[ExI] the formerly rich and their larvae, was: Impressive book: Farewell to Alms

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Mon Feb 4 15:08:12 UTC 2008


Stathis writes

> Social considerations such as the fact that more affluent people, for
> whom the economic burden of having multiple children is not
> significant, nevertheless choose to have fewer children are much more
> important.

It's important right now (that many people are choosing to have few
children), but evolution has a way of curing such "defects". Clearly
from a biological perspective---how can anyone evade this tautology?
---any decision to have *fewer* viable offspring will simply result
in those genes responsible being eliminated from the population.

By the exact same token (which speeds the evolution) cultural evolution
will go hand in hand. Any culture which supports *not* having extremely
large families will become less dominant over time---because of, obviously,
the simple, tautologous fact that more biologically successful strategies
supplant the less successful.

Lee




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