Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.science
From: mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman)
Subject: Re: Are the Moties us?
Organization: Oracle Corporation
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 23:34:51 GMT
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In article <rvaykmd@rpi.edu> kasprj@rpi.edu writes:

> MF= Michael Friedman
> JK= myself

>MF:
>|> Up until quite recently the optimum genetic strategy for a human
>|> female was to have a few kids and concentrate on them.

>JK:
>|> In less developed or expanding societies, a large family is a positive 
>|> strategy.

>MF:
>|> Define "less developed".  I'm defining it as any society you can find
>|> up to about 200 years ago.  In that kind of society, you have many
>|> kids but few get past early childhood.  Moreover, you don't have too
>|> many too close together because if you do you stand a fair chance of
>|> starving before they are old enough to help out.

> That turns out not to be the case. In pre-industrial societies, most
>families subsisted by human labor on small farms. More children means
>more people to milk the cows, plow the fields, gather the crops, etc.
>Bringing up children isn't a large drain on the family's energy. Look 
>at what the families of the pre-industrial era were like. You'll find
>that most of them had four or five (or more) children surviving to 
>maturity.

That seems hard to believe.  If it was true, then just assuming 25
year generations it would have taken only 500 years to multiply the
population of Europe by a factor of 1,000,000.  Even today there are
under a billion people in Europe.  500 years ago there were far more
than 1,000.  Where's the hole in the logic?

>MF:
>|> Why are you worrying about prosperity?  This is an argument about
>|> genetics.  Prosperity isn't an evolutionary advantage.

> Perhaps it isn't, though I suspect that it could be. At any rate, when 
>you throw human intelligence into the question, genetics takes a back 
>seat. Prosperity _is_ a proven survival trait on the scale of a human 
>lifetime. 

But not a trait that leads to having many kids.  It used to be - the
rich had tons of bastards - but that's a lot rarer now.  If prosperity
doesn't lead to having many kids then the traits that lead to
prosperity will decline in the gene pool or traits that lead
prosperous people to have many kids anyway will increase.

>And humans, being sentient and not entirely puppets of our 
>genes, are more likely to act on traits which have an effect on a more 
>observable scale.

And what happens in the next generation?  People who are motivated by
prosperity over protecting their bloodline will die out.

>JK:
>|> But do the women who have children at age 16 keep having more until age
>|> 35+? Most teenagers with a child or two can't afford any more.

>MF:
>|> But they have them anyway.  How often do we read the sad stories about
>|> women on welfare with four kids by four different husbands?

> How often you read about them isn't a reliable indicator of how often 
>the situation actually occurs. Census data (at least in the USA) show 
>that such people are a small fraction of the poor population. They do,
>however, make great story material for liberal "we have to help them"
>tearjerkers and conservative "they're going to outbreed us" paranoids,
>which may explain why we read about them so often.

Even if you are right, one very simple strategy to out-grow your
opponent is to have the same number of kids he has, but to have them a
few years earlier.  Two equal populations with doubling times of 4
generations and generation times of 16 years and 24 years,
respectively, will have a 2 to 1 population imbalance in just 192
years. 

>MF:
>|> Want to bet that over the next 100
>|> years the negative correlation between wealth and birth rate isn't
>|> going to decrease?  In fact, going blind, I'll bet that in the US
>|> mong native born Americans it has decreased in the last 100 years.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that this bit of convoluted 
>grammar works out to "Rich people should be having more children."

Wrong.

Let's try it slow.

Right now there is a negative correlation between wealth and birth
rate.

I contend that this negative correlation will decline in magnitude over the
next 100 years and I'm guessing that is has already declined.

>MF: 
>|> Anyone know how to check this out?

> Census data. Try a trip to your local library.

What, exactly, would you check?  One thing to remmber is that a family
with 5 kids is almost automaticly poorer than a family with one kid.
How do we factor this in?  After all, it provides an automatic bias
leading to large families being poorer than small families.

>MF:
>|> Until something happens to forcibly restrain humn breeding I would
>|> expect to see a continuing trend that brings us closer and closer to
>|> the Motie model.

>JK:
>|> You'd be in the minority, then. The facts fail to support your hypothesis.

>MF:
>|> Which facts are those?

> Demographics as recorded by the census bureaus of the world. Again, I 
>reccomend going to the library and doing a bit of research on the subject.

Can you be specific?   I doubt it.

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