Re: Stem cells and Human evolution

From: William Morse (wdmorse_at_twcny.rr.com)
Date: 07/24/04 

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 21:47:59 +0000 (UTC)

"Malcolm" <malcolm@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in
news:cds2f5$1ra6$1@darwin.ediacara.org:

>
> "CurtAdams" <curtadams@aol.com> wrote in message
>>
>> All creatures are baby machines, for the contexts in which they
>> evolve. Humans have survived difficult circumstances for many
>> millenia, and in order to do so, and produce babies, they have had to
>> learn, to cooperate, and to keep others interested through sexual
>> selection and proxies like music and art. Now, those nice things are
>> less useful or even unnecessary and may get thrown to the wayside, to
>> our detriment. Notably, being educated and living la dolce vita - two
>> things I really
> like
>> in my neighbors- are currently associated with smaller families.
>>
> You have a temporary situation, created by technology moving much
> faster than evolution, where proximate goals such as eating nice food,
> having high status jobs, and doing interesting things tend to conflict
> with reproductive success. In evolutionary terms, the welfare queen
> niche is much more lucrative than the head of university faculty
> niche. Can we say that, in some objective sense, the (female) head of
> a university faculty is better than the welfare claimant with five
> kids?

I hope you understand the difficulty in trying to interpret current
behavior in evolutionary terms. The thought that high wealth should be
combined with low fertility makes no sense from the standpoint of
maximizing reproductive success - in fact one should expect the opposite.
Similarly, the "welfare queen" should be limiting the number of children
so that her limited resources can be best directed to successfully
raising a few children instead of having them all die. Note the above
assumes that we are constrained by what has previously been adaptive,
which I think was your point. In reality I think human behavior is more
complex than that, so we need a more robust explanation for why middle-
class women have fewer children later in life while lower-class women
have more children earlier in life.

Yours,

Bill Morse

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Solid Argument Against Evolution
    ... Reproductive success is the criteria to determine whether or not a trait is beneficial. ... Eugenics is more a direct product of stock breeding, and the theory of evolution did not "empower" Hitler any more than the theory of gravity "empowered" him. ... It was well known at the time that apes and humans were closely related. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Genomes succeeding and failing, for whom is it a success or
    ... Post24 by Geoff: ... Lets presume there are no humans on this planet, ... Many people have told me that NS is a metaphor yet refused to spell ... and is always relative to the level of reproductive success ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Mens Hour Books
    ... to humans or which prey on humans, ... Those useful to humans are better off with a large human population, ... The original question was not about individual welfare, but whether *species* ... previously defined the success of species in terms of reproductive success. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)