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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.

Why not? It's well accepted science that humans are exceptionally bad, among animals, at having children. We are terrible at giving birth. Humans evolved a large brain, but that large brain comes at a terrible price. A very long incubation period, a horrifically painful pregnancy, and then years of being a helpless baby. No other animal species puts anywhere near that much effort and pain into having kids, because no other species evolved giant brains. And unfortunately the modern world puts even more premium on the brain so... here we are, I guess. The Great Filter of human extinction is our own brain.

None of which suggests that women would evolve to not want children, which violated the most fundamental law of natural selection - alleles that lower reproductive fitness get weeded out. It's a tautological - anything that hinders reproductive fitness had better be making it up somewhere or it's gone.

or it's gone.

Bear in mind that evolution works exceedingly slowly. Like, over millions of years. "Modern" human civilization- meaning like, agriculture- is only like 10,000 years old. Maybe we're now in the "it's gone" phase of human evolution.

This is not true. Evolution can work quite fast. So fast to the extent that, back in the day, it had paleontologists and paleoanthropologists tearing their hair out as to why transitory specimens ("missing link(s)") were so lacking in the fossil record.

For example, lactase persistence has went from zero to substantially non-zero, the majority, or even near 100% quite a few times within the time-scale of a few hundred to a few thousand years in various Eurasian populations, possibly even a few dozen years in some cases.

Speaking of 10,000 years, in The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending discuss not only human evolution, but accelerations in human evolution, since the agricultural/civilization era.

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