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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Did it? Constant wars and plagues and famines and the rise and fall of empires over and over again, slavery, misery, death from disease. Childhood mortality at 50%, giving birth a 1 in 10 crap shoot of the mother dying. I don't think a lack of gender was helping that much.

Childhood mortality at 50 % was a good thing because it purged suboptimal genes from the genepool.

That isn't how it worked. Often is was just the one that was malnourished or late in the birth order, or unlucky in what crazy disease they caught. It wasn't some kind of fight to the finish. The smartest people haven't been winning some darwinian struggle to improve the human race since....ever.

That isn't how it worked

Yes it is.

Ah, then why aren't Congolese the smartest strongest healthiest people on the planet then? Maybe because natural selection doesn't always select for the traits we want, maybe it just selects people that will have the most people born to them. What a crazy stance to take, so "optimal" human life for you is just the ability to pump out 10 kids that can live in poverty?

...because tropical diseases and animals are infinitely less lethal than their fellow men ?

You really think you'd rather be exposed to Steppe Nomads than elephants ?

What? Africa is always at war, and has been since time immemorial.

Still likely a correlation between being the feeblest and not surviving childhood, versus these days in which serious conditions are extended ad infinitum for no particular benefit to society.

giving birth a 1 in 10 crap shoot of the mother dying

This is almost certainly not true. Historical birthrates were high enough that an absolute majority of women would have died in childbirth were this so. The historical record does not seem to support this, and it’s biased towards elite women who probably had higher maternal mortality rates because they married younger.

I took a moment to look this up. An example of an old-timey rate, In Sweden and Finland in 1800, for example, around 900 mothers died for every 100,000 live births. That's about 1% per birth, so if you had more than 10 pregnancies (which a married young rich woman might as you say) maybe you could get lifetime risks around 10%.

There are still countries in africa where more than 1 in 20 women can expect to die in childbirth.

https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality

What? Maternal deaths were a mainstay of life for most of human history. What are you talking about?

The comment above yours has actual numbers- .9% per birth in Napoleonic-era Scandinavia, highest in the world right now is (predictably)South Sudan, at 1.2% per birth. There's no doubt been times and places slightly higher, but even the really crappy parts of sub-saharan Africa don't break 2% per birth.

Natural fertility ranges from 4-10 children per woman, depending mostly on female age at marriage. That would mean childbirth is a common, possibly the most common, way of dying for women in historical societies, but pretty far from a majority. And that checks out with deep third world numbers- no African country has a double digit percentage of women dying in childbirth.

Maybe you're right, certainly right if you did a bit of googling here, this is a nit and a pick, my overall point was that life was much much worse for most of history. Do you disagree with that?

P.S.

I also said one in ten, perhaps I was thinking over overall odds which are exactly in line with your research

Yes, one in ten certainly seems like a reasonable approximation of total lifetime risk of premodern maternal mortality. And of course childbirth before the Victorian era was orders of magnitude more dangerous than it is today.

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