News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by maratd on Friday July 05, 2019 @08:15AM (#20361918)
If it was advantageous for us to have lots of children, then women would have a dozen at a time, rather than one. There are plenty of mammals that do that. There’s clearly a tradeoff there and the selective pressures for humans tend to lean toward fewer. Not sure where we’ll end up, but time will tell.
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by bin0 on Friday July 05, 2019 @08:19AM (#20361940)
I think there was such a selection pressure when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Agriculture is a very recent development anthropologically, so we were still in the mode of one-kid-per-pregnancy, though multiple might have been advantageous. It's possible we developed higher fertility due to that, but we didn't have enough time for that new pressure to kick in.
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by barry-cotter on Friday July 05, 2019 @08:29AM (#20362005)
It’s been 5,000 years since the dawn of agriculture. If multiple births were fertility increasing they’d be, if not normal, at least common in some groups. You don’t even get 1 in 3. Single births are clearly not being found wanting by the Blind Idiot God.
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by bin0 on Friday July 05, 2019 @08:50AM (#20362117)
Not necessarily. Mortality of mothers is higher in multiple births; maybe that's a counter-pressure (fewer children). Children do worse as well ([0], [1], [2]). Ladies are not built to carry more than one child, especially considering the size of our children, and agriculture has been such a blip on the evolutionary/anthropological timescale that we have not had time to evolve so significantly as to change our basic reproduction.

[0]: https://watermark.silverchair.com/151663.pdf?token=AQECAHi20...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5541191/

[2] https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/4/e004514

Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by malvosenior on Friday July 05, 2019 @12:10PM (#20363599)
The size of the human brain makes this physically impossible.
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by maratd on Friday July 05, 2019 @04:26PM (#20365584)
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by malvosenior on Friday July 05, 2019 @06:58PM (#20366569)
Three and twelve are very different from each other. Even three is very rare and often comes with complications.
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by option_greek on Friday July 05, 2019 @11:59AM (#20363514)
Minor correction: Advantageous to the children (conferring evolutionary advantage). Not to us.
Re:The heritability of fertility makes world population stab... by maratd on Friday July 05, 2019 @04:13PM (#20365481)
I'm not sure I understand your distinction. From a gene-based perspective, the gene, whether in the child or in the parent, is the same. The selection pressure is on a gene level, not on a species or individual level.