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Evolution's Path May Lead To Shorter, Heavier Women
Hugh Pickens writes "Yale University researchers believe that if evolutionary pressures of sexual selection and reproductive fitness continue for another 10 generations, the trends detected in their study may mean that the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm shorter, 1 kg heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter menopause 10 months later. 'There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans,' says Stephen Stearns of Yale University. 'That's just plain false.' Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 spanning three generations, and found that shorter, heavier women had more children than lighter, taller ones. Women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol were also more likely to have large families as were women who gave birth early or had a late menopause. More importantly, these traits are then passed on to their daughters, who also, on average, had more children. The study has not determined why these factors are linked to reproductive success, but it is likely that they indicate genetic, rather than environmental, effects. 'The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals,' says Stearns. 'These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things.'"
Evolution's Path May Lead To Shorter, Heavier Women
Well, shit. That sucks.
Evolution would just mean that whomever has the most children (that survive to also make children) becomes the dominant (in numbers) body type.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I think evolutionary change is being stifled by both medicine and civilization. Reproductive "success" is not genetic anymore, its based on social factors. The goal of most humans is no longer to spawn the most progeny.
I come from a small backwoods town and women in these areas (e.g. low income, low education) have more children, and have them at a younger age. ( This is a generalization, no anecdotes please. And no I don't feel like looking up stats, maybe someone else can post some).
Also, regardless of the details, I hope TFA is wrong. Have you seen dwarven females?
Wow. I had no idea when I went to sleep last night that I would wake up against Evolution. Where's the ID/Creationism Kool-Aid? Comin' on board... make some room.
Where is evolution in that?
I want evolution to produce a three boob'd woman. Who cares if evolution is producing folks within the same genetic parameters.
Seriously, though, the logic is sound and the current population trends are clear.
Heavier.
And people say we americans are falling behind. We're just 500 years ahead and all the rest of ye are catching up. ;-)#
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
(stops eating)
Alright. We gotta lick this problem right now. (puts milk back in fridge). Just think of all the money we'll save if we only eat half as much.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Change the diet, and you'll see the "trend" reverse.
It's obvious that lighter and taller women have more sex than the heavier and shorter ones, so it's birth control that we should blame for the study's results!
Here in Illinois, we just call them "corn fed". I had just assumed it was the climate.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/27/1455253
is shorter and heavier "more beautiful"?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Look, if slim tall people were to begin having sex, do you know what would happen to the price of children?
...only if she's 5'3"
--- Do you believe in the day?
'There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans,' says Stephen Stearns of Yale University.
What he says in the opposite:
“The idea that natural selection has stopped operating in humans because we have gotten better at keeping people alive is just plain wrong,” said Stephen C. Stearns,
Reproductive selection will always operate, it is just that the ''selection criteria'' may change, physical fitness may no longer be so important, supplanted by taking advantage of social security/... to enable them to have more children than they can support by the ''sweat of their own brows'', the government picks up the bill.
I suspect that genetics and nutrition will mitigate these factors. Whilst the trend is towards fat, now, this is likely to plateau and fall.
I record my sleeptalking
The problem with most biologists and geneticists (I'm one) is a lack of objectivity. They should talk to more engineers when solving problems (I'm one of those too).
Process A
Most planned pregnancies happen in later life.
Most unplanned pregnancies happen while drunk.
Most drunk intercourse is with the first willing partner.
Most willing partners are more homely than gorgeous.
Most homely women are shorter and fatter.
Process B
Most unplanned pregnancies are followed by unplanned marriages.
Most marriages starting with an unplanned child are followed by subsequent progeny (it started with sex, so sex is what you do together for the first while)
Most social traits carry on through generations - daughters of young mothers often have early pregnancies (these may involve factors expressed in Process A)
Thus, homely Mom, homely daughters, Mom got drunk and had sex early so why can't I, followed by more homely daughters...
Where's the mystery?
The traits described probably have more to do with proximity to the local McDonalds, than anythiing about "survival of the fa^Hittest"
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
When I was young, an ongoing joke was the question 'Is fertility passed on by the parents." Now you could start asking that question. Also there is a trend of finding slimmer women more attractive. In the past this ment that those would be having more children.
However with the pill and other contraceptives, it looks as if the most attractive (in a biological way) females have LESS babies.
The result of this all will be that we have a lot of ugly kids. Perhaps the division becomes so great that we will separate as species and become two.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It could just be that the Menfolk of Framingham fancy short fat women. Perhaps they're all short and fat as well.
Smivs on the intertubes!
1) The children will take some characteristics from their dads as well.
2) A few generations of people doing what you say and you might have a breed of humans more likely to rape.
A "breed" of humans with a genetic propensity towards violence and lawlessness... I hope no one mentions the elephant in the middle of the room.
That's right. Pit bulls.
Tall, thin women also tend to be wealthy, either from having been born into wealth, or from having married into wealth (obviously, they have higher value on the meat market) or from having earned it themselves (if you don't think tall thin women make more than short fat ones, you are kidding yourself).
And, based on many studies I read about in college, wealthy people tend to have fewer children, if any at all. The average was something like 1.1 per family I think.
Poor people, on the other hand, breed like rabbits. The average I read was close to 6 per family. And here's the kicker: in western culture (not just America) the abundance of cheap fattening food combined with jobs that are not physically intensive means the poor can get fat. Once-upon-a-time the poor were all farmers and therefore got enough exercise to stay thin. Now the poor all work in retail (or similar) and can get quite fat.
So, yes, the trend will be for short-fat women. But the trend in rich families will still be for tall, thin women.
I wonder if our race will bifurcate into two separate species someday.
I'm not convinced by these researchers' claims. Is there a trend towards people getting shorter? I thought the opposite was true. As for obesity, that's another story. But what I am convinced this reflects is not an evolutionary trend but rather a socioeconomic one. The better off people are the less likely they are to have children. So poorer people are the ones having children and unlike most of the rest of the world lower-class Americans are very likely to be obese. Do this study in parts of Asia or Africa and these researchers would be saying the trend was towards thinner humans. The US actually bucks the trend established by most developed nations in that many people still tend to have a few children, in Europe and Asia you're lucky if they have one. I'm not sure why there would be a shift towards bearing children sooner considering most people seem to be waiting longer to have kids. Again, it might simply be a reflection class.
That seems like a big assumption to me given how many variables exist. An interesting thing a gynecologist told me a couple of years ago was that obese women tend do deprive the fetus of nutrients more so than your average women, so they tend to have underweight babies far more frequently. So this evolutionary tend doesn't seem like a particularly good thing to me. But then there are so many variables affecting humanity that these findings are likely meaningless.
