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How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

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Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#51

Post by InSteady »

nostrademons wrote: post #41
jmyeet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another sobering thought: you represent an unbroken chain from the universal common ancestor of successful reproduction going back billions of years and probably trillions of generations (given that many of those were as a single-celled organism). Every one of those generations a success. So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. Here's another: you have 2…

I suspect a lot of the "woe, things are way harder for Millennials than past generations, I'm too poor to have a family" zeitgeist is actually this phenomena + literal survivorship bias. Every single person alive today came from parents that successfully reproduced. When you're a kid, it's very natural to think that having kids and a family of your own is the default state of being. After all, all of your friends hav…

You raise an interesting point, but you also seem to be conflating two things. Having children is more expensive than ever, and purchasing power has continued to drop for decades. Not to mention the drastic increase in specific "raising a family" essentials/barriers like housing costs, medical debt, educational debt, and childcare expenses. I don't have numbers to back this up, but my intuition (based on observation and casual reading) is that more working class people who actively want to have children are not doing so because they are stretched too thin than we saw in the 1970's (when people could work part-time to pay for all 4 years of college and expect a high paying career out of their degree).

Also, a 15% drop in 50 years is nothing to scoff at. In America, we are below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. Currently it is at 1.7, so our population would be declining without immigration. [1] This is not a bad thing in my opinion, but it is extremely significant in terms of politics, culture, and economics. If our fertility rate continues to drop expect to start hearing about it more often and at higher volume from many different corners.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr028.pdf

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#52

Post by omeid2 »

ta8645 wrote: post #21
omeid2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a future mutation was necessary to save humanity Even in that scenario, it is very simple, we protected the people today and use vaccines to induce the necessary mutation. The moral choice in my book is to always err on the side of the living than "potential of the living".

That's your personal calculus, and fair enough. World leaders might make a different decision though. For instance, the British military planners allowed soldiers to die on the battlefield, who they could have saved, in order to protect the secret that they had cracked German encryption during WWII. That was a place where the needs of the many, were deemed more valuable than the lives of the few. I'm not judging one…

> For instance, the British military planners allowed soldiers to die on the battlefield, who they could have saved, in order to protect the secret that they had cracked German encryption during WWII. That was a place where the needs of the many, were deemed more valuable than the lives of the few.

This is not a very good comparison, in my opinion. Military is rarely about the "needs of the many" far more than it is about the "powers that be". Once you understand the dynamic at a play, it is rather clear that the soldiers died for what soldiers almost always die for; the regimes that pushes them to war.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#53

Post by ARandomerDude »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #49
vlovich123 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are social animals. It’s myopic I think to only evaluate based on reproduction and genetic propagation. For example, most bees and ants are not involved in reproduction but they are all involved in helping the species survive into the future. So even if you don’t reproduce you have a critical role to play in society (helping it stay cohesive, helping productivity, helping through your work efforts, helping you…

The OP was making an observation. But I'll bite. First, human beings are not bees or ants. Our nature vis-a-vis reproduction is quite different. Most human beings do reproduce as that is our nature, or certainly most of us used to with the exception of periods of social collapse (think of Rome). We're in that sort of condition now, where we are having little or no children in the developed world. This does not bode w…

> Furthermore, our society demonizes families, especially large families (perhaps in part stemming from Protestant attempts to restrict Catholic populations in the US)

I think it has a lot more to do with feminism than any Protestant/Catholic divide. In the Protestant church I attend, having 6+ kids is pretty normal. Certainly many evangelicals don’t value large families but I think they’re getting that mindset from the culture, rather than sacred Scipture.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#54

Post by laeri »

vlovich123 wrote: post #32
jmyeet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another sobering thought: you represent an unbroken chain from the universal common ancestor of successful reproduction going back billions of years and probably trillions of generations (given that many of those were as a single-celled organism). Every one of those generations a success. So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. Here's another: you have 2…

Humans are social animals. It’s myopic I think to only evaluate based on reproduction and genetic propagation. For example, most bees and ants are not involved in reproduction but they are all involved in helping the species survive into the future. So even if you don’t reproduce you have a critical role to play in society (helping it stay cohesive, helping productivity, helping through your work efforts, helping you…

They are involved in helping their queen produce new offspring that also contains part of their own genetic material. In bees and ants you have to think of them as one single individual. Each single worker is not able to reproduce but they still will indirectly still reproduce through their queen. Not sure what being good humans has to do with this.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#55

Post by TravisCooper »

MrVandemar wrote: post #27
blindriver wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The eye evolved in much the same way, a bit at a time. It didn't just turn up one day. As for the virus/placenta thing, I recall reading a similar thing about wasps, though I couldn't provide any citations, that the method by which a wasp stops the immune system of a host (such as a catepiller) from attacking its eggs/larvae is viral in origin, and remarkably similar in some ways to the way a mother's body doesn't at…

Strange that an uncoordinated, random walk of mutations would keep a profound number of changes in tact, ready for some other random bit to take place and it all just "fall into place". The eye didn't evolve. Hearing didn't evolve. Smell didn't evolve.

