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.
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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...