Normally you'd expect the psychology of priming to catch this one: a linear extrapolation is worthless when medical technology continues to change as fast as it does. Diabetes continues to exist in 50 years? On the near side of the apocalypse? I highly doubt it. Excepting curvature, we can thus conclude that women are getting fatter.
Some people see this phase we're in where the genomics/proteomics researchers are discovering that nothing is as simple as we told the investors as evidence that progress in medical science has taken a coffee break. Hardly. For the last century, the foundation of modern medicine has been statistical epidemiology: trying to find a needle in a haystack with a densitometer.
The profit model for the pharmaceutical industry is to spread the benefit of a drug over the largest study population where the effect remains statistically significant. Cholesterol levels too high? Add Lipitor to the water supply. It could be that only 10% of the people who take Lipitor actually benefit. But then, if this were determined, they'd have to charge ten times as much per treatment to maintain existing revenues, and fewer uninsured would be able to pay, and we might have to let some future president actually preside.
We are right now in the heart of the transition to etiology based medicine. Among the problems are how to pay for it without using giant studies designed to implicate everyone. This isn't so different from the transition of observational taxonomy (A and B share the same egg tooth dimple) to taxonomy with a genomics turbo assist. I recall in the early 1980s, this transition was not widely welcomed among traditional taxonomists. Unreliable, they complained. Now you couldn't do taxonomy any other way, and a lot of old arguments are long gone in the rear view mirror. The new bionic taxonomy is better, stronger, faster.
We're in that deceptive interlude after pressing the ignite button on the Saturn V rocket where the flame and rumble have erupted out the bottom, while the rocket itself just kind of shivers there, apparently going nowhere.
The combined propellant flow rate of the five F-1s in the Saturn V was 3,357 US gallons (12,710 l) per second, which would empty a 30,000 US gallons (110,000 l) swimming pool in 8.9 seconds. Each F-1 engine had more thrust than all three space shuttle main engines combined.
A decade or two later, you're praying for center-engine cutoff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_8_acceleration.gif
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/genbankstats.html
Swell time to extrapolate the fate of humanity on a straight line. Besides, I have evidence to the contrary.
And yet after all of these observations, there's still so many fatties. WHY?
You mean the EU is actually BEHIND the US in a social trend? Specifically that of what we call baby boomers not having childeren, so there is no one to replace them when they get old and retire? What will our US yuppies do when they can't point across the ocean and say "X handles this so much better then the US"? Oh Great Flying Spaghetti Monster I might have to listen to an origional idea from one of these neo-liberal ass-clowns... --- *curls in a ball and hides*
Mexicans and african americans follow both of these traits.
Shouldn't beauty and media imagery influence have at least some role in evolution?
Here's another one for you. Genetically slutty women had more children than genetically prude women. Therefore, women are now genetically easier to get with than they used to be. Discuss.
You just got troll'd!
It would be nice if evolution were driven by our ideals, but our ideals are not conducive to evolutionary drives and mechanisms which effectively boil down to "who gets laid more" and who don't.
In the western U.S., I think the situation is only slightly more complex than described, but I can't disagree with its general assertions. However, some of this is somewhat regional. This should be expanded to include other nations. The short-fat thing in other nations and cultures don't work the same way as they do in N.America. For example, many women in other nations and cultures don't gain lots of weight before childbirth or lose all of the extra weight after childbirth. They do this through force of will which is something N.American women lack quite often. Women who want to remain thinner and sexier (ironic since those are theoretically signs that make a woman more appealing to men who would want to make them pregnant in the first place) usually control pregnancy and simply have fewer, if any children.
Similar projections have been made with regards to intelligence or personality traits that lead to wealth and power as the more intelligent, wealthy and powerful people have fewer children when compared to people on the other end of that spectrum. Further, the same pattern is observed when comparing white and non-white people in terms of population shrinkage and growth numbers. (Did you know that in Texas "hispanics" can no longer be considered "minority"? It's true! Though they still seem to be collecting a lot of minority targeted benefits at the moment.)
While this is all pretty interesting, it is also pretty obvious in so many ways.
It's all good though. I like shorter, darker, softer women to begin with. The girl that plays Velma Dinkley is awesome cute! :)
TFS makes the assumption, that because the people in Framingham are like that, that the whole world must be like that.
Which of course, is total bullshit. This study is only meaningful for Framingham. If you want it to have a global meaning, do it globally.
I don't understand how someone can create that assumption, and absolutely not notice its wrongness...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Didn't Thomas Hobbes argue that in the state of nature "the wife of man is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short." Or have I misquoted somehow?
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Giving birth earlier and later menopause all sound like things that would improve selective fitness... but the question is, if they really are selected for, why weren't they selected for five thousand years ago? (Lower blood pressure and lower chloresterol are two that I can understand perhaps a little better-- the problems with heart trouble may have not been quite so much of a problem ten generations ago, when most humans did a lot more physical exercise just to stay alive).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's all idocracy
God just likes 'em pudgy.
>>>If you don't like it, go rape some tall and skinny women into pregnancy, and ensure the children survive to perpetuate the cycle.
C'mon we're geeks No need for such crudities:
- Donate sperm to a bunch of banks (this should be easy for us)
- Hack the computer and replace your specs with some hot-looking guy's specs
- Unsuspecting women pick the man of their dreams, and instead get your sperm.
- Eighteen years later these women will be wondering why their kids look like Bill Gates instead of Tom Cruise
- ???
- Profit (genetically speaking)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
In the Netherlands people marry rather late, and many women get their kids in their (late) thirties. A good portion of women of that age miss the boat. There is an enormous selection pressure going on. Ignoring the emerging trend of freezing eggs, one may expect that in a couple of generations Dutch women will be able to bear children at even older age, and may well live even longer than they do now.
Bert
My wife has already fully evolved.
Wait...... that makes her sound like a Bakugan.
... and we still wont have flying cars
Seriously, though, the logic is sound and the current population trends [census.gov] are clear.
Did they stop to consider the possibility that the men were part of this equation?
Could the same results be seen if it turned out that a higher than average percentage of tall slender men turned out to be gay?
Poor people, on the other hand, breed like rabbits. The average I read was close to 6 per family.
You should consider reading something that actually quotes facts someday, instead of Rush Limbaugh, or whoever it is you get your made-up facts from.
