To Breed or Not to Breed? • Hacker News Board

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#71

Post by thefz » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

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…

> years of evolution driving you to breed

The more I think about it the more sense this makes to me: there is no innate urge to breed, only to mate. It's what tricks you into breeding.

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#72

Post by thefz » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

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.

Who cares? I'll be dead!

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#73

Post by throwaway19937 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 3:09 AM UTC

thefz wrote: post #71

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…

> years of evolution driving you to breed The more I think about it the more sense this makes to me: there is no innate urge to breed, only to mate. It's what tricks you into breeding.

One complication for this theory is that fertility affects sexual behavior; women are more likely to have sex during their most fertile time of the month (https://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20040609/sex-he...). A breeding urge explains this phenomenon, a mating urge doesn't.

Re: To Breed or Not to Breed?

#74

Post by errcorrectcode » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:01 AM UTC

native_samples wrote: post #70

errcorrectcode wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to create an idiocracy and ruin the gene pool: The "smart" people worried about their "carbon footprint" or "quality of life" deciding not to have kids while the knuckle-draggers down the street have 10.

You realize Idiocracy is based on highly controversial theories of IQ, genetics and eugenics? And that you're also using a rather laughable definition of "smart" that involves deciding not to have children because of some stuff some academics said, when they've been saying the same things for decades and have been proven wrong many times before? This is not a definition of smart I'd subscribe to.

Are you going to call me racist and sexist now, snowflake?