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Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

phys.org

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Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#61

Post by hutzlibu »

pooper wrote: post #57
hutzlibu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems, that those movies are mainly targeted at older mens fantasy and do not represent reality. Quelle surprise.

There is a simpler explanation. Those older men are known actors/stars who have established some influence in the industry. That or some people might buy tickets to watch movies because it has a familiar name in leading role. The combination of the two above might be enough to explain why the older men can still play lead roles in movies.

Well, that leads to the question, why only men were famous actors past 40, which is where the arguments becomes tautological.

Because men can have attractive roles past 40 and women not, or only very rarely. I don't remember the name of the movie, but it was about greek and a female character that was 40, but the cast was not offered to a 40 year old, but a 30 year old.

Because 40 year old women are not supposed to look like 40 year olds, which is where we are back to the fantasy thing.

Biology is a real thing, though, men can become fathers with over 50, but women cannot. So I am not judging btw. But those fantasies are real and strong, even though they are taboo nowdays.

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#62

Post by [deleted] »

sdwr wrote: post #3

A 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 daw…

[deleted]

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#64

Post by [deleted] »

zeristor wrote: post #58

A few points, female fertility declines steeply past 40, but males not so much, so older males could conceivably father children with other females. Dare I say it, and this may just be not right, Genghis Khan is purportedly supposed to have fathered thousands of children it is said he had 500 or so secondary wives (citation needed). Since average (mean) income is famously a bit pointless due to a few very rich people…

[deleted]

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#65

Post by luckylion »

hutzlibu wrote: post #52
midasuni wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, Men are 2-3 years older than women at first marriage and have been for a century https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/familie...

So it seems, that those movies are mainly targeted at older mens fantasy and do not represent reality. Quelle surprise.

The important "men in their 50s" target audience for the musical/romance/comedy mashup!

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#66

Post by GoblinSlayer »

tanbog5 wrote: post #26
georgeoliver wrote: post #7

The 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?

It's 10,000 or so generations - which is not much time for things to radically change. And similar genetic studies work on other species so that's even more evidence it's reasonable generic a technique.

That's quite a lot of time and a lot of things changed: genome, technology, food, pollution, radiation, climate, biosphere, medicine, lifestyle.

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#67

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kaba0 wrote: post #43
smt88 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no modern scientists who understand evolution and think it can be "completed" or that humans have done so. If you stand by your assertion, please provide evidence.

Not parent commenter, but what can be argued is that evolutions “rules” are way different to us then to any other animal (except the ones we closely handle ourselves). E.g. healing people, far smaller infant death rates, no basically no food scarcity from natural causes, etc. Our selection process is societal, not “natural”.

Our selection process looks pretty natural to me. Also we solved food scarcity, like, a century ago?

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#68

Post by scajanus »

wolverine876 wrote: post #32
mertd wrote: post #8

Somewhat 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.

It frustrates me that people on HN, an intelligent crowd, draw conclusions without a serious basis. Why not ask, ' Is this study disregarding the humans who never reach the reproductive age or the ones who cannot keep their offspring alive ? Is there is some survivorship bias baked into the methodology ? ' You might find out - we might find out - rather than you guess wrong, never find out, and we all carry the error…

If anything, more intelligent people might be more suspectible to these kind of errors -- assuming their intelligence applies and extends to fields they have little knowledge of. And also just enjoy intellectual speculation as such.

From the comments, it is pretty clear to me that people lack understanding of biology/modern computational genomics, and the models used and their limitations.

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#69

Post by yywwbbn »

kaba0 wrote: post #49
tanbog5 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that's a common conception about the past, but what's the actual evidence for it? There are plenty of social and religious norms even today that keep people from getting together too young. There's also no reason not to think people at the time understood how sex and pregnancy worked. They didn't have the internet but they were as intelligent as we are today. I'm sure they could figure out how to have "fun" wi…

The Bible and plenty similarly old texts refers to marriage of such young women to usually older men, but even Romeo and Juliet is about 14 years olds. Biological fertility as a baseline only slightly modified by social norms seems to be a good guess.

> Romeo and Juliet is about 14

And Juliet was considered way to young to marry (we don’t really know how old exactly Romeo was).

While mid-teens was acceptable age in many cultures to marry and have children by the 17th century that wasn’t really the case. e.g. the average age at first marriage for women was 24 in England in the 1600s

Re: Study reveals average age at conception for men vs. women over past 250k years

#70

Post by csomar »

svnt wrote: post #4

It 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.…

Couldn’t be accurate if they increase the sample size? They are using DNA, and we have tons of that. (Just speculating totally clueless in this area)
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