So, yes, the trend will be for short-fat women. But the trend in rich families will still be for tall, thin women. I wonder if our race will bifurcate into two separate species someday.
No, by the logic you just quoted, the fat women are fat because they're poor-- you just told me that the fatness was because of "the abundance of cheap fattening food combined with jobs that are not physically intensive means the poor can get fat. " That's not hereditary.
In any case, the birth statistics you quoted imply that the "tall, thin, rich" women die out, and are replaced from the pool of "short, fat, poor" women (whose progeny become tall and thin, before they die out and are replaced in turn.) So the species doesn't bifurcate (at least, not according to the logic you give).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Evolution, or adaptation? Isn't evolution one species evolving into another species? Wouldn't this actually be adaptation, as the species hasn't changed? Just saying...
Wait until the year 2400 and see for yourself. Pardon me while I make a note to myself reminding me to do this...
It's simple really. Environment-wise, women are getting fatter. The men who like thin women reject them, while the men who like fat women accept them. Since size preference may be more genetic than environmental, when they have children the males will trend toward those who prefer fat women, and - environmental impact or not - the females will also be genetically predisposed to be fat. And according to the article, their body chemistry will be better equipped to handle being fat (lower blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.)
So get used to it - fat's where's its at!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
BadAnalogyGuy wrote:
Symmetry plays a large role in physiology, so it would be very unlikely to see an evolutionary step that leads to 3 boobs. Lateral symmetry dictates that you'd be more likely to see 4 or 6 before that.
Bob54321 wrote:
Well, we can have lateral symmetry of three....
( . )( . )( . )
Yes, but that requires a change in symmetry pattern. That doesn't happen.
Broken symmetry happens a lot (the liver, for example, or flounder, or the assymetrical claws of lobsters), But not change from paired to centered.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Class is not fixed. In my case, I'm the first generation in my family born in a middle-class household. First generation college, first generation Ph.D., first generation that earned more than $100,000 a year. My parent's generation was the first where everyone graduated high school. All grew up as dirt poor farm kids but over a few decades clawed their way up to middle-class. My grandparent's generation had one person graduate high school, the least formally educated person went to school for four years only, all were farmers or farm laborers. Early memory of Mom's: grandpa going through the farm's scrap metal heap to find enough to sell to buy her shoes.
Now compare that to the rich. There's a saying that goes something like grandpa built the business, dad expanded it, junior bankrupted it. When you meet people born into riches, frequently (of course there are exceptions) you find lazy, spoiled children who do not have any ambition or curiosity. Their children often are similar, wasting the family fortune making the following generation either middle-class or poor. At any point though the family's class could go up or down, just like my family. I don't expect the next generation to move up as much as mine or my parent's; but they could still go up or down. Class is not fixed, despite the gaming of the system by the rich.
Long story short: Idiocracy is classist bullshit that comforts rich wankers who desperately want to believe that they're rich because of some inherent superiority rather than opportunity and/or inheritance. Incipient speciation along class lines is ridiculous.
If tall and fit men have more children than their stouter brothers, the two effects might cancel each other out.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Poor people, on the other hand, breed like rabbits.
http://dontclickthis.whatingods.name/miracle-of-life.gif (NSFW)
seeing as how most females of the species are smaller then the males in the various mammal species. What is interesting is that evolutionary effects are showing that medical treatment and good diet have slowed the trend down.
Of course, seeing as how food quality has dropped since the end of WWII, I'm also not surprised that we're beginning to see a reduction in physical size of our female population along with the emphasis towards a greater number of offspring along with the increased length of child bearing ability.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
In ten generations we'll either be extinct or be consciously choosing our evolutionary directions.
Great that they extrapolate to the global population a trend that may or may not have been seen in one specific, exact, location over the course of 50 years.
Framingham appears to be a suburb of Boston. I've only passed through Boston. They have baked beans there, or something. I've lived all across the country, and I do know that body shape averages do actually seem to change. For example here in SoCal, there seem to be 2 basic social classes, and those within the upper class tend to be pretty thin - especially compared to what I've seen elsewhere. And to boot, lots of these attractive thin tall women are becoming milfs.
Lots of talk about "Idiocracy" without considering that it's always been this way, since we started living in communal caves. And also without considering the fact that there's only 300mil people here in the US, and the planet has 7bill; don't pretend that some cultural phenomena here holds true in the other global cultures, including those cultures that are both dramatically different than ours, and have populations that extremely outnumber ours. We're becoming a global society, transportation is trivial, we move things across the planet now. What are people going to look like in 10 generations? Asian, probably. And I personally don't see what the fuss is about or why anyone would care; we're ok with giving the children 10 generations from now a heaping pile of trash and a burned out planet, but we're worried about how tall and fat they'll be?
From the Yale press release:
“The idea that natural selection has stopped operating in humans because we have gotten better at keeping people alive is just plain wrong,” said Stephen C. Stearns
The implicit assumption is that medicine tends to help the weak relatively more than the strong, which is a probably false right out the gate.
It is more likely that medicine increase (lifespan) equally across the board.
So he's basically trying to disprove a false assumption that he had made himself.
More bizarre however, is Stearn's implicit notion that tall&thin is weaker than short&heavy (now I see why pr0n sites often have a fatty sub-section).
Also is Framingham, Massachusetts a completely isolated test tube, without immigration, because arguably the majority of recent migration had been from cultures that are shorter and heavier.
In case he is correct however, I would like to volunteer my reproductive services to any hawt, tall, thin single females.
There are PLENTY of women here close to or over 2 meters. Do you know how hard it is to stare down at a woman's tits when they are above you? I got to carry a stepladder around JUST so I can I look down on women.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
British scientists have uncovered why little girls like pink toys. “Women are hardwired to like pink,” says Professor Gene Hunt of the University of Metro, “because their cavewoman foremothers spent their days gathering red leaves and berries amongst the trees.” Later, women needed to notice red-faced babies and blushing boyfriends. Men are attracted to blue because of the colour of the sky as seen when hunting.
Women are also predisposed to backstab one another in the workplace and cry in the boardroom, just like the social structures in the cave population as extrapolated from two bone needles. Being too successful will increase women’s testosterone, giving them hairy nipples and male-pattern baldness. Females joining the hunt may also explain the end of the Neanderthals.
IQ test studies show that women have lower IQs on average than men, undoubtedly from lesser need for environmental variation while taking care of the cave. Tests on little boys prove that testosterone correlates with a sense of humour, so women are naturally more humorless than men. Housework has been shown to cut the risk of several fatal diseases, and dressing up nicely around the house is psychologically healthy as it uses the Homo erectus clan maintenance abilities of the female of the tribe.