This line of thinking is just hopeful projections of desired causality.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#56

Post by thewarpaint »

TravisCooper wrote: post #47
zakki wrote: post #22

If every part of a human coming from evolution, how it synchronize between each part? Is there any books explaining evolution in detail? How cell formed? How they found a way to multiply? How they choose DNA to store the information? And so on.

[flagged]

What’s your theory/understanding then?

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#57

Post by InSteady »

TravisCooper wrote: post #47
zakki wrote: post #22

If every part of a human coming from evolution, how it synchronize between each part? Is there any books explaining evolution in detail? How cell formed? How they found a way to multiply? How they choose DNA to store the information? And so on.

[flagged]

>Which came first, the Heart, Blood Vessels or Blood? Which ones were "selected for" before the others arrived? How would a random process, uncoordinated through time select for these things and keep them while they're "not useful" until they are? etc etc

Evolutionary biologists have very detailed answers to all of these questions, plus a bunch more that are far more complicated and confounding to laypeople. You can even find some great popular science books that hold your hand and walk you through some of the absolutely mind-boggling ways in which we have found evolution to work. It doesn't require any advanced math courses to wrap your head around if you go at the topic patiently and with an open mind.

The numbers and timescales on which evolution has been operating are astronomical, far too large for a human mind to comprehend in any meaningful sense. Of course it's products are also going to be a challenge to comprehend. Especially if you start forming opinions before you have consulted the experts and put in the hard work of trying to learn how those experts know what they think they know.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#58

Post by vlovich123 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #49
vlovich123 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are social animals. It’s myopic I think to only evaluate based on reproduction and genetic propagation. For example, most bees and ants are not involved in reproduction but they are all involved in helping the species survive into the future. So even if you don’t reproduce you have a critical role to play in society (helping it stay cohesive, helping productivity, helping through your work efforts, helping you…

The OP was making an observation. But I'll bite. First, human beings are not bees or ants. Our nature vis-a-vis reproduction is quite different. Most human beings do reproduce as that is our nature, or certainly most of us used to with the exception of periods of social collapse (think of Rome). We're in that sort of condition now, where we are having little or no children in the developed world. This does not bode w…

No humans aren’t bees or ants. We’re social animals and you can’t ignore society and culture as aspects of evolution.

Regardless, you’ve taken this whole thing in a weird direction bringing up a demographic collapse that is a fringe theory at the moment. As for that hypothesis, there’s no actual indication that humanity is in any danger of a collapse just because the boomer generation is passing and our numbers return to normal. Humans can reproduce quite quick and have a long reproductive lifecycle - if it ever becomes a problem society will change to priority life more. As it is, life has gotten pretty difficult in terms of supporting kids and people having fewer is a symptom of that and not consumerism as you claim. And children are both a blessing and a burden. If they weren’t a burden then the statistics about teenager births and the outcome for the parents and babies wouldn’t be as bad as they are.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#59

Post by TravisCooper »

InSteady wrote: post #57
TravisCooper wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Which came first, the Heart, Blood Vessels or Blood? Which ones were "selected for" before the others arrived? How would a random process, uncoordinated through time select for these things and keep them while they're "not useful" until they are? etc etc Evolutionary biologists have very detailed answers to all of these questions, plus a bunch more that are far more complicated and confounding to laypeople. You can…

This is absolutely untrue.

It's strange that an uncoordinated, random walk of mutations would keep a profound number of changes in tact, ready for some other random bit to take place and it all just "fall into place". The eye didn't evolve. Hearing didn't evolve. Smell didn't evolve.

These explanations are always full of "must have" and "must have been". This line of thinking is just hopeful projections of desired causality.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#60

Post by BurningFrog »

vlovich123 wrote: post #32
jmyeet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another sobering thought: you represent an unbroken chain from the universal common ancestor of successful reproduction going back billions of years and probably trillions of generations (given that many of those were as a single-celled organism). Every one of those generations a success. So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. Here's another: you have 2…

Humans are social animals. It’s myopic I think to only evaluate based on reproduction and genetic propagation. For example, most bees and ants are not involved in reproduction but they are all involved in helping the species survive into the future. So even if you don’t reproduce you have a critical role to play in society (helping it stay cohesive, helping productivity, helping through your work efforts, helping you…

Ants and bees in a hive have very similar genetics. Typically 75%, and sometimes 100%, if I remember.

This means that a hive in some ways is best thought of as a single organization, which happens to have a "distributed" body.

In that view, the non reproducing individuals are propagating their DNA in the same sense that human liver cells do, even though they don't have the direct involvement that down and egg cells do.

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