[extropy-chat] evolution and adoption

[Damien Broderick]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Walker" <mark at permanentend.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 21, 2003 11:03 AM

> what would be more surprising is if rich societies
> never acted on their desire for sex, or if when children were on the way
> many parents in rich societies gave them up for adoption. In terms of
> maximizing one's viable progeny giving up as many children for adoption
> might make the most evolutionary sense. This would allow one to focus
one's
> energies on reproducing rather than squandering them on breast feeding,
> midnight diaper changes and other physically and emotionally draining
> activities.

I'm not sure how tongue in cheek this is, Mark. What's you've described is,
after all, exactly what wealthy people did in the 19th and early 20th, and
indeed perhaps all the way back to the invention of hierachical power
culture. Wet nurses, nannies, private tutors, boarding schools or their
harsh equivalent; all these allowed the luckless wives of the rich to
produce one child rapidly after another, many of them doomed to perish,
without wasting time and effort on emotional support, bonding, etc--and the
wonderful result was that these warped kids proved just the right stuff for
going out and building empires, thus perpetuating the process. Until it
stopped working. And now nations like the UK struggle to deal with the
legacy bullshit embedded in the culture.

Damien Broderick