Men are naturally predisposed to sleep with as many women as possible, as proven by lions, whereas women are naturally predisposed to stay loyal to their man and their spawn. Women who sleep around are at increased risk of parasites and death, as proven by cheetahs, who are a pack of catty sluts.
In a final crowning achievement, the team has shown that daily fellatio greatly reduces the incidence of breast cancer. Furthermore, regular sexual intercourse is essential to feminine health, but may be injurious if prolonged for more than two minutes or conducted while the man is sober.
“In conclusion,” says Professor Hunt, “all of this is top-notch science that you can absolutely rely on. Now get your knickers back on and make me a cuppa.”
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Dear Sir/Madam,
Evolution doesn't work that way. You're talking about genetic drift, which is not the same.
Kthxbai
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you want to know how will evolve humanity, specially when all survive, is sociology the answer, not biology. Our capacity to replicate memes, like speaking, acting and looking as being actually popular somewhat increases our chances of reproducing. Is globalization pushing us towards not only unified culture, but also unified look,
Still, most people that dont fully comply with that usually reproduce too. Numbers are just too high, so even if there is a clear trend there, will take many generations, and nothing ensures that our civilization in the current way will remain that long. Won't be so surprising that in a somewhat near future not all survive (disasters, wars, totalitarian governments trying to "clean" their gene pool, etc), or not all will be free to have children (too many books and movies around that), or genes could be "corrected" (we are almost there to avoid genetic diseases, but could derive into "designing" children to met some fashion criteria), and not always will be natural or slow that "evolution".
much like communist propaganda made a herd of idiots support autocrats at the expense of their impoverishment, libertarian propaganda makes a herd of idiots support monopolists at the expense of their impoverishment
libertarian propaganda, of course, being the mirror image of the evil that is marx's das kapital: the holy text of ayn rand
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html
market fundamentalists and agrarian fundamentalists loudly rage about their incredibly retarded ideologies, and us normal folk have to tolerate these ignorant assholes who do nothing but create suffering for us. i liked how this biography of rand linked her creation to her upbringing in revolutionary russia. in other words, the prophet of the libertarians was born as an angry revenge, a living vendetta, against the suffering of her upbringing in the birthing pains of communist russia. fitting and poetic: the idiocy of communism begat the idiocy of libertarianism, directly
death to libertarians and communists, mirror image morons and assholes who create suffering for us all with their loud ignorance they call an ideology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Shit. My wife comes from future!
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/27/1455253/Are-Women-Getting-More-Beautiful?art_pos=20
... but I do know that
1) genotypes are a direct function of enviro-types
2) the envirotype of 2010 and and of 1900 to the present (antibiotics, changed cultural mores etc.) is pretty different from anything that proceeded it, so of course the genotype will adjust.... if that envirotype hangs around long enough.
On the other hand, while the Western envirotype has shifted, has the planetary envirotype shifted? Isn't the normative human environment still China, India, Africa and Brazil? Must be, because that's where the people live. So whatever evolution is happening for the species as a whole, it is surely happening because of environmental changes facing people living in places other than Europe and the U.S.
Seems to me that for human evolution to occur in a meaningful sense you'd need a big change in some fundamental environmental factors, and they would have to effect most of the planet, particularly the places where most of the people live.
Given climate change and global warming, I'm not even sure we'll be around long enough to measure such effects. 2500 indeed! Good luck getting to 2200, planet earth.
Then of course you can get into different scenarios. What if Asia and Africa are wiped out by global warming, and Framingham Europeans are really a population bottleneck? Well then you could have evolutionary changes to adopt to Framingham environtypes... but only if they persisted over generations.
In retrospect, the antibiotic technology based stage of human evolution may prove to be quite temporary... a few generations. Do you really believe that antibiotics are forever? I suggest you have forgotten the evolutionary potential of bacteria.
The world of 20th and 21st century America and Europe is probably a deviation from the basic human condition of the past (certainly) and African villages and Mad Max warriors and Ghengis Kahn is more like the real future (I predict) and so the forms that evolve to live in the modern world are probably dead ends any way.
I know that you tech optimists find that improbable. You think antibiotics and high energy society are forever. I think African villages and are closer to forever, and that if there is a long run that's more what it looks like. The human forms that can survive in that world will continue to be the face of humanity.
My two cents.
Already done. I have something on the order of 5,000 children, who will be tall, skinny, and insanely intelligent. I've also created 3 biological children (the old fashion way). One girl, two boys. They're all tall, skinny, and intelligent. They'll all likely be hackers and/or megalomaniacs. The next world wars will be between my own children. :) As it continues, the biological children count should increase, as there are many tall skinny attractive intelligent women who are courting me to be their mate. :)
I've done my part to improve humanity through unnatural selection. It's up to the rest of you to do your parts. You short fat idiots need not attempt it. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Not being the tallest man myself, this means the amount of potential mates will increase slightly. What? Four hundred years from now? Damn!
Maybe I should RTFA, but there seems to an obvious bias in this study. Framingham, Mass is cold, maybe women (and men) do better here when they are stockier since they have less surface area to lose body heat from. Or maybe I am just bitter about the cold weather out here.
The reason is that the poor breed like cockroaches. They're more likely to be short and fat. The well off take care of themselves and they also work so they're less likely to have kids or as many.
We're effectively stalling evolution and will take a step back thanks to protecting the ignorant and lazy. Time to start making people jog on the tread mill to earn those welfare checks.
How would you know the sperm recipient wouldn't be one of the "shorter and heavier women"? I mean there's no reason tall and skinny chicks should drop by a sperm bank yes?
It helps to realize that evolution works by modifying code, not output. You can imagine physiological development as a main program calling a bunch of functions, and each of those functions calling others many levels deep. The code is the genes. Toss in some function parameters (cell environment), global variables (hormones), and input (external environment, including the environment of gestation). Run it through quality control (gestation and childhood) and see how well the modified code does at making copies of itself (reproduction).
So you're not likely to get five-fold symmetry for one feature on a human. Such symmetry exists in other creatures, like starfish. But if a human's symmetry function mutated to five-fold, then it'd likely get applied to heads, hearts, and other parts as well as breasts; and that fetus probably wouldn't survive to birth, much less reproduction. Mutating a new symmetry function for just one body part would be hard to do without a bunch of intermediate and beneficial small steps.
