Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id WAA10197 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 28 Apr 2001 22:13:31 +0100 Subject: Re: Perpetual change Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 17:09:16 -0400 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "Memetics Discussion List" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20010428210916.AAA13480@camailp.harvard.edu@[205.240.180.157]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Hi Kenneth Van Oost -
>I don 't know, and again I could be mistaken completely, but IMO this
>sounds more and more like an attempt of some dark conservative out-
>post to get woman back again behind their stove.
I'm not at all sure _that_ agenda was behind any of this.
>Cultural factors such as religion and education had virtually no genetic
>component. But one major determinant which did was the age at which women
>started having children. The earlier women had their first child, the
>"fitter" they were. This makes sense - women who have their first child
>early have more time to have more children, and a shorter generation time
>also means more descendants.
>
>The surprise was that across all groups in society, the age at which
>women had their first child was genetically inherited. After accounting
>for cultural factors, 23% of the variation in age was down to genes.
The main conclusion here, I think, is that of determining how long a
woman remains of child-bearing and societal/cultural fitness, and, it
seems to show that early child-bearing has an impact on extended and
active child-bearing. The woman who puts off bearing a child until later
in life dies earlier, or is more incapacitated by disease and infirmity-
among the sampled set of twins in Australia....
Now, I will make a perfectly invalid and personal comment here, but, I'm
not sure I know about too many wizened old crones serving as 'grannies'
to the community who were career women through their adult stretch.
There was another study I remember reading somewhere that claimed that
modern women menstruate far more than nature designed for them to do by
not having children. But, yeah, who knows? We are not in the veldt
anymore, or the caves, and we really don't _need_ to make the amount of
babies we once did, but, who's telling nature that?
Putting off child-bearing until late in life is a cultural decision,
quite at odds with the biological body (especially since there are many
and good statistics that show girls are reaching puberty earlier than
ever)- many of the emancipated women in the seventies and eighties and
nineties started moaning about biological clocks, and started
single-parent families to answer this urge. The so-called Murphy Brown
syndrome. I won't even start to begin to wonder if some conversions to
lesbianism were cultural results of some of this... (although I have no
reason to doubt that there could be strong cultural reasons behind much
of sexual behavior).
If there's any agenda behind this particular study, maybe it's in that
nebulous place that Gaia resides, along with the ghost of Malthus.
- Wade
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