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The decreased birth rate we're experiencing is quite an amazing biological anomaly. People who have many children (say 5) will reproduce much faster than people

by ced 18y ago

The decreased birth rate we're experiencing is quite an amazing biological anomaly. People who have many children (say 5) will reproduce much faster than people who don't (1 child). 5^n faster, where n is is the number of generations that has passed. This is a huge evolutionary pressure. If "having many children" has any genetic basis at all, the phenomenom of small families is likely to die out in the short term... at the evolutionary time scale, anyway. Centuries, maybe. The cause of reduced birth rates is the availability of contraception, of course. It used to be that even if a man didn't like to have children, he couldn't help it as long as he wanted to have sex. Now that this is no longer true, it's quite likely that the average man will be increasingly fond of children, or increasingly averse to contraception. Evolution, much like progress, won't be stopped.

palish 18y ago
Why? There is nothing to suggest people will become increasingly adverse to contraception; they already are. And you can't evolve out (or legislate away) abortion. I don't understand your points.
- jibiki 18y ago
  I think he's talking about the ~100 generation time-scale; i.e., Darwinian evolution rather than Lamarckian evolution. If anybody has a "desire to have a large family gene", then that gene will come to dominate the human gene pool in a few hundred generations, because people with it will produce, on average, many times as many children as people without it. The two biggest assumptions here are: 1. This gene exists (and is the main factor in determining how many children people have.) 2. Other genes won't become more important. I would bet on both of these assumptions being false, but it's certainly possible that they hold.
asciilifeform 18y ago
Human evolution is over. I predict that in less than a century, having genetically unedited children will be viewed as an act near in its savageness to cannibalism or at the very least public defecation. At any rate, the necessary technology will appear long before the glacially slow natural evolution has a chance to substantially change us. Assuming the familiar nuclear/bioengineered plaugue apocalypse doesn't get us first.

by ced 18y ago

palish 18y ago

Why? There is nothing to suggest people will become increasingly adverse to contraception; they already are. And you can't evolve out (or legislate away) abortion. I don't understand your points.

jibiki 18y ago
I think he's talking about the ~100 generation time-scale; i.e., Darwinian evolution rather than Lamarckian evolution. If anybody has a "desire to have a large family gene", then that gene will come to dominate the human gene pool in a few hundred generations, because people with it will produce, on average, many times as many children as people without it. The two biggest assumptions here are: 1. This gene exists (and is the main factor in determining how many children people have.) 2. Other genes won't become more important. I would bet on both of these assumptions being false, but it's certainly possible that they hold.

asciilifeform 18y ago

Human evolution is over. I predict that in less than a century, having genetically unedited children will be viewed as an act near in its savageness to cannibalism or at the very least public defecation. At any rate, the necessary technology will appear long before the glacially slow natural evolution has a chance to substantially change us. Assuming the familiar nuclear/bioengineered plaugue apocalypse doesn't get us first.