Something that doesn't seem to have been pointed out yet:
There are two ways of looking at the problem. One is the rather unsavoury one of calling out a general alarm because 'the chavs are breeding out of control!' The other is to ask why it is that professional, educated women don't seem to have as many children as people with fewer letters after their names.
By the time a woman has had done a PhD and established herself in her chosen career, she's likely to be pushing 30 and her fertility will already be declining. Taking a 'baby break' at this time is still like as not career suicide. Or at the very least, it's likely to push her back several years down the pyramid. And even in the UK, with fairly good socialist services, having a baby is likely to mean a fairly severe pay cut. Day care for infants is of variable quality and very expensive. How does anybody do it?!
So rather than 'negative eugenics' of stopping fat people having babies, perhaps society should look at the stresses we put on professional people. Short term contracts at universities. Ridiculous hours for medics and lawyers. Huge amounts of competition for science funding. I know wonderful, intelligent women who simply can't afford to have a baby without giving up everything they have worked so hard for. They don't plan not to have children or relationships, but time creeps up on you and before they know it they're 40 and the chances of getting pregnant are minimal.
As a medical student I remember giving babies injections all morning. I was 27, and every single mother who came in that morning was younger than me. More often than not they were in their early 20s, yet they had lives. Families. Part time jobs. In contrast I was slaving away every day and evening whilst the debts accumulated. I knew that any relationship I entered would have to be short term because I would likely have to move away the next year. Then move somewhere else the year after that. And the year after that. And probably a few more times before I could think about a long-term post. Had I married another medic, one or the other of us would simply have simply had to say goodbye to a good career for the sake of the other. Or else lived apart. And for some couples I know, that can mean 5 hours apart. Try getting pregnant when you only see each other every other week. Now, I was in a rough part of town and many of these people live hard, impoverished lives. Yet I also felt jealous of them for a normality that my own life lacked. Jobs and a family and the time to enjoy life.
You can justify it on eugenics (which I don't), or you can justify it on the grounds of simple humanity: we've made a society where it can be very difficult for professional people to have any semblance of a normal life. The fact that education reduces fertility simply reflects this, and should be changed.
Goldman Sachs would have gone bankrupt, their investments and "products" shown to be mostly cons, if their employees weren't also in charge of the Fed and the Treasury.
And you know it and so does the rest of the planet.
Mr. Rogers asks, can you spell "bailouts", "insider trading", "front running", "flash trading", "influence peddling", "shell corporations", "naked shorts"?
Goldman Sachs = the mother of all potential RICO cases..and it's coming, sooner or later.
BTW, China has started allowing a lot of their high level investors to just default on these "products", better and more accurately termed "swindles", because they are realizing now they are mostly cons. This trend will accelerate and go beyond China, and China is switching to more durable type goods as investments overseas, mines, farm lands, energy sources. Their foray into dollar denominated paper "financial products" will be gradually slowing as they shift. They won't do it all at once, but they are and will continue to change.
From the article:
They then surveyed the traits that conferred reproductive success. After adjusting for environmental factors such as income, education and lifestyle choices such as smoking, the researchers estimated the heritability of traits by applying correlations among all relatives.
If you are studying evolution, you are not supposed to 'adjust' environmental factors. Environmental factors are driving evolution. If you eliminate them you are studying genetic drift.
Besides what evolution we are talking about. They had only 2 generation.
So, you're thinking that short, fat, poor people will evolve into Morlocks?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I like... big... BUTTS and I cannot LIE...
You other brothers can't deny....
That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get
SPRUNG...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF9QI18-Bpo
Also, if dwarven females are that ugly, there you have an immediate selection pressure against them taking over.
That is not a given. that would only be a given , if there was no contraception. Letme give you a scenario : beautfiul women might want to avoid pregnancy more often than ugly dwarf as you so tactfully put. So they use more often contraception to keep their "beauty" longer, OTOH ugly dwarf would not care on pregnancy making them fat (or at least would not care as much). That could be a scenario, and it would be interresting to see if they took into account societal pressure in the "why" women are getting heavier in average. Also in some country "ideal" women are definitively far heavier than the skeleton ralf lauren and co present us, and that many western women try to imitate. If in those country the women reproduce more in average, then the statistic above, on the whole world, WILL lead to heavier women in average, if not by the sheer number of "lighter" women not reproducing as much in other country.
Mind you I have not read the article so I dunno if they took that into account or not.
Finally evolution is only linked to what facilitate gene to be given to offspring in a aprticular environment. It does not say that the environment must be natural or artificial, or even purely psychologic (societal). Our modern society changed that environment , and allowed other weaker offspring to be born, but this is only a NEW environment with different constraint. Thus human still evolve. Human would stop evolving is *ALL* environmental constraint were removed, and we ALL had the same number of kids and everybody reproduced the same number of kid (all women and men) since this is obviously NOT true, some selection will happen.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"Welfare queens" are not a myth, they are history. TANF was developed and passed in 1996 specifically to replace AFDC for this reason, after peaking in about the 1970s when some states began to tighten up their rules. Many bricks form the social net, also there are income credits (EIC), Social Security (for deceased/disabled spouses) and still various forms of charity.
Also careful shopping can reduce food cost far below average. I've been hiring 2-3 low wage earners/week this year and I notice they spend far more on junk (20 oz branded soda, Cheetos, etc) alone than I spend on half or more of my at home meals (e.g. carved ham, $1.29/lb, two eggs, @$.78-1.10/doz, toast, tomato, $1.99/gal milk/tea and vitamin, 3 cents). Chicken, $0.78/ lb, and fresh produce are usually cheaper, too. I am sure that I am a more careful shopper, although I just pick up staples and specials at their lowest cost place in my part of town, passing by.
Even today, I am not so sure about welfare being below the incremental cost per child for careful shoppers (e.g. $3/day for healthy food, thrift shop or handed down clothes, and often incrementally free housing.)
I don't think the conclusion can be generalized beyond saying that women in the Framingham area are evolving to favor these attributes.
How can so many people, even doctors and scientists, not know the difference between evolution and natural selection. I have known the difference since the 3rd grade.
The article has NOTHING to do with evolution. They are talking about natural selection, with is easily observed.
10 generations? By that time we'll all have metal wings and laser eyes. I'm curious if the study takes genetic engineering into account at all.
I've always known I was born in the wrong time. Now I know what the right time is.
From what I've observed in my life. Dumb women that really like sex have a lot more kids than average women.
