you have evidence to think this numerically insignificant behavior is so genetically hereditary we should worry about it?
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    Yes. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2019/demo/sehsd-wp2019-07.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa... : census for 2019 and men’s fertility
- 8note 6y ago
  This parent does not get that benefit though, each child does usually when you say somebody is selfish, they're actually doing stuff that gains benefits for themselves.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    Parents pass down their genes. They benefit.
    - perilunar 6y ago
      The genes benefit. The individual doesn't really. Dawkins wrote a book about it: 'The Selfish Gene'.
      - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        The book came out in 1976 and there has been a lot of discussion and debate around it since then. Wikipedia can update you and is easy to look for links in the reference : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene [..] The view of The Selfish Gene is that selection based upon groups and populations is rare compared to selection on individuals. Although supported by Dawkins and by many others, this claim continues to be disputed.[33][34] While naïve versions of group selectionism have been disproved, more sophisticated formulations make accurate predictions in some cases while positing selection at higher levels.[35] Both sides agree that very favourable genes are likely to prosper and replicate if they arise and both sides agree that living in groups can be an advantage to the group members. The conflict arises in part over defining concepts: "Cultural evolutionary theory, however, has suffered from an overemphasis on the experiences and behaviors of individuals at the expense of acknowledging complex group organization...Many important behaviors related to the success and function of human societies are only properly defined at the level of groups".[34] In The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), the entomologist E. O. Wilson contends that although the selfish-gene approach was accepted "until 2010 [when] Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and I demonstrated that inclusive fitness theory, often called kin selection theory, is both mathematically and biologically incorrect."[36] Chapter 18 of The Social Conquest of Earth describes the deficiencies of kin selection and outlines group selection, which Wilson argues is a more realistic model of social evolution. He criticises earlier approaches to social evolution, saying: "...unwarranted faith in the central role of kinship in social evolution has led to the reversal of the usual order in which biological research is conducted. The proven best way in evolutionary biology, as in most of science, is to define a problem arising during empirical research, then select or devise the theory that is needed to solve it. Almost all research in inclusive-fitness theory has been the opposite: hypothesize the key roles of kinship and kin selection, then look for evidence to test that hypothesis." According to Wilson: "People must have a tribe...Experiments conducted over many years by social psychologists have revealed how swiftly and decisively people divide into groups, and then discriminate in favor of the one to which they belong." (pp. 57, 59) According to Wilson: "Different parts of the brain have evolved by group selection to create groupishness." (p. 61)[..]
- paconbork 6y ago
  > the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels I believe you mean the needs of actual human beings born of such people, to whom the God-given rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and yes, the collective inheritance of the commons, are owed.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    Can you please point out to me the original source where said ‘God-given rights’ are proffered?
yellowapple 6y ago
> If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it with a giant seastead. And even then, the surface area of the Earth is still fixed. So is the volume (unless you're willing to destroy Earth as we know it in the process). So a seastead just kicks the can down the road. If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it in space.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  1. I agree that people need to be housed. 2. But I don’t agree that property rights ought to be snatched from owners. 3. I also don’t think we could keep on increasing the world population when we have clearly crossed carrying capacity. They are all different issues and points. Not necessarily related. You don’t need separate a person’s property from him just because a few million people are homeless. You don’t need to keep on breeding homo sapiens to out breed all other species and destroying habits and environment to support the extra billions of human beings. Because the apex predator can wipe out every eco system to support itself. And at a faster rate if it outbreeds the rest of the species. Half the planet needs to be uninhabitated and rewilded for species and habitat preservation, conservation and restoration. As apex predators, if we don’t protect habitat and other species below us, it is like sawing off the main trunk of a tree below us while perching on the top most branch. We will become extinct as a species. One day, I am going to be able to buy thousands and thousands of acres and let nature take it back. There is a better chance that we will survive as a species if we reduce our population rather than keep on increasing it exponentially. Because we are guaranteed to outbreed every other species upon whom we rely on for our survival. The planet survives because of a delicate balance between the ocean’s temperature and carbon levels in our atmosphere. We really don’t understand it fully yet. It’s premature to assume that we can keep on breeding to perpetuate our species. It’s the most unscientific, irrational and illogical way to solve a problem. It certainly is a sure way to erase ourselves from the universe as we know it.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > But I don’t agree that property rights ought to be snatched from owners. Nobody's calling for any snatching of property rights. What's being called for is for landowners to internalize the opportunity costs they've externalized on the rest of society (and, indeed, the planet). > I also don’t think we could keep on increasing the world population when we have clearly crossed carrying capacity. As much as I agree, unfortunately humans happen to enjoy making more humans (and indeed, arguably have a biological drive to do so), so barring either the ability to move humans off Earth or some Malthusian catastrophe, global population will continue to increase whether we like it or not. > Half the planet needs to be uninhabitated and rewilded for species and habitat preservation, conservation and restoration. Which is a lot easier when people are penalized for contributing to suburban and rural sprawl.

