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

phys.org

141–150 of 166 posts

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

#141
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#142
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.

It is indeed an unusual assertion, but it does bring up some interesting ideas - it seems obvious that the speed of evolutionary change in species is highest whenever the environment changes (especially after various great extinction events associated with drastic change) but in any particular place would settle up in some local optimum (or Nash equilibrium between the related species) after some time of no significa…

One known recent evolutionary event is geographic variation of lactose intolerance.

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

#143

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…

Men with harems perfectly explains history's obsession with virgins. 1. No man wanted to raise another's child (as far as evolution is concerned, that doesn't lead to replication of ones own genetic material) 2. Less risk of VD, which would seriously affect your ability to utilise the harem

After loss of virginity those two things can happen just fine.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indeed an unusual assertion, but it does bring up some interesting ideas - it seems obvious that the speed of evolutionary change in species is highest whenever the environment changes (especially after various great extinction events associated with drastic change) but in any particular place would settle up in some local optimum (or Nash equilibrium between the related species) after some time of no significa…

One known recent evolutionary event is geographic variation of lactose intolerance.

Yes, the relatively novel adaptation to process lactose is a great example of an adaptation to agriculture and animal husbandry that started to happen but didn't even yet have the time to properly spread out until the environment changed again so much to make it not as relevant due to wide and easy availability of all kinds of arbitrary dietary choices. We could consider our "evolutionary adaption to modern agriculture" to be completed only after probably hundreds of such and larger effects have had enough time to both occur as a mutation and either spread across all the population or stabilizing to some equilibrium state.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One known recent evolutionary event is geographic variation of lactose intolerance.

Yes, the relatively novel adaptation to process lactose is a great example of an adaptation to agriculture and animal husbandry that started to happen but didn't even yet have the time to properly spread out until the environment changed again so much to make it not as relevant due to wide and easy availability of all kinds of arbitrary dietary choices. We could consider our "evolutionary adaption to modern agricultu…

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biased age disparity in marriage is hardly a "fantasy" or even "taboo". I suspect if you looked at e.g. the top quintile of male earners, or those who married more than once, you're liable to see an even more pronounced gap over the aggregate median. Equally as interesting, how do wealthy divorced/widowed women marry afterwards? Poking at US presidents that stood out (i.e. more than 5 years): | President | Born | Spo…

Well yes, there is this image, that the successful older men, has a younger wife (and even younger affairs). But the average men has not. Hence serving the "fantasy" of the target audience. But as far as I observe, this is frowned upon today. It still exists of course, many of the hollywood heros regulary change their 20 year old models for partner, but there is increasing criticism about it. I mean, my partner is 7…

Criticism from whom? If it's your friends, get better friends. Other than that, it might be family - which is easily explained as jealousy (any success at all tends to get that response). Am I missing some hypothetical case where someone criticises you about the age of your partner and their opinion somehow matters?

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

#147
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexually mature? Definitely not. Able to procreate? That depends on nutrition, probably not, only a few years later (15-17).

Sexual maturity means that an organism as reached the capability of to reproduce. Looked around in the literature. Apparently consensus is that paleolithic hunter-gathers had menarche earlier than agricultural groups. Around the same age as the current averages in developed countries.

Having menarche and having the capability to bring a child to term are different. Pregnancies at early age have a higher rate of miscarriage. It seems there is a question of definition of sexual maturity - for me it is the age of reliably giving birth, for you the capability of getting pregnant. I am fine with either as long as it is clear what we use.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, there is this image, that the successful older men, has a younger wife (and even younger affairs). But the average men has not. Hence serving the "fantasy" of the target audience. But as far as I observe, this is frowned upon today. It still exists of course, many of the hollywood heros regulary change their 20 year old models for partner, but there is increasing criticism about it. I mean, my partner is 7…

Criticism from whom? If it's your friends, get better friends. Other than that, it might be family - which is easily explained as jealousy (any success at all tends to get that response). Am I missing some hypothetical case where someone criticises you about the age of your partner and their opinion somehow matters?

I did not ask for life advice, I was stating the fact, that nowdays age disparity seems to be frowned upon and provided a anecdotical data point.

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

#149

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

Those metrics are culturally specific and the dataset of okcupid is limited to people who go on okcupid and volunteer answers to such questions. It's a classic case of participation bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias (see "Alf Landon wins in a landslide" for the famous example).

The takeaway here is that straight single middle aged men who chase after woman, are on ok cupid looking for them, and who fill out this survey, are on average, looking for younger women.

Those results cannot be seen as representative of the general population based on the methodology used here.

It gets worse. Similar to the Alf Landon flaw, this could simply be exposing the demographic makeup of the site. Perhaps men think there's a promise on okcupid of younger women so it self-selects for those proclivities. Perhaps women think there's a different promise so they come accordingly.

You have to extricate that. Otherwise, it'd be like going to a gay dating site, running a survey and then come out with some earth-shattering ground-breaking claim of 100% of men saying they prefer intimacy with other men. I mean, duh, look who you're asking.

That's not to say these results don't hold generally, they might. But this is not evidence supporting that.

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

#150

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…

Older men have had time to climb the social ladder and amass resources and status, a corollary for power. These equal higher odds of survival for offspring. Younger women are more fertile. There's nothing more to it than that. This dynamic has existed for so long it's part of our DNA now via sexual selection.

That assumes nuclear families raising children under capitalism - that's a culturally specific western view of the past maybe 200 years. There's many other modalities over the entire globe and 250,000 years. The premise and the conclusion of your statement is unsupported unless you can demonstrate those assumptions consistently holding in most societies over a quarter million years.
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