I've known three ex strippers in my life. Each eventually shared that they had each had 4 or more children. All had given at least one up for adoption.
All had very high sex drives (which sounds good... but when you really think about it, most of us couldn't emotionally handle being married to women like that).
They were thin, two were tall, one was about 5'.
Perhaps dumb is the wrong word tho. They were intelligent but unwise.
Along those lines, and in line with the study, women who put themselves first and are wise, tend not to not be prolific in my experience. Several smart, wise females I knew from college did quite well in life but never had children. Two never married (and weren't gay-- their standards were just too high until it was too late).
It's bad for us long term to keep growing the population and I think we would be much happier and sustainable as a race at about 3 billion population.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
All of the sperm banks in my area have height requirements that I don't meet...
I've heard a rumor that tall women have trouble finding mates. A lot of men are put off by it.
This sounds like an obvious example of getting the causation wrong. To me, the very obvious implication is that pregnancy makes women fatter. Weight is by no means entirely genetically driven. Neither is blood pressure or cholesterol. There are genetic factors, sure, but the study as the Telegraph is reporting it at least imply that all of these things are entirely genetic. This is not true at all. Environment is significant in weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and even height. Good nutrition has effects on all of these and it is pretty well known that good nutrition improves fertility.
The other bit is even funnier:
It should be obvious that on an entirely probabilistic basis women who give birth early will, in the end, have more children. Without any proof that there is any genetic basis to giving birth early, this means nothing. The bit at the other end may make more sense as there's more likely to be a genetic basis for later menopause, but even there you'd have to show that the genetic basis was actually there.
In truth *any* study that claims that we are "still evolving" without referencing actual genes is suspect as separating out the genetic and environmental factors is extremely difficult.
The cake is a pie
How exactly does a slew of awkward insecure geeks whose mothers hate them and will never get laid benefit the gene pool?
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
A lot of tall women won't date a man shorter than they are, and enough of us tall men don't much care whether a woman's short or tall to where we're not with the tall ones, to really piss off certain very tall women ;)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't feed shieldwolf when he's off his meds, it will only encourage him to continue not taking them.
Poor people, on the other hand, breed like rabbits. The average I read was close to 6 per family.
Ah! You mean niggers and Mexicans, right?
I've always preferred that sort of woman (think cup size).
Yo mama is so evolved...
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The God Emperor of Dune created a legion of ursine female warriors.
His idea was that men should be kept as far away from warfare as possible; they are simply not stable enough. If men get to dictate when you go to war, you will always be at war.
Women, especially ones that have had children, have an entirely different and more stable perspective on the world, more protective and nurturing than men. If women get to dictate when you go to war, you will rarely go to war.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Actually, if you plot GDP per head against fertility rates, there is a statistically significant uptick as GDP/head increases. The US is a particularly strong example, but there are a fair number of countries where this holds true, and there is no obvious cultural or religious correlation.
[FUCK BETA]
I've heard a rumor that tall women have trouble finding mates. A lot of men are put off by it.
If what you say is [ or were ] true, it might explain South Australians' [ past ] tradition of giving their -daughters- [ not their sons ] some sort of medication, intended to [ & effective at ] "stunuting" the growth [ in height ] of their girls.
BTW: One way to check the research claims is to grab & analyse some large, online dating sites' databases. They have height/weight/# of kids (possibly biased, of course, by assumed ideas of what makes an attractive mate).
(Anybody heard of similar research based on such databases?)
Like it or not, he's mostly right.
Now put down the McDonalds, it wasn't aimed at you personally.
We need to nip this in the bud right now...so, guys, QUIT fucking fat chicks!! Don't settle...wait around for quality women that don't weigh a ton.
Geez, with all the supposed 'pressure' they say is on girls to be thinner...it sure doesn't seem to be working that well.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Also I might point out that having an abundance of food and not having to do jobs that are physically intensive are characteristic of the rich, not the poor. The United States is one of the collectively wealthiest societies in the world, and it is also one of the fattest. Poor people are more skinny; go to India or China and check it out some time. There are vastly more skinny people on Earth than there are fat people, and they aren't more well off as this guy is suggesting.
Fine, you quit sleeping with the larger ladies, that leaves more for me. I personally like the larger ladies.
When you have a society that says it's OK to be fat and overweight, what do you expect? Designer stores are selling HUGE sizes for men and women, magazines are proclaiming "Big is beautiful", and designers are selling clothes for people who should be on a treadmill, and not in their stores. I'm sick of hearing people say that it is OK to be overweight - It's not.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The anorexic ones don't reproduce.
BTW, Rush Limbaugh actually quotes facts. Try not to get your panties in a wad about the poster being right. The statistics bear themselves out, the poor reproduce at a much higher rate - it's a fact. Personally I believe that the future will resemble something like the movie Idiocracy protrayed :(
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I"m not talking about unhealthy thin...but, fit and healthy thing...something like Jennifer Anniston, I mean that lady is 40 and STILL looking hot...or something along the body fitness of Adriana Lima (I think that's her name) of Victoria Secrets. These women are very healthy, no pudging bellies, no cottage cheese thighs...something that looks good with their midriffs showing.
There's a difference between being fit and being anorexic.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Actually, I think women will be some strange, never-before-seen shape and metallic by 2409 --maybe beings of pure energy. It's kind of funny to assume we'll still be simple biological entities at that point. Even if you think Kurzweil's estimates of the date of the Singularity are absurd, it's difficult to believe it won't have happened in under 400 years (barring some cataclysmic disaster, of course).
I really enjoy sci-fi with space-faring humans in the distant future and all that, but the robots are going to think that stuff is absolutely hilarious.
Ask me about my sig!
I am exploring where potential bottom costs are for healthful and doable, not easy or exciting, living. Economy of scale (living with relatives and friends), debt, transport and housing are critical cost questions that range from "free" to crisis on cost or nonavailability. And there is a point of low budget, where maintaining health becomes problematic. In America, many are still above that point financially, maing poor choices and damaging their health and finances.
Actually where I live, precut frozen thighs are usually cheaper than whole chicken, very easy and fast. The cheapest produce is often affordable (cabbage, 50# onions, supersale items), DIY (sprouts), or easy on a short fence (beans, tomatoes).
What I see here are poor people that unfortunately squander resources on junk, costly debt, or relentelssly advertised choices instead of making do with traditional, less glamorous.
Btw lest you think I am all stonehearted, I make a point of buying someone a square meal on the job for my work, at higher than average cafeteria prices. And I try to make sure they get inexpensive vitamins (1-2 multi, winter D 2000+iu), even if I have to provide them.
