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To Breed or Not to Breed?

nytimes.com

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Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#51

Post by HKH2 »

mikewarot wrote: post #41
tharne wrote: post #9

These types of movements never really go anywhere, in large part because their proponents remove themselves from the genepool. It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates. The main thing that not having children does is e…

>The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit. How well have you been able to convince your friends of something? Yeah…

> nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit.

So brainwashing doesn't work?

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#52

Post by nkurz »

throwaway292961 wrote: post #50

Personal anecdote: My wife and I got married assuming that we would eventually want kids. We were pretty young, and that's what people do, right? We kept checking in with each other and kept not wanting to have kids. 5 years into our marriage, we were certain enough that I chose to have a vasectomy. We were so certain that my biggest fear was NOT that we'd change our minds later, but that my vasectomy would be one of…

Great comment! I'm wondering, why did you choose to post this under a throwaway? Do you fear repercussion, prefer to keep personal separate from business, or just not have an account?

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

bckr wrote: post #40
User23 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you that you will not make a little replica of yourself. It will be a new and different person that inherits some of your traits, but by no means all of them. That you're thinking of a child in that way suggests that you are right to not have one, at least until your thinking on the subject matures. I don't see any point in arguing with the child-free types, I just see it as evolution at work in the mode…

> The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype "dominated", for sure, and yet we also have a tremendous number of gay people. It's not quite so simple.

[deleted]

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#54

Post by mikewarot »

HKH2 wrote: post #51
mikewarot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit. How well have you been able to convince your friends of something? Yeah…

> nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit. So brainwashing doesn't work?

Fortunately, it doesn't.

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#55

Post by goodpoint »

goodpoint wrote: post #26
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #2

I've heard this kind of commentary a lot, but I still believe it's much more of a case of "people not wanting to have kids and then giving climate change as the reason" than climate change actually being the deciding factor in not having kids. I think in most cases it's more akin to virtue signaling. The modern world, especially in the US, is quite unfriendly to having kids. Both parents have lots of other opportunit…

Any ethical behavior can be arbitrarily labeled "virtue signalling" by those who don't like it. For example: - not having kids in a world facing climate collapse - reducing one's energy usage or pollution - donating money to some charity It's a label that can be applied to any behavior.

Hah, dowvoted for pointing out this?

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#56

Post by goodpoint »

tharne wrote: post #9

These types of movements never really go anywhere, in large part because their proponents remove themselves from the genepool. It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates. The main thing that not having children does is e…

This is absurd. The "gene pool" has nothing to do with people's sense of ethics around having kids or not.

We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#57

Post by goodpoint »

mgamache wrote: post #20
polalavik wrote: post #19

A whole article about people grappling with whether to make little copies of themselves when there are tons of kids that need adopted. The whole idea of having a kid just seems like a weird selfish ego trip. I know there’s underlying primal instincts at play - years of evolution driving you to breed, but we have the brains to take a step back and say is this the best choice I can make if I’d like to love and raise a…

it's not ego. It's the drive of your genes to get into the future. Helping someone else's genes (that have some overlap with yours) is also adaptive, but not as much as people more closely related to you.

Genes don't drive anything. They can give you a wide nose or red hairs but not your goals in life.

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#58

Post by throwaway292961 »

nkurz wrote: post #52
throwaway292961 wrote: post #50

Personal anecdote: My wife and I got married assuming that we would eventually want kids. We were pretty young, and that's what people do, right? We kept checking in with each other and kept not wanting to have kids. 5 years into our marriage, we were certain enough that I chose to have a vasectomy. We were so certain that my biggest fear was NOT that we'd change our minds later, but that my vasectomy would be one of…

Great comment! I'm wondering, why did you choose to post this under a throwaway? Do you fear repercussion, prefer to keep personal separate from business, or just not have an account?

Thanks :) I wanted to add some perspective, but felt some of the details were a little too personal to have it permanently tied to my professional identity. So more of a preference to keep personal separate from business.

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#59

Post by rsj_hn »

goodpoint wrote: post #56
tharne wrote: post #9

These types of movements never really go anywhere, in large part because their proponents remove themselves from the genepool. It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates. The main thing that not having children does is e…

This is absurd. The "gene pool" has nothing to do with people's sense of ethics around having kids or not. We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.

> This is absurd. The "gene pool" has nothing to do with people's sense of ethics around having kids or not.

To think that fertility -- one of the key issues in evolution -- would not be influenced by genetics requires a massive detachment from reality as well as lack of awareness of current knowledge about genetics and human behavior.

Note that we have data on this, and a good rule of thumb is that most everything is about half genetic. This includes likelihood to have kids. Why? well, things like sperm counts, and personality traits are influenced by genetics, as are things like tendency to be religious[4]. Values are also strongly influenced by genetics, as is income and intelligence[5], all of which is correlated with decisions to have or delay having children. Similarly the duration of the reproductive lifespan of females is influenced by genetics[2] - something very important as women delay childbirth:

The most recent GWAS conducted in ∼370,000 women of European ancestry identified 389 independent signals explaining ∼7.4% of the population variance in age at menarche (Fig. 1), corresponding to ∼25% of the estimated heritability[2]

And even the decision to delay childbirth is influenced by many factors that have a genetic component.

> We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.

An international research team, including the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, has found twelve genes that may help determine why some people have children at an early age, while others remain childless.[3]

See also [1] for an overview and discussion.

- - -

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK97281/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-018-0068-1

[3] https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2016/twelve-genes-influence-ferti...

[4] https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/beliefs

[5] https://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/1000H/BouchardRev.pdf

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#60

Post by mgamache »

goodpoint wrote: post #57
mgamache wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not ego. It's the drive of your genes to get into the future. Helping someone else's genes (that have some overlap with yours) is also adaptive, but not as much as people more closely related to you.

Genes don't drive anything. They can give you a wide nose or red hairs but not your goals in life.

Sure they do. You think you have free will?
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