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Comment by debesyla | Hacker News Reader

It's debatable if choice/want/accident of having children is based on genetics.

It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies.

If you're talking about environmental pollution and declining fertility because of it then that's something else but even then, those who manage to survive and persist in a polluted environment will be the ones who pass on copies of their genes.

> It's a tautology. Replicators which do not replicate do not persist in the environment and so are selected out of the pool of replicators. So whatever genes persist in the environment are tautologically the ones that managed to replicate and persist. The people who do not have children are selecting themselves out of the pool of genes that make copies so will be replaced with ones that do make copies

That's.... not how humans work. If people choose to have less children, which has very little to do with their genetics, there are fewer children to replicate, not "replacement" with children who are genetically determined to be fecund.

Humans are animals and animals which do not replicate are selected out of the gene pool. There is nothing to argue here.

Nobody is taking issue with the fact that humans that do not replicate do not pass on their genes

They are taking issue with the ludicrous assertion that falling birth rates are "self correcting" because the offspring of people who do replicate are somehow genetically predisposed to have more children to "replace" them.

Either they'll have children or they won't and the ones who do will replace the ones