I travel to third world countries and we as a country still don't know what really poor is. Modern sugar and carb levels are the bane of most people's bodies (at 3/4 genetically), perhaps especially the poor. The trick is paying all the bills, not running out of money, not getting sucked in on small but expensive "comforts". Even in the poorest coutries, I see how relentlessly carbs (e.g sodas) and cigarettes are hawked to the poor, even one stick at a time.
I have lived on beans before, not now, carbs became a vitamin and mineral problem (inadequate B, C, Cr, Mg). However, I look at how my grandparents lived, and see what we do wrong today when poor.
"if not sugary junk to get you through the working day" Cabbage, bulk yellow onion, garlic, cheapest pepper, oil, thighs as primary base, low carb food plus cheapest, low carb, colored produce. That includes canned tomato products. And water or tea. (Much) Cheaper than what I see many poor Americans eat. (I admit, I may not be competitive on a food basis with 3rd world poor)
I had to go to this diet after being wrecked by a now withdrawn (p)harmaceutical that made me sick and extremely carb/gluten intolerant.
So that's you, me, Mika, Sir Mix-a-lot, the fictional David St. Hubbins and the dead Freddie Mercury (when he was going through his "bi" phase, anyway). Between us, we are going to get a lot of sex.
He's specifically talking about the USA. It's much easier to buy Little Debbies at Walmart than to buy the proper food at Whole Foods (i.e. "whole paycheck"). Part of what makes civilization work is easy, cheap access to stored grain products... exactly what makes you fat. Rich folks have access to better quality food, they drink half-caf-soy-lattes instead of Coke, they get hour+ lunch times to eat nicely prepared salads, not 30 minutes drive-thru... ect, etc. They also get discounts for those expensive gyms (and again flexible work hours to USE them). At the top end, they farm their kids out to nannies so they have time to go do social things and look pretty.
There's no need to bring Rush Limbaugh into this.
It's not universally true, but it is more or less an accepted fact.
Fertility rates are inversely proportional to income.
In the modern world there are a lot of reasons for this. The rich tend to have access to better education. therefore, they tend to try to start a career before a family (illustrated in comedic fashion by the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy). Then with their career dominating their lives, they usually only have a couple kids at the most.
More wealthy folks have better access to birth control. Again, better education plays into this. On the extreme end of the spectrum, you have folks who have superstitious beliefs. That doesn't help keep their fertility rates down any...
Economists and demographers have known about this correlation for centuries. And it's interesting because it goes across religions, across nationalities, race, and other factors. Poor Americans are just as likely to have a higher fertility rate as poor French, or Japanese. Poor Nigerians or Indians are even more likely because a poor American is fairly well off by Nigerian standards.
Side Rant: The Israelis in particular are worried about this effect because Israel is a democracy. And the Israeli Palestinians have a fertility rate several times that of Israeli Jews. Again, the average Israeli Palestinian is much poorer than the average Israeli Jew.
The Israelis are concerned because with the higher fertility rates of the Palestinian Israeli citizens, the Palestinians may become a majority in the "Jewish State" in a couple generations. This brings up all kinds of moral dilemmas for the Israeli government, who must try to balance it's commitment to a homeland for the Jews to it's commitment to democracy for all it's citizens.
A few minutes of on the Google came up with these:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164483
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/177/8/846/F19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/correlation.aspx?v1=67&v2=31&y=2004
Also, I have no idea why you brought Rush Limbaugh into this. I'm about as progressive a character as you're likely to meet. I don't know anyone that disputes this data.
Cause is another matter. Progressives would tend to contend that the reason is education, the nature of pre-industrialized societies, higher mortality rates among poor nations, the tempo of life in wealthy nations and classes.
And Rush would say they all want their welfare checks or something.
You're right about the lack of heredity for short-fatness though. It is environmental / cultural, not genetic.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Above a certain height (or weight) it's not so comfy when she sits on your lap :).
;).
But yeah, most ladies have a thing for "guy must be taller than me"[1]. Go explain that rabid feminists
[1] and not too skinny.
She's 40, still hot and key point- has not yet had any kids! Yes that's right, it's the end of the line for her. If the hot chicks don't have kids- there will be no second generation of hot chicks. Meanwhile I see plenty of ugly chicks with babies walking around in Auckland New Zealand .. this boat is sinking.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Does anybody remember a punk tune from the late 70's that went lyric-wise something like:
Big women
To fill my eyes
Big women
With flabby thighs
Big women
Big women
I'm swimmin'
In Big Women....
Men and women should have evolved to look extremely beautiful. Reproductive fitness is no good without reproduction.
haha awesome.
he who controls the spice controls the universe
My wife is 4'9" and we just had our first child. We are both engineers, and I'm none too tall myself.
I think we might as well save them the trouble and name our next child Nali Mekkatorque and just get the Gnome race started.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I wouldn't really call this "natural selection." Social, cultural, political, and economic factors drive birth rates. It so happens that women in places with the highest birth rates tend to be shorter and heavier. It's not because they're more likely to be fertile and reproduce. It's just that they haven't figured out how not to get pregnant yet. (Or choose not to practice birth control despite it being available).
What?
I mean if we do basic math we'll see that they'll get knocked up more
Theres nothing like a plump farm girl.
balance it's commitment
Jews to it's commitment
"its".
The Israelis in particular are worried about this effect because Israel is a democracy. And the Israeli Palestinians have a fertility rate several times that of Israeli Jews. Again, the average Israeli Palestinian is much poorer than the average Israeli Jew.
The Israelis are concerned because with the higher fertility rates of the Palestinian Israeli citizens, the Palestinians may become a majority in the "Jewish State" in a couple generations. This brings up all kinds of moral dilemmas for the Israeli government, who must try to balance it's commitment to a homeland for the Jews to it's commitment to democracy for all it's citizens.
I've about heard this kind of demographic fear before; if it's widespread in a country, it means that it's a democracy mainly by coincidence, and its true political system is sitting on the fence and taking a hard look at whether if one day the coincidence went away it might actually want to be a democracy.
With that said, I usually hear about this demographic fear, as here, attributed to unnamed Israelis in the kind of publication I don't even trust to get today's weather right. (Sorry Slashdot editors, I know you don't print the weather, but if you did it would be wrong.) I don't know if anyone who hasn't been doing lines of H. P. Lovecraft really thinks this way or not.
