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> For this to be the case, cancer must have been killing a significant number of people before they reached the reproductive age. Evolutionary forces are still
by Crito 12y ago
> For this to be the case, cancer must have been killing a significant number of people before they reached the reproductive age.
Evolutionary forces are still in play for people past their reproductive age, though admittedly in a much less direct way. A person that lives long enough to help care for their grandchildren will be more likely to have some of their genes survive.
- Turing_Machine 12y agoYes, particularly in a hunter-gatherer society (which all of us were until quite recently in evolutionary terms). In addition to caring for grandchildren, there's also the wisdom of age. It's only in recent generations that things have started changing so fast that this is devalued. For a long, long time having grandpa or grandma around to tell you where you could still find water in a once-in-a-generation severe drought, or what other things you could eat when the herds of food animals didn't show up that year, was very useful. Looking at it another way, if old people weren't useful evolution would not have produced humans with such long lifespans after reproductive age (since the old people are consuming resources, populations where individuals died off shortly after the kids were autonomous would have had an advantage).