Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
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Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#2[deleted]
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#3A lot to unpack (read - wildly speculate about) here.
10,000 generations ago. Like the next one but less of a "solved game".
1000 generations ago - Old men coupling with young women reads as small-scale tribal society to me. Polygamy, pride-of-lions. Groups are small enough that village elders control the, uh, means of production. The bottleneck on food is natural stocks.
200-300 generations ago lines up with the dawn of civilization and large-scale farming (5-7000 years ago). The bottleneck on food is human labour. Young people are encouraged to start (reasonably) self-sufficient farming families, and the surplus is traded for, taxed, or stolen.
0-50 generations ago (1000AD+) ??? Cultural escape velocity is reached. Women are having children later than ever before, pointing to less risky lives, greater food security, and increased autonomy, but also a heavier load of cultural baggage. Becoming elves isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Also, before someone else says it, blah blah blah average vs median.
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#4It seems they used modern human mutation rates, which vary by ~300%, to predict age at reproduction. Since the relationship between this rate in parents and the offspring even a few generations back does not seem to be particularly well understood, it seems they would have a hard time reaching back very far into history with this analysis and claiming any accuracy at all.
To me it reads like someone bought a cheap e.g. lux meter, realized it was highly thermally sensitive, and instead of throwing it out or making a better one, declared they could use it to sense both light levels and room temperature.
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#5I’m going to hazard a guess at -9 months for both sexes? :P
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#6I’m going to hazard a guess at -9 months for both sexes? :P
Yeh, the grammar is bad, more like "age of parents at conception".
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#7The link to the paper wasn't loading for me. But I would love to see the reasons for extrapolating present-day biology back 250k years?
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#8Somewhat grim, but this has to be disregarding the humans who never reach the reproductive age or the ones who cannot keep their offspring alive. So there is some survivorship bias baked into the methodology.
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#9The link to the paper wasn't loading for me. But I would love to see the reasons for extrapolating present-day biology back 250k years?
A fundamental tenet of much modern science (and, especially, punditry) is that humans have completed the evolutionary process.
Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years
#10I’m going to hazard a guess at -9 months for both sexes? :P
Yeh, the grammar is bad, more like "age of parents at conception".
With "conceive" (when used as a transitive verb), the subject is the parent(s) and the object is the child. There's potential for confusion because of some ambiguity but the only reading that makes sense in the context is the one intended by the author. IMO the grammar is not bad.