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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

7. You never pass your genes on to another generation. That's the tradeoff of not having kids, you fail at life.

Huh? I am all in favor of people having kids and know it is necessary for society... But are you saying you can't pass on other stuff to the next generation? An example of this is teachers, i.e. a teacher who had no kids but who did nothing but did a great job of teaching kids, teaching and inspriring, but didn't socialize with anyone (except with parents during conferences or to the extent necessary with other teachers & administrators)... would you say they "failed at life"?

Yes, that's failing at life, which is generally defined as biological propagation. It's success in memetics, but not genetics.

i tend to read "life" as the experiential aspect of existing, and pursuing my desires.

"failure" and "success" are notions relative to goal achievement, and biology doesn't have goals - it's a mechanistic process.

>>"failure" and "success" are notions relative to goal achievement, and biology doesn't have goals - it's a mechanistic process.

Of course biology has goals. Every living organism's goal is to propagate its genes to the next generation. For details on this, read The Selfish Gene.

I haven't read The Selfish Gene, but from what I've heard it tells the exact opposite: That every gene's goal is to propagate, for which task it merely employs the living organism.

Talking about "goals" and "desires" can sometimes be a usefully simplified way to think about biology, but it's not really accurate. A bacterium doesn't "want" to reproduce anymore than a rock "wants" to roll downhill. Only quite complex animals can be truly said to have goals.

Life is the characteristic that distinguishes organisms from inorganic substances and dead objects. (WP)

Anyone who made it through the childhood and has no plan to die soon succeeded at life. You probably mistaking it with reproduction, which is often required as ability, not as demand.

It is also pretty rough to label fertile ones as losers.

Humans are not exactly rare around these parts, and we have many modes of transmission other than genetic. You may fail at biological propagation, but we've got more freedom than the amoebas to define success. :)

I'd say if you've defeated your genetic programming, its a win.

Decreasing the number of people on this planet by lowering birth rate greatly increases the chances of survival of humanity as a whole.

Sounds like a greater success...

Realize that the people who don’t care are going to be the only ones left - what makes you less deserving of kids?

Your fallacy is assuming that the desire for kids is passed on to children. If that were so, people without the desire to have kids would have died out thousands of years ago. Reality disagrees with that conclusion.

I think GP's point is more along the lines that people who care less about grand things like society and the planet tend to also reproduce more.

... and consume less, because their baseline for consumption is typically shared multi-generational living and relative poverty in a developing country.

Not necessarily. This works for developed countries too. As an illustration, see e.g. the premise of the movie "Idiocracy".

The theory of evolution implies that the desire for kids must be passed on to children. The modern environment just means that genes that formerly led to positive results in the environment we evolved in, in the modern environment accidentally make people vulnerable to antinatalism. If the modern environment persists, those genes will die out.

The idea that offspring is the only thing you can give to the world is patently false.

You must be a very strong advocate for human cloning. Imagine how much you could win by if there were millions of your progeny.

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