71–80 of 166 posts
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?
A fundamental tenet of much modern science (and, especially, punditry) is that humans have completed the evolutionary process.
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A fundamental tenet of much modern science (and, especially, punditry) is that humans have completed the evolutionary process.
I've never heard this before. Do you have a source?
The perennial older male age is because men are fertile longer than women so statistics would tend to this pattern over a large enough population. There's power asymmetry, people are monsters and sexual predation is rampant but there's also biological feasibility at play here. To demonstrate, let's say that we have an imaginary equalityville where for every age pairing and sex act, there is an exactly equal one with…
And yet https://imgur.com/Ijgzwsk
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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.
I mean sure, could count as "evidence" but you'd have to be aware of the strength of it.
Imagine in a 100 years time, the next civilisation finds some popular dvd and tries to draw conclusions from it.
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I watch a lot of old movies (30s-40s-50s). A ton of them have a 40s-50s man marrying a 20s woman. No idea if that was societal norm, mens fantasy, or whatever. I have to kind of believe movie execs would want the largest audience and so if 40s-50s men dating 20s women was not appealing to women of the time they'd been losing 1/2 the market. But, maybe these particular movies were the male equivalent of romance novels…
What world do you live in where 50 year old men don’t want 20 year old wives?
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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…
Of course they did, which is how silphium got to be extinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
> The plant may also have functioned as a contraceptive and abortifacient.
You are far more confident on this than Wikipedia. Are you an expert on it?
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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?
Those would be some natural selection processes, and they don’t apply to us in any significant way since.. I would say the agricultural revolution at least, but maybe even sooner (the very reason we can “feed” such a hungry organ as our brains is due to our efficiency at hunting/processing food even back then thanks to tools/fire)
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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 fictional. I mean sure, could count as "evidence" but you'd have to be aware of the strength of it. Imagine in a 100 years time, the next civilisation finds some popular dvd and tries to draw conclusions from it.
Also, I think quite a lot can be reconstructed from even primitive drawings, let alone a whole dvd we know got popular and thus even more relevant for an age.
The perennial older male age is because men are fertile longer than women so statistics would tend to this pattern over a large enough population. There's power asymmetry, people are monsters and sexual predation is rampant but there's also biological feasibility at play here. To demonstrate, let's say that we have an imaginary equalityville where for every age pairing and sex act, there is an exactly equal one with…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet https://imgur.com/Ijgzwsk
source?