"Malcolm"  wrote in
news:cds2f5$1ra6$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> 
> "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? 


I hope you understand the difficulty in trying to interpret current 
behavior in evolutionary terms. The thought that high wealth should be 
combined with low fertility makes no sense from the standpoint of 
maximizing reproductive success - in fact one should expect the opposite. 
Similarly, the "welfare queen" should be limiting the number of children 
so that her limited resources can be best directed to successfully 
raising a few children instead of having them all die. Note the above 
assumes that we are constrained by what has previously been adaptive, 
which I think was your point. In reality I think human behavior is more 
complex than that, so we need a more robust explanation for why middle-
class women have fewer children later in life while lower-class women 
have more children earlier in life.


Yours,

Bill Morse
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