The elephant in the room..

[klr]

Ooops! sorry. False friend. In Spanish the retirement houses are called "Asilo", and I made the bad translation. I meant that they would not be living with the children.
As for the races, it is not you, it's everything I have read about using r/K selection to humans.

[charlou]

I am afraid I don't agree at all with your two previous posts in the same basis which is that I find very arguable and dangerously misleading the application of natural selection theories into humans. Everything I have read about it I have found it statistically inconclusive. Too many objections that make it anything more than a theory to chat with a coffee. I read Rushton's "Race, Evolution and Behavior" which uses extensively the r/K theory and it's one of the few books that I have thrown to the rubbish can. I would not donate it or give it to anyone else. I personally believe that the main factor in human evolution from the moment it gained conscience it's memes related; culture, psychology and sociology are 90% of the decition makers in our lives. Not genes, hormones and such. And when I hear "race" I get goosepumps. Especially when I hear "black race", as if east africans and west africans would be closely related...

Have you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Carlos? I've heard much about it (and have just found myself a copy), and from what I can gather the content of the book has left many people questioning the very notion of 'race'. Even though the ideas seem to mirror my own thinking and conclusions, I'm still looking forward to reading it ...

[FBM]

...the countries with the highest GDP tend to have the lowest population rates. The US may be an exception...

[Hermit]

Having 12 or more children used to make sense when most of them were expected to die in infancy and the rest were badly needed farm labourers. Apart from that, there was no such thing as a pension. If you had no offspring to take care for you when you were too knackered to provide for your own food you'd just bloody well starve. These facts - more than the joy of sex - caused people to have many (preferably male) offspring.

Despite the lack of any contraception to speak of, human population has not risen noticeably for many thousands of years, but once sanitation and medicine developed rapidly from the 18th century onward, population growth skyrocketed. The graph looks like this:




The growth rate is clearly unsustainable, but even if the planet's population plateaued right now, we (in the affluent societies) will not be able to survive without undergoing drastic adjustments in our lifestyles, and those nations whose populations naturally aspire to similar levels of consumerism and comfort must not be allowed to emulate our levels of wastefulness. Right now the USA constitutes 5% of the global population and annually consumes 25% of the resources, and this is the level of luxury a billion Chinese, almost a billion Indians, hundreds of millions of other Asians and hundreds of millions of Africans, South Americans et cetera aim for. In order to achieve such affluence, energy and other resource consumption will multiply even if the planet's population remains static.

Yes, in conclusion I think that sustainability is multifaceted, and that population control seems to be a bit on the back burner as far as environmentalist movements are concerned.

[klr]

Having 12 or more children used to make sense when most of them were expected to die in infancy and the rest were badly needed farm labourers. Apart from that, there was no such thing as a pension. If you had no offspring to take care for you when you were too knackered to provide for your own food you'd just bloody well starve. These facts - more than the joy of sex - motivated people to have many (preferably male) offspring.

Unfortunately, social norms seem to lag behind economic and other material realities, at least in this matter. Having lots of children was clearly unsustainable in 19th century Ireland. More children were being produced then were ever needed to farm the land. Also, farms became ever smaller and thus less viable. Even with some emigration to relieve the pressure, the system was collapsing on top of itself even before the great famines of the 1840's. The population of Ireland (the island) has still not recovered to this day - in fact even after the famines it continued to decline, and only began to rise again (in the Republic) in the 1960's. For generations after the famine, (Catholic) family sizes remained huge - and I mean huge. Only a very substantial level of emigration stopped society from disintegrating. To put it another way, Irish society was fatally flawed, but it survived because it was not a closed system, and could export it's excess population. It can't really do that anymore, so it's just as well that the birth rate has plummeted in the past 40 years or so.

There are a lot of developing world countries in a position right now similar to 19th century Ireland, but they don't have the mass emigration option that Ireland had all those years ago.

[Rum]

It is also clear that education reduces family size. In many poorer parts of the world large families = more income.

I've heard this argument before and I just can't fathom the logic of it. More income? When there are more mouths to feed where's the improvement?

I don't think people in poorer parts of the world have large families to supplement their income, I think they, like the rest of us, just enjoy sex, and procreation is inevitable and unavoidable as a result of their poverty and/or lack of education.

Well it isn't a myth. A number of studies offer evidence. Just typing 'education and population growth' into google brings up quite a long list. Here is one-

http://www.uni-protokolle.de/nachrichten/id/39996/

I think you may have missed the point of my argument which is in objection to the claim that large families mean more income and in objection to the notion that it is a conscious rationale for procreation in poverty stricken areas. Any extra income is swallowed up in (barely) maintaining the larger family. They're not better off, they're often worse off. I don't think poverty stricken people procreate for that reason. I don't think they procreate with a conscious motive of providing carers into their old age, either. They procreate because they, like most people, naturally like to shag and procreation is a consequence of lack of contraception and/or a lack of or misleading education about contraception. Our (humanity's) culture of 'family' has evolved, just like that of other apes, as a consequence of biological and natural selection imperatives and memetic perpetuation, and it's had very little to do with conscious considerations until relatively recently; and only as a result of our increasing trend toward education and enlightenment.