For a human trait where the average is not moving up or down, then the individuals far out on either side of the bell curve must be failing to reproduced to roughly the same degree. If you think about this with respect to intelligence, then if the really smart ones are not reproducing, the ones on the other end of the scale are unlikely to be reproducing either. If this was not the case, then the average over generations would drift up or down until the curve was being trimmed on both sides equally.
To give an example far from western culture, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/why-pygmies-are-small In this case, the larger ones didn't have enough reproductive years to replace themselves. (High mortality.)
The ones who matured too soon didn't do as well in child bearing either.
While we notice the smart people who are not having kids, the ones who are equally far from the mean on the low side don't reproduce either.
Keith Henson
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
Read the rest of the comment and you'll find out.
Women below 2 meters there drown when the tide rises.
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!
Massachusetts is cold. Big women keep you warm.
I think that the authors have confused an opinion related to natural selection with one related to evolution. Natural selection relates to the inability of dead people to have children, which causes a close link between dying and not reproducing. It is one driving force of evolutionary change that does indeed have a decreased influence in societies with intense medical care. Sexual selection is another force (which I do not think can account for the Gnomification of womankind either), and a third relates to everything to do with fertility, breeding, and raising children. I believe this third factor may be related to the matter at hand. For instance, it is easy to imagine that anorexic women have trouble breeding. More importantly, women who get pregnant a lot tend to weigh more as a result of their pregnancy; nothing genetic there (correlation != causation). and of course women who give birth young tend to have more children in their lifespan (or conversely, the women who will wind up having many children are the ones that tend to start early). That last factor is interesting, because the psychological urge to have children is very much influenced by genetics, and (because it is now the single most important determinant of the number of children you have) strongly subject to evolutionary change. Additionally, we may expect the future to bring us women who are genetically insensitive to birth control medication, and who are allergic to letex (or aversive to condoms; I believe the last is a very rare example where men are an evolutionary step ahead of women).
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
I think you both have the answer tight there.
The ones with the best body image are valued for that body image. It could be personal value, or it could be monetary value from whatever job they have. As a result, if they want to keep that body image they have to delay or forgo reproduction, as that would disturb the value of their body. So all these beautiful bodies are waiting until later to have their kids, and probably having fewer as a result.
Girls without a body image to protect would probably be less hesitant about going ahead with early birth or large families. Hence, the higher birth rate goes to the ones with lower body social value.
Doesn't it suck how evolution works? I thing we should just switch change back to ID. Then we could design the kind of girls we want instead of waiting for one to come along like evolution mandates.
Troglodytes, Eloy ... it's sooo obvious. H. G. saw the future and it is us. (With apologies to Walt)
If beautiful women don't have children, being beautiful is evolutionarily maladaptive, and will be selected out. Margaret Sanger's not working out so well...
How many children does Jennifer Anniston have, at 40?
I like the Time Machine reference to two separate species lol.. if thats what you were going for
Which means that children in the lowest 1/5 of households have an even shot at moving halfway across the class spectrum. It may not be a perfect meritocracy, but it's no caste system, either.
In the high school that my children attend, there appear to be few poor families. The remainder seem to be split largely between middle class families with white collar jobs (i.e teaching, sales, programming,) and professional class families whose income may be the same or many times higher (i.e. law, medicine, executive, and accounting). 98% will graduate high school (U.S. Grade 12) at age 17 or 18, and more than 80% of them will eventually graduate from college. (Bachelor's degree or better.)
In the adjoining poor city, more than 90% of the families live below the poverty line. Their incomes often combine government assistance with low paying jobs. 75% of children born in that town will drop out of school by age 16, and a trivial percentage will graduate from college. A frightening number of these children can not read or write and will never rise to median incomes.
The rare children produced by the poor who find themselves raised by wealthier suburban families seem to succeed in life on par with other children raised in the suburbs.
As a result, it may be more accurate to acknowledge that while the US does not have the caste divisions found in India, that we are still far from the meritocracy envisioned by so many of our founders.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Look at any carving of woman's fertility around the world from any culture from ancient times. Short and Fat are the norm I would say.
and it will also lead to more poor people and less chinese people.
yes, social rules are having an effect on our gene pool. but will the rules last long enough to stick?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Seriously, though, the logic is sound and the current population trends are clear.
Shit. Just tag it 'mexican' and be done with it.
My prices are US, and much lower than average, because I know who has what deals. e.g. milk in US is typically $3.29-$4.50/gal, with $3 a little more common now (depression). I found one place, a drug store chain around the corner that has a $1.99/gallon traffic builder for months on end. As a side note, in one 3rd world country I stop in, milk is $2-3/liter, goat's milk version preferred over the local cow.
The chicken thighs are the lower price chains in town or others' sales prices, nothing sketchier than usual (depending on how critical you are about factory food in general). $1.29 ham are typically ham shanks, say 6-9 kg, low cost chains like Walmart. Eggs from sales store well with a little cooling - eggs used to be commercially stored in merely fan cooled rooms with slight water evaporation in the humind US south for 3-4 days prior to sale, even in summer (15C-20C?).
Yes, GST and VAT taxes do wonders for the cost of (not) living in most of the (de)developed world outside the US west of the Mississippi.
Because at 10:00 she was a 2...
Get your dogma outta my yard!
We already know how tall women will be in the 25th century. Doesn't anyone remember Erin Gray?
It's one of the first things people learn concerning the realm of human biology. Swarthy and short are dominant and fair and tall are recessive. The same holds true in the realm of politics, economics and sociology. Tyranny, poverty and squalor are dominant (and politically correct); liberty, prosperity and sanitation are recessive (not to mention so overrated). Ergo, mongrelization on all levels will surely guarantee nothing but short, fat, swarthy poor tyrants.
It's the New America...and all is right with the world.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
I wonder if our race will bifurcate into two separate species someday.
Possibly in countries with a high differential in the distribution of wealth, and low social mobility, eg contemporary America. Then again, with the vast difference in available education, healthcare, opportunities etc available to different social segments in the US of A, arguably this has already begun to happen (in a logical if not a physical sense)?
If they are the more fertile then men will find them more attractive.
And in any case, I question the sanity of men salivating after stick thin girls who often are not healthy, not physically and often neither emotionally.
And what about the stereotyping of tall women not digging for shorter men? If anything men should be happy that women would have one less excuse to filter prospective partners.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sexist, quasi racist, and mostly baseless and uninformed.
Good effort mate.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is at least one positive thing to look forward to in the future. We will have shiny silver jumpsuits that say "NO fat chicks".
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.