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Kinda morbid thinking about all the failed mutations as laying eggs evolved into the placenta
by mlcrypto 3y ago
Kinda morbid thinking about all the failed mutations as laying eggs evolved into the placenta
- jmyeet 3y agoHere'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 biological parents, (up to) 4 biological grandparents (go look at Cleopatra's family tree) and so on to an upper bound of 2^n ancestors for the n'th previous generation. At some point this number exceeds the number of organisms that were alive at that time so there are likely one or more individuals in the past who are direct ancestors to everybody. A consequence of this is that if you go forwards in time ultimately your genetic line will either die out or you will be the direct ancestor of everybody given sufficient time.
- vlovich123 3y agoHumans 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 your friends and family raise children who can help humanity survive and be good humans themselves etc)
- mrphoebs 3y agoI doesn't seem like the above commenter was making a value judgement.
- vlovich123 3y ago> So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. I’m responding to this and saying that’s not an accurate way to frame it. I’m saying you are participating in evolutionary success even if you don’t reproduce. For example, a more social family where there are siblings that don’t reproduce and instead invest in the success of the reproductive sibling’s offspring is still evolutionary success and would be being selected for through your whole families reproductive success as a whole rather than your individual success. The argument being made here is similar to the argument that sterilizing would result in removal of genes from the pool - it doesn’t work because gene selection is very complicated and doesn’t solely rely on individual reproduction.
- mrphoebs 3y agoMy mistake, I presumed incorrectly, that the argument you were making came from a place of defensiveness, rather than a more holistic framing of evolutionary success. Thanks for providing further clarity.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoI like this argument because it frames the “self”/“you” as an illusion—instead, there is a more distributed self. I recognize that there are arguments against this argument — but you point out that DNA identity is pretty distributed as well. Neat.
- NortySpock 3y agoI'm currently more focused on spreading good memes to the next generation. Memes like kindness, empathy, planning ahead, being honest with yourself (and preferably others), communicating your intentions clearly ahead of time, and how good parenting takes more emotional labor and emotional intelligence than, say, the kind of parenting that solely consists of yelling when the parent does not receive the desired response from the child. Genes are not the only thing the next generation needs.
- Log_out_ 3y agoYou also remove infection vectors for failed memetics from the pool
- Loughla 3y agoGenetic line =/= role to play in society. Those are different things.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoThe 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 well and at some point the decline of such a society will become irreversible. Of course, you are right that not everyone must reproduce, that there is no particular obligation for anyone to reproduce, and that those who do not can still contribute to the well-being of their families, the human species, and the common good. And indeed, if you are, say, a Catholic, you would say that while having children is the natural course and the normal path for most people, a small minority are called to sacrifice this natural end for the sake of a higher supernatural, spiritual end, e.g., the priesthood, by which one becomes a spiritual parent in place of a biological one. Certainly, we can be parental figures in non-biological ways as well. Even biological parents do that. But that's not that we're seeing behind the present demographic decline. Something like the priesthood is an exception, not the rule. Most who can have children of their own are not having them, or many of them, not because of some kind of exceptional higher calling, but rather for morally dubious reasons. Children are demanding. They require sacrifice. They demand the love known as charity. A consumerist is going to view a child not as a gift, but a burden. Furthermore, our society demonizes families, especially large families (perhaps in part stemming from Protestant attempts to restrict Catholic populations in the US). Having many children used to be seen as a blessing, a privilege. Today, we both think we're entitled to having children (IVF is a testament to that), and refuse to have them.
- ARandomerDude 3y ago> 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.
- laeri 3y agoThey 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.
- BurningFrog 3y agoAnts 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.
- derac 3y agoHuman beings are 99.9% genetically similar to each other. Also, we're about 99% genetically similar to chimpanzees.
- inciampati 3y agoIn the euchromatic regions, yeah, it's about that. Elsewhere (e.g. centromeres) we are all quite diverse. This is recent news due to long read sequencing and complete genome assembly. The human pangenome project is touching on this, if still reticent to make clear claims about the centromeres. I'm not sure that "99%" similar is the right way to think about chimpanzees and humans. We have a different chromosome number. Our chromosome 2 is a roberstonian fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes found in all other great apes, including chimpanzees and bonobos.
