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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.
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.
No one is ever going to sleep with above-average people like you.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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
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.
There is the possibility of radial symmetry kicking in and getting a non-even number of boobs, but that's just weird.
I doubt it. It probably reflects the fact that skinny women are less fit hosts for a fetus than heavier women. At some point, you run into high weight causing health issues that also make the woman a less fit incubator.
Earlier maturity and later menopause extend the fertility period (duh)... in times past women needed more time to build up a healthy body to have children, and there was no genetic point in delaying menopause since pregnancies towards the end of female fertility were less likely to be viable. Modern medicine and diet are probably the enabler here, making girls healthy and heavy enough quickly enough to bear children when younger without significant risk of death, and making a higher percentage of near-menopause pregnacies successful.
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.
...only if she's 5'3"
--- Do you believe in the day?
skinny women are less fit hosts for a fetus than heavier women
Maybe they've got cause and effect the wrong way round. Maybe after the first baby, the women in this study put on weight. Women who didn't have children didn't gain weight so skewed the samples and results?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Framingham is not America and America is not the world. While this report might hold true for a statistically insignificant group in one country, it tells us nothing about human evolution over the whole planet.
The traits described probably have more to do with proximity to the local McDonalds, than anythiing about "survival of the fa^Hittest"
Only blame the summary. Stearns made no such generalization.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
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.
To quote Monty Python: "Look at them bloody Catholics, filling up the bloody world with children they can't afford to bloody feed." At least, I assume that's what you were referring to.
But seriously, the idea of a "welfare queen" is a myth (and typically a racist one at that). The vast majority of welfare recipients are trying to work, are unable to, but find work within about 2 years. Among other things, the per-child benefit that is given via WIC, TANF, and food stamps doesn't completely cover the cost of having the extra child, so having more kids makes even welfare recipients poorer.
I am officially gone from
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!
Any GP or OB/GYN will tell you that there is a minimum percentage of body fat below which a woman won't even menstruate.
They'll also tell you a woman should gain some weight during pregnancy, and that generally speaking the outcome of the pregnancy is better if a certain amount of weight is gained (unless the woman is already overweight, of course).
Again, I don't think they're saying thinner = bad, I think they're saying the population is shifting towards the optimum range. Skinny women have less, and less healthy children on average, so the average weight is rising by a small amount as they're outbred by heavier women.
There will be an upper limit to this effect as well - morbid obesity is not a good thing for getting or being pregnant, either.
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.
Give that idiocracy shit a rest. It's not genetically dumber people who make more children, it's people lower on the social scale. As in, people in ghettos and immigrants. Poor education and poor nutrition (both which cause lower IQs) aren't genetically hereditary.
So-called smart people always confuse uneducated people with less intelligent people. Maybe they're not that smart after all.
You just got troll'd!
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.
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.
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
>>>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
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
Note that the GP's fertility measures is just average number of offspring. This is probably just due to the well known fact that the better educated and the rich often choose to have fewer children. I seriously doubt awkwardness has anything to do with it.
caritj.org
One of the principal lacts of their evil is to sponsor a media-culture that gets ordinary schmucks like yourself to identify emotionally with them, aspire to their condition, and to assume an attack on the values of the truly rich to be a personal threat to your own status and mobility. You are also trained to revile those perceived as less fortunate/gifted as yourself - never suspecting that to the real rich, the difference between you and the homeless doesn't amount to a rounding error.
Hallelujah. Which yields weird and amusing behaviours from middle class nowhere-near-rich people. They're against taxes on the rich as if they ever were going to make it one day (this being said I can relate to that delusion, I always believe that I'm about to make it big and picture myself in ten years with more money than I could need), and they don't want any "handouts" to poor people, even though that's tens of millions of Americans we're talking about.
The American lower-class doesn't even exist, if you pay attention to political debates. I wonder if it's because no one wants to hear about the poor, even those who are on their way to poverty, or if because there's so many poor, and so little difference between the poor and the middle class compared to the upper class that the lower class is now part of the middle class.
You just got troll'd!
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.
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.
Shit. My wife comes from future!
The women who bore children also got shorter, apparently.
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.
It is also their job to go out of business, when they fail. But they have so many moles in your government (Geithner, Obama, etc.) that you will bail them out for the next 80 years - as they pay themselves bonuses off of your children's former college fund.
You need to look up the definition of "Stockholm Syndrome" - then look hard in the mirror at yourself.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's an indisputable fact that people with lower incomes tend to have more children. And the GP didn't say anything about welfare queens or politics; he simple stated the fact that the many transfer programs in this country mean being unable or unwilling to provide for your offspring no longer limits your reproductive potential.
"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.)
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.
Your facts are less correct than they were 50 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html
"The movement of families up and down the economic ladder is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. But it does not seem to be happening quite as often as it used to."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662456
Eighty percent of Americans still believe it's possible to pull yourself up by the proverbial bootstraps. That's according to a New York Times poll reported last week, but a recent mobility study suggests the American Dream may be more style than substance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
Upper nonmanual occupations have the highest level of occupational inheritance. [3]
http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/27/news/companies/lashinsky_hurd.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009030310
As his father did before him, Hurd attended the Browning School - a prestigious all-boys school where classmate Jamie Dimon, now CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, remembers seventh-grader Hurd as a good basketball player
The wealthy own the media and push the "you could be wealthy!" idea hard. It helps keep the lower class folks voting against their own self interests. It's why the wizard of wall street pays a lower tax rate on his monumental earnings than his secretary pays on her salary.
There is a tiny chance you will break into the wealthy classes. But, for the most part, they pass the good jobs down to their own. Just look at the way hollywood has been taken over by 2nd and 3rd generation actors. CEO jobs are less obvious but essentially the same.
Any idiot can bankrupt themselves-- but it takes a lot more than simple hard work to get into the executive class.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
Don't feed shieldwolf when he's off his meds, it will only encourage him to continue not taking them.
Except most people today are moving from ABSOLUTE poverty to a developed nation poor, does not mean that classes will not solidify over time as the rest of the world becomes fully developed like the west.
In the west we have a reversing trend, more people are getting poorer.
Social mobility cuts both ways (i.e. person in developed country gets job, x amount of workers lose their jobs in USA/Canada, Europe).
And considering the amount of underemployed unviersity educated people in the USA and Canada it's quite obvious that they are backsliding (i.e. goign backwards).
I just read a big article on it the other day I'll see if I can't find it.
Yo mama is so evolved...
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting! The thing about such debates is that all arguments are based on assumptions, assumptions which are difficult to verify. I'd be interested to see anything close to a graph showing the distribution of offsprings depending on household income/education btw!
You just got troll'd!
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.........
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.........
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.
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?
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
"Half way" means nothing when 10% of the people own 90% of the wealth.
It does mean that the classes aren't fixed - and that was the only claim I was making.
Of course you are talking about the legitimate children. But consider that the rich people have more illegitimate children than the poor - maybe without even knowing. As I remember somewhere about 20% of the people are conceived in infidelity. This skews the statistics quite a lot.