[ExI] Stone age intuition was medical power of attorney

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Wed Dec 10 07:11:44 UTC 2014


On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:

> It’s just r versus K selection. As the population increases and open
> niches decrease, and competition for space and resources increase, K
> selection (fewer offspring of higher quality) becomes more effective than r
> selection (quantity and speed over quality). The Phd or CEO woman who has
> twins at 45 is opting for K selection, while the Amish and the Quiverful
> fundamentalist families are opting for r selection. It is absolutely not an
> evolutionary “mistake” that rich and middle class families started having
> fewer children than poor families after the Industrial Revolution and the
> population explosion. They had to, in order to invest more in the children
> that they had. Interestingly, after about a century lag, poor /less
> educated families are now starting to once again have fewer children in
> comparison to richer/better educated families. The reason is that the age
> of first parity is rising across the board. A woman who spends her twenties
> getting a degree and establishing a career can afford medical assistance,
> if needed, to still have two or three children after age 35. But a woman
> who has only a high school education and a single income who waits to have
> children until her 30s is less likely to conceive. This is what is
> happening. The only exceptions, as mentioned, are those families who
> deliberately embrace an  r selection strategy and retain early age of first
> parity. They can only do this at the cost of considerable isolation into
> their own niche, however. That’s a rather vulnerable position to be in.
>
> So I don’t think its either Idiots or Plain people that will have the most
> genetic success, but (as usual), the richer, smarter, and more popular.
>

### I don't think you can call childlessness a reproductive strategy. What
is happening to many women and men today is misfiring of ancient
adaptations (hypergamy, novelty-seeking, sex drive) under the conditions of
modern life, with complete loss of fitness. For the vast majority of
Americans, except the Amish and Quiverfull adherents, the number of
offspring is not resource-constrained, and therefore there is no question
of a trade-off between number and per-offspring parental investment that is
the key to the K-r differentiation. Today's America is not medieval
England, Ming China or a Yanomami village, here most people choose to have
significantly fewer children than they could support. The number of
offspring is limited by psychological adaptations to conditions that no
longer obtain, and it will take some time for new adaptations to be
selected in the gene and memetic pools. Remember, having less than 2.1
children per couple is a recipe for long-term elimination from the gene
pool.

Rafal
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