91–100 of 494 posts
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My neighbour is a fifty year old guy and his grandfather was born in the 1860's. Both the grandfather and father had kids with much younger women. Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.
John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 and served as the 10th President of the USA from 1841-1845. His Grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Born November 9, 1928), is still alive today.
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Because of ecological overshoot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot ), which is a real problem ( https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da... .). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.
A vast supermajority of the entire inhabited human planet is so far below replacement-level fertility that human extinction is now closer than the ice caps being completely 100% melted. This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing. Even with a handful of countries still breeding like…
The problem is collective action. It's ALWAYS collective action. As long as people keep lapping up petrochemical lobby propaganda, it doesn't matter that we could pretty easily solve our climate crisis, nobody is going to DO it.
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Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.
Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense. Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?
If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…
My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly, both had mental decline (stroke, Alzheimers) and I never knew them in their right mind. They'd be in their 110s today. The idea of knowing my great-grandparents, who would be in…
My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe they'd also be on the longer side.
(NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)
* Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — not that anyone in this august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of OnlyFans worked.
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45.
I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he was trying to make. And the "this grandmother" parenthetical could have just been a subtle inline link.
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that _my_grandmother_ became a grandma at 45.
Much clearer!
0: I think he meant that his grandmother's first grandchild, who born when she was 45, was someone other than the author, so technically she wasn't /his/ grandma at that moment because he didn't actually exist yet.
For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this: > A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45. I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he…
> this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022 I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number of great grandmothers that much. Having kids older is definitely a big change for society and individual families, though. Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parent…
Obviously there have been huge changes in family size, parental age at first birth, etc. over the last few decades. I'd argue the lack of great-grandmothers is going to be the least consequential of these changes.
If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…
The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. I'll leave it to my children on how it turned out in my 30s. Generally I'd expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate, which is a really critical ability when dealing with the 4th day of 3 hours of sleep and a colicky baby (for example). Also no point. But…
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One of the (maybe more) obvious downside being the increase in mutations this brings, in the order of 1 full generation of mutations for every decade the fathers are older for instance. There are plenty of studies on these issues, notably paternal age genetic disorders and "selfish genes", as well as increase of autism, schizophrenia, mendelian disorders, .... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502…
Probably a good thing to speed up the evolutionary landscape during these rapidly changing times.
I remember seeing a talk by Steve Jones[1] where someone asked a question like this and he said the human species has basically not evolved at all for I forget how long he said but it was at least hundreds of thousands of years. He said specifically if you took the children of someone like this dude[2] and put them in a modern school system they would not perform noticeably differently in any way from a modern child as long as they had decent food etc all the other benefits of modern society.
[1] https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/7056 (emeritus professor of human genetics and evolution at university college London and the author of a fantastic book on the subject called "In the Blood")
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My neighbour is a fifty year old guy and his grandfather was born in the 1860's. Both the grandfather and father had kids with much younger women. Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.
John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 and served as the 10th President of the USA from 1841-1845. His Grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Born November 9, 1928), is still alive today.
It makes me wonder - who is the oldest "directly-known" person? Maybe there's a better term for this. What I mean is, of all of the currently-living people, who is the person that one of them actually met who was born the earliest?