4 ms·

All those women who "opt out of the marriage market", who choose a career over a family, these women won't have any descendants. To the extent that this behavio

• Game_Ender 15y ago
  That's career focused, driven women will bread themselves out of existence? I would think genes from fathers with the same traits would have a counter balancing effect.
• epscylonb 15y ago
  Interesting point, I guess we need to know to what extent this behaviour is genetic. If there is something in society that causes women not to want to have kids and this remains in place then the prediction is correct. This is a nature versus nurture debate.
  • tokenadult 15y ago
    Interesting point, I guess we need to know to what extent this behaviour is genetic. Your interesting and pertinent question has both an easy answer and a hard answer. I'll provide references for both. The easy answer is that this behavior is "heritable," that is that correlations in rank order on this dimension of behavior are stronger for close relatives than for persons who are not close relatives. That is true of ALL human behaviorial characteristics, without exception. A genetically sensitive study design on any human behavioral characteristic from political behavior (who is "conservative" and who is "liberal") to obesity to IQ will always show a broad heritability greater than 0 (and always strictly less than 1). Everything that people do is heritable. The hard answer is that even if a human behavior is shown to be heritable, as all human behaviors are, it still remains unknown how much the behavior is subject to environmental influences. Some human behavioral characteristics with high observed heritabilities are nonetheless highly sensitive to environmental influences. Most human behavioral characteristics are polygenic, that is they are influenced by many genes, each with a small effect, and even monozygotic twins are consistently found to differ in highly heritable characteristics, for environmental reasons that are sometimes still quite poorly understood. Knowing the heritability of a human behavioral characteristic says nothing about how much that characteristic is subject to environmental influences. Here are the references I promised, recent papers by world-famous behavioral geneticists: http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... To sum up, in the context of this thread, a LONG-TERM trend of women having fewer children might be expected to reduce the reproduction most of women who have some genetic propensity to disfavor having children. But all women of all shuffles of the genes respond to societal and individual incentives to have more or fewer children, with few of those incentives yet being well understood. It is certainly possible in principle to reduce the trend toward reduced reproduction, irrespective of which persons (with which genomes) are reproducing.
• gst 15y ago
  If this behavior is genetic our future will look something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
• evilduck 15y ago
  You'd first have to show correlation between some genetic factor and women who don't want families. It seems just as likely to me that our current societies simply does not value or reward reproducing, and in some cases, outright punishes child rearing with impoverishment or being socially exiled.
• hugh3 15y ago
  Y'know, I'm usually a believer in the genetic component of human behaviour, but I don't think there's much genetics involved here. Fertility rates have been dropping all over the civilized world. Reasons: 1. Women are pursuing education and careers, which means they're often already thirty before they're "ready" to have children -- leaving no time to pump out more than one or two 2. Children are getting more expensive, both in terms of the absolutely compulsory costs and the things you're just expected to buy for them 3. For people who expect to get around by car, more than three children is a nightmare. In fact, with all the modern safety regulations having more than two children is a nightmare. My parents were happy to cart around three young children in the back of an early 80s Mazda 323, but you couldn't do that any more because a minimal child seat would take up nearly the whole back seat 4. There's really no incentive to have more than two children any more. Child mortality is nearly zero, and it's no longer expected that children will support their parents in their old age.
  • gregpilling 15y ago
    I have three kids. The incentive? I liked the first one, and then we kept going. How many kids do you have?
    • jordan0day 15y ago
      So why don't you have twenty? Or one hundred? Did the quality of the children decrease linearly or is it just the third that was so bad you had to quit making more? I am kidding, of course -- I doubt too many people these days have children for purely dispassionate economic reasons, but we shouldn't pretend that those considerations don't enter into the equation, and aren't entirely legitimate.
    • hugh3 15y ago
      Heh, I didn't mean to say that there's no incentive to have more than two children, I should have said that the balance of incentives has changed. As the youngest of three, I'm well aware of what a great idea it is to have more than two children. ;) (And no, none of my own just yet, but I'll probably have two so that I can avoid owning a minivan...)