[ExI] Prisoner of bad philosophy: Carl Sagan couldn?t allow > himself to hope

[SR Ballard]

Well excuse me for anthropomorphism -_-

Let me explain again.

Let’s have two families: Adam and Anne, and Bob and Becky.

Adam and Anne think that birth control is wrong, and don’t use any. They have 12 kids. 

Bob and Becky plan their family, and only have as many kids as they can afford and cake care of, they have 3 children. 

Simple math would make it appear that the “A” family line will simply outbreed the “B” family line. This is behind the Dominionist ideology in the US, which became popular in the 70s which basically states: “If Christians outbreed secular people, Christianity can take over the country.”

But, there can be lots of other factors involved here, that we are not taking into account. 

For example, if a couple are quite young when they start having sex (she’s 14 for example), and they don’t use a condom, she might lose the baby.

If she does become pregnant, she might decide to have an abortion, thus no offspring result.

There are a lot of complications to pregnancy at such an early age. She might die as a complication, or have a decreased lifetime fertility. 

The baby, being born to a very young mother, is likely to suffer specific issues, and may experience a higher infant mortality rate.

The young mother, being ostracized, might fall into poverty with her child, and lack of access to a proper amount of food and medical care might lead it to die younger. 

Now, assuming that women only have children after reaching maturity, there are a number of important factors to consider, all of which might be more important than pure numbers. 

In the developed world, due to the effects of education, fertility rates fall off very quickly among immigrants. It’s a very small percent of people in developed countries who have large families. It is correlated very heavily with religiousness. 

So let’s return to the A family and the B family. 

Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that the A family is a very religious Christian family. 

Anne had #12 when she was much older, and the child has a severe mental disability, and so will never have children.

#1 fulfills the dutiful oldest daughter trope and stays at home until her youngest sibling is married, and so, being at least 30 years old before they begin having children, has a reduced rate of fertility, having only 6 kids, but those kids are raised not to use condoms.

Since this family should statistically have a gay son, if the majority of the children are boys, and it’s generally one of the younger sons, let’s say that #11 is gay. He’s disowned by his family and thrown out. 

The parents don’t believe in vaccinations, and #2 dies of some easily prevented disease, and they didn’t go to the doctor because they were going to pray away the illness.

Catching the same illness, #3 receives a disability like deafness or blindness, which is interpreted as a trait which makes someone un-marriageable in their culture.

#10 rebels a bit in their teen years, and develops a bad drug problem and dies before having children.

#4 grows up and is an atheist. They begin to use condoms. They have 3 children and teach their children to use condoms.

#5 & 6 grow up and are less religious than their parents and use natural family planning, having only 6 kids each. They pass these values on to their children.

# 7 & 8 follow in their parent’s footsteps and have 12 children.

# 9 outdoes their parents and have 20 children.

 Now, of course, the ‘A’ line family has more grandkids than the ‘B’ line family. But suppose that, in order to marry, in the ‘A’ line family, if you remain in the religious viewpoint, you have to marry someone who shares it. They too are producing many offspring. 

Due to the high number of children, the group appears quite large, however all the members are more closely related than expected. Overtime, they begin to suffer the effects of this process. For example, there is FLDS Downs, a type of Down Syndrome only common in FLDS communities. Similarly, there are genetic defects only found in the Amish communities. Given time, even though each healthy woman might have more children, a greater and greater portion of them may eventually suffer from these disorders. 

So again, as I said, even though not using a condom might produce more offspring, it will take a long term assessment of the situation to determine if either using or not using a condom produces a larger number of offspring. Because condom use is associated with many other things as well. You’re not going to have any kids if you die of AIDS in your 20s.

So again, excuse me for anthropomorphizing genes, just like everyone else did in this discussion. 

Clearly what I was saying is that there are other factors that correlate with either condom use, or non-use, and these factors might be more important when determining long-term repercussions of their use or non-use. That’s all I’m saying. 

> On Aug 8, 2018, at 18:39, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 1:04 PM, SR Ballard <sen.otaku at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> >Well, it might be rational to use the condom from the gene's point of view if the offspring which are produced, though fewer, have a higher chance of producing offspring. We'll know in a few hundred years. 
> 
>    
> Evolution doesn't work that way because genes have no foresight. If you have a flat tire you can take off the flat and put on a new tire but Evolution could never do something like that, when you take off the bad tire you have no tire at all and have temporally made things worse. Evolution just doesn't understand that one step backwards 2 steps forward is a good thing. 
> 
>  John K Clark
> 
>  
> 
> 
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