- lynguist 3y agoAnd 30% to a tomato. So what? The basics of cellular respiration are always the same on this planet.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate-reducing_microorganism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate-reducing_microorganism
- BurningFrog 3y agoThat's a different kind of percentage. The terminology is unfortunate and confusing. I'm taking about the sense in which you share 50% of the DNA with a sibling or payment.
- jmyeet 3y agoThis is a perfect example of what I like to call the Eggs-Waffles Phenomenon. Basically, you can’t say something like “I like waffles” on the internet without someone replying “how dare you malign people who like eggs”. And here there’s not even a value judgement or personal preference yet this has somehow been perceived as an attack on the childless. Others have jumped in to bemoan the perceived attack on the family. It’s wild. Nowhere do I argue that you should or shouldn’t reproduce or that either outcome affects your perceived or actual value. The word “fail” seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in your perceptions here.
- lostlogin 3y ago> At some point this number exceeds the number of organisms that were alive at that time so there are likely one or more individuals in the past who are direct ancestors to everybody Wouldn’t this common ancestor be a certainty? Otherwise aren’t you betting that there were similar mutations in different lines?
- nostrademons 3y agoI 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 have parents who successfully reproduced too. But that's because you tend to have much closer relationships with your family and peers than with childless adults. When I change my sample from "my friends growing up" to "my parent's friends when they were growing up", a lot of them never had children. By the numbers, the percentage of households that are families with children has gone down, but it's gone from about 55% in 1970 to 40% in 2022, which is a much less drastic fall than most people would suspect. Being childless is far more normal than children believe.
- InSteady 3y agoYou 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 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr028.pdf
- afavour 3y agoWhy would any of that be specific to millennials, though? The way you’re describing it nothing would have changed in a very long time. I’m pretty sure the “I’m too poor to have a family” perspective stems directly from the wild increases we’ve see in the price of housing and not a whole lot else.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wruza 3y agoSo if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. True to an extent. What you really break in this case is the last inch change that your parents happened to merge in. Your extended families are still there with almost the same genotype.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. I sincerely could not care less. As far as I'm concerned, my blood ends with me. I have absolutely no interest in continuing this endless cycle of bullshit. You are welcome to have babby, of course, and to also do so in my stead if you are exceedingly concerned about the population count that I won't help grow or maintain, I ain't stopping you since what you do in your bedroom is none of my business (and vice versa, if the above wasn't clear enough).
- _0ffh 3y agoHere's another, superficially quite perplexing one: Your female ancestors vastly outnumber your male ancestors.
- overtomanu 3y agoFor those wondering, I think this is mostly because of men having multiple wives.
- JPLeRouzic 3y agoI don't understand that, IMO it's more than only high cast/class men could reproduce, others were used as slaves/living tools. Isn't the main change brought by the Neolithic?
- _0ffh 3y agoImagine drawing your ancestry tree, parents, grandparents, etc. you will of course have as many male as female nodes. The higher variance of male reproductive success makes it likelier for two given male nodes to be filled by the same infividual, than for two given female nodes. Ed. Of course this only works if some males have more than one reproductive partner over their life span. Serial monogamy, escapades, and polygynie are the obvious probable factors in skewing the symmetry. I might have missed some less obvious ones, but can't think of any right now.
- qgin 3y agoThe idea of a genetic "line" is not the concept people think it is. Humans already share 99% of their DNA. Of the 1% that creates our differences, after 5 to 7 generations, depending on how you look at it, the similarity of your descendent's DNA to your DNA would essentially be indistinguishable from noise or random variance in people who you aren't even related to at all. Talk of lines and blood and bloodlines has more to do with people really wanting to not disappear into oblivion.
- lamontcg 3y ago> So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. All your genes are in other people and will continue without you. And your unique configuration of genetics is lost like a droplet in a river. Only around one in a billion people really put their stamp on our genealogy -- and you really need to rape, murder and empire build like Genghis Khan to achieve that kind of thing (and as the population expands it likely gets more and more difficult).
- nkrisc 3y agoEven the current version fails on its own quite often.
- pfdietz 3y agoThere's a reason religious types recoiled from Darwin's idea. It paints God as a vivisectionist on the grandest scale. Darwin experienced this as a father, watching his oldest child die slowly and horribly (probably from cerebral tuberculosis). It would not be a stretch to imagine this experience soured him on traditional religious dogmas.