Malcolm  wrote or quoted:
> "CurtAdams"  wrote in message

> > All creatures are baby machines, for the contexts in which they evolve.
> > Humans have survived difficult circumstances for many millenia, and in
> > order to do so, and produce babies, they have had to learn, to cooperate,
> > and to keep others interested through sexual selection and proxies like
> > music and art.  Now, those nice things are less useful or even
> > unnecessary and may get thrown to the wayside, to our detriment.
> > Notably, being educated and living la dolce vita - two things I really
> > like in my neighbors- are currently associated with smaller families.
> >
> You have a temporary situation, created by technology moving much faster
> than evolution, where proximate goals such as eating nice food, having high
> status jobs, and doing interesting things tend to conflict with reproductive
> success. 

> In evolutionary terms, the welfare queen niche is much more
> lucrative than the head of university faculty niche. Can we
> say that, in some objective sense, the (female) head of a university 
> faculty is better than the welfare claimant with five kids?

Nature's usual metric involves the chances of genes being ancestral.

If the female head of a university faculty has sacrificed her role
as a mother to get there, then her genes are probably not doing very
well in nature's eyes - unless perhaps she is contributing generously
to the welfare of her sisters.

However the "welfare queen" might not be doing much better.  She
may be supporting several kids - but will any of them become long-term
ancestors?  Nature is not interested in how many kids someone has -
but in whether there are great-great-grandchildren - and having lots
of kids and investing only a little in each one may not necessarily
be the best way of doing that.

The woman on welfare has one thing going for her, though - she has
got the government to sponsor her kids.  Quite why the government
would do that seems rather mysterious, but - in my country at least -
the government often seems prepared to sponsor individual children -
and pay for their education out of everyone's taxes.

It's a bit like the genetic equivalent of an anti-robin hood -
they forcefully extract resources from those with no kids - and
give the proceeds to those who already have plenty of offspring.

I understand that - in America - that sort of thing does not go on.
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