Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
There's also something wrong with spouting forth conclusions and condemning the opposing viewpoint as being idiotic without citing any evidence (which makes this somewhat ironic, I guess).
The Wikipedia article on the subject is convoluted and doesn't really offer any strong conclusions, but at least some studies reported in the article have suggested a small negative correlation between intelligence and fertility (i.e., number of offspring), and another study showed a strong negative correlation between education and fertility (and education is sometimes used as a proxy for measuring intelligence). There's also a well-known negative correlation between economic well-being and fertility which may be related.
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
Idiocracy is classist bullshit that comforts rich wankers who desperately want to believe that they're rich because of some inherent superiority
The part that I find most humorous about this fact is that our DNA doesn't care what we do for a living or how big our houses are. It doesn't care how intelligent we are either. The goal of our DNA is procreation. So if the rich have fewer children than the poor, then the rich are, by definition, genetically inferior to the poor, and it is natural selection that makes them a minority.
Funnier yet, it is the rich who can afford to have the most children, so the poor are beating them despite having a severe handicap.
Class is relatively fixed, do not confuse some dynamic movement in income as social mobility, most people behave like atoms in gas.
Are the atoms in a gas fixed? I'm sorry, but the article you've cited does a poor job of supporting that idea. On the other hand, according to this
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.