chillacy 6y ago

If you’re hinting at taxing having more kids, I know it’s an unpopular idea but honestly it sounds decent to me. It just doesn’t mesh well with the declining birth rates in developed nations. Some countries are paying people to have kids, and it’s not working very well.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Well. It is a statistical certainity that we will hit a peak and the population numbers will fall off the cliff. My hope is that if we can manage population numbers before we run out of resources, we can stave off the severe resource crunch that will come when we don’t have a sufficiently large gene pool when the decline begins. The problem also is that our efficient supply chain has ensured that one or two rich deposits of xyz resource takes care of the whole world. Many rare metals and precious metals mined for electronics and phones come to mine. Phosphorous comes to mind. We use it as fertilizer but it’s not renewable. The river sand we use for construction. Top soil that is depleted and water sources that are poisoned due to Ag runoffs and Ag soils that are tilled away. And I am not even talking about global raising temperatures or carbon. Take insects for example. The bees we need for pollination. The frogs..especially insects and reptiles and amphibians need habitat to survive. Their disappearance shows that there is a tear in the web. It indicates that we have destroyed their environment or poisoned it or made it impossible for them to reproduce it sufficient numbers to keep their future generations up. They are on the other side of mammals like us or elephants etc..because we live so long, it would take a while and a lag before we see a decline. They have such short life spans and can have a couple of hundred generations within a matter of days, they are like early warning systems. Given this, we know that habitat is disappearing and ecosystems are in peril. Poverty is disappearing and we are expending huge amounts of energy to keep our soon to be 10 billion people by 2050. Even if population becomes stable before plummeting as the old people become more more numerous and are non reproductive and die off..even if we have sufficient young people to keep our species alive and even if we find it ways to live smaller and differently...the non renewable resources once gone are gone. Top soil once gone is gone. Soil phosphorus once depleted isnt coming back. Mining has to end some day. Oil will become scarce someday. Homes build on Ag land and forests cannot be razed down to become habitat and forests and environment and habitat again. This might not happen in your lifetime or mine, but our species extend beyond one or two generations. We owe it to generations down the line to preserve the planet. We can’t synthesize our own food. We rely on our environment and natural resources as an apex predator sitting on top of the food chain. The most urgent thing to do is multi part: 1. Find a way to preserve genetic material effectively and create a gene data base. We do that with seeds in Ag. There is a seed vault in Svalbard(don’t know if it still exists) 2. Invest in anti ageing therapies. And by this I don’t mean youthfulness of looks but ageing is the slow decline of cognitive faculties and organ failure and cell aging. 3. Have a half-earth philosophy as promulgated by E.O.Wilson to keep intact our environment and habitat that relies on that environment. I am not attempting to suggest that we have to become Luddites or start controlling population numbers. If we just back off and stop incentivizing high birth rate, within 120-150 years, we might get this under control. No need for coercion or mandatory depopulation methods. Stop encouraging people who can’t afford children to keep having children. That will do. China supplies most of the developed world with what we need at cheap prices. These are mass produced products. In return, through belt and road initiative, China has the entire Southern Hemisphere trading food and Ag products to support its 1.4 billion. It’s easy to make 10 billion iPhone chips. It’s not as easy to feed 1.4 billion people pork with available resources. So with declining populations, the world still needs to deploy and deplete its resources to trade due to our higher consumption habits. But exponential population increases are a funny thing. Exponentially 1.4 increases faster than 350 million. Some resources don’t increase at all and in fact non renewable. What do we do now?