From: kasprj@isaac.its.rpi.edu (Jim Kasprzak)
Subject: Re: Are the Moties us?
Reply-To: kasprj@rpi.edu
Organization: The Big Wedge 
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 02:43:00 GMT

 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.

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. 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.

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.

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."
If so, then your guess is wrong. The size of families in the upper
income levels is not increasing.

MF: 
|> Anyone know how to check this out?
 
 Census data. Try a trip to your local library.

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.
------------------------------------------------------------------
     __  Live from Capitaland, heart of the Empire State...
 ___/  | Jim Kasprzak, computer operator @ RPI, Troy, NY, USA
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     \_| Pro-Change. Pro-America. Pro-Clinton.
      ====  e-mail: kasprj@rpi.edu or kasprzak@mts.rpi.edu