Sorry if I got hold of the wrong end of the stick Char. There is certainly a perception that large families represent greater prosperity however. I lived in the Far East and travelled in India pretty extensively a while back and it is a common ..well perhaps 'myth' is the right word. However the point remains that ignorance or lack of education is the factor here and education changes people's behaviour in this respect. Educated people have fewer children it would appear, whatever the reason.

[klr]

...
Sorry if I got hold of the wrong end of the stick Char. There is certainly a perception that large families represent greater prosperity however. I lived in the Far East and travelled in India pretty extensively a while back and it is a common ..well perhaps 'myth' is the right word. However the point remains that ignorance or lack of education is the factor here and education changes people's behaviour in this respect. Educated people have fewer children it would appear, whatever the reason.

That is certainly true now, but it was not always thus. There was a time when the affluent had large families (Darwin is a good example), partly because they could, and partly (so it would seem) that there was a social expectation that they should. But then they could afford servants of all types who would effectively minimise the amount of time they themselves had to expend on raising their children.

[charlou]

...
Sorry if I got hold of the wrong end of the stick Char. There is certainly a perception that large families represent greater prosperity however. I lived in the Far East and travelled in India pretty extensively a while back and it is a common ..well perhaps 'myth' is the right word. However the point remains that ignorance or lack of education is the factor here and education changes people's behaviour in this respect. Educated people have fewer children it would appear, whatever the reason.

That is certainly true now, but it was not always thus. There was a time when the affluent had large families (Darwin is a good example), partly because they could, and partly (so it would seem) that there was a social expectation that they should. But then they could afford servants of all types who would effectively minimise the amount of time they themselves had to expend on raising their children.

hmmm ... and we certainly can't discount historical and cultural relativism as a factor in what is considered 'educated', either.

[Sisifo]

I am afraid I don't agree at all with your two previous posts in the same basis which is that I find very arguable and dangerously misleading the application of natural selection theories into humans. Everything I have read about it I have found it statistically inconclusive. Too many objections that make it anything more than a theory to chat with a coffee. I read Rushton's "Race, Evolution and Behavior" which uses extensively the r/K theory and it's one of the few books that I have thrown to the rubbish can. I would not donate it or give it to anyone else. I personally believe that the main factor in human evolution from the moment it gained conscience it's memes related; culture, psychology and sociology are 90% of the decition makers in our lives. Not genes, hormones and such. And when I hear "race" I get goosepumps. Especially when I hear "black race", as if east africans and west africans would be closely related...

Have you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Carlos? I've heard much about it (and have just found myself a copy), and from what I can gather the content of the book has left many people questioning the very notion of 'race'. Even though the ideas seem to mirror my own thinking and conclusions, I'm still looking forward to reading it ...

Yes, I like Jared Diamond very much. I think he is a far better essayist and small documents writer than a book writer. He lingers too long in the ideas, stretching them to add pages, under my humble opinion (actually, I have the same thoughts about RD), but hey! books sells, essays don't.

"Guns..." is not very entertaining in style. I prefered and enjoyed a lot more "Collapse" that he wrote afterwards. But it is, nonetheless, a book worth to have, and read a chapter now and then.
As for the races issue, any of his books make you abandon the idea. He lived for a long time with tribes in New Guinea. I guess you can't get closer to primitivism, and he has such regard for those tribes and its usually despised culture, that you get into that spirit.

In any of the cases, and any of his books, he is an unusual ot-of-the-box thinker about human civilitation/civilitations.

To any one who has the idea of "races", i would tell them just to travel. Nationalism and racism are illnesses healed by travelling.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

One child is the only way to cut down population unless you intend to withhold medical care and count children even if they become deceased.

You not allowing for other means of mortality than old age. If every person replaced themselves, and nothing more, incidental losses would reduce the population in time. Maybe not "in time", but certainly in time.

[Sisifo]

One child is the only way to cut down population unless you intend to withhold medical care and count children even if they become deceased.

You not allowing for other means of mortality than old age. If every person replaced themselves, and nothing more, incidental losses would reduce the population in time. Maybe not "in time", but certainly in time.

Yes, but accidental offsprings would compensate and keep it up.
The most fascinating solution I have ever read was in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Thus: Each couple has the right of having 1.5 (one and a half) children...

That means that any couple can have 1 child, but then they can decide if buying the half right from another couple to have a second one, or sell that half themselves. I think it's quite smart...