4 ms·
Meet future woman: shorter, plumper, more fertile
- btilly 17y agoNot covered by their dataset, but any trait that lessens the effective use of birth control is definitely being selected for as well.
- naz 17y agoThe future woman will be Catholic
- bokchoi 17y agoAnd more beautiful! http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6727710.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6727710...
- fnid 17y ago404 error on that link...
- ApolloRising 17y agoLink worked for me FYI - Maybe you caught a glitch
- Tichy 17y agoCould the differences in physique also stem from number of births?
- BrandonM 17y agoIn addition, couldn't the later menopause be explained as a direct result of lower oocyte consumption? With 9 months of pregnancy, that's 8 or 9 fewer ovulation cycles, so wouldn't it makes sense for a woman with an extra child to have menopause a few months later? I'm no reproductive specialist here, but that seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Add in the selection bias (women with later menopause are more likely to have an unexpected child at a late age), and this really could turn out to be an experiment with no notable findings.
- toadstone 17y agodo not want
- jibiki 17y agoI am blinded by your sparkling wit =/
- icefox 17y agoAnd that is perfectly fine because those who do want will reproduce more and soon your gene's will be gone.
- randallsquared 17y agoLess well represented as a percentage doesn't mean those genes will die out.
- araneae 17y agoIt does if the trend continues. Yay math.
- randallsquared 17y agoWith a growing population, a more slowly growing subpopulation can nevertheless be a smaller and smaller percentage.
- araneae 17y agoBut the growth would also have to continue. In all real populations, population size has an upper limit(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity.) Of course, it's easy to forget that if you think about humans because it appears that technology has increased the carrying capacity for humans to a yet-unknown level. It's true that humans are going through a population explosion right now, but of course at some point we'll hit an upper limit.
- tl 17y ago"If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later." This is a non-story. The change they are predicting is unnoticeable 400 years out.
- req2 17y agoPlease note that average height a mere hundred fifty years ago was a few centimetres shorter. The reversal of a trend (admittedly spurred by different causes) is notable. If you do wish to call a development a "non-story", please refute it with something more substantial than "the numbers don't look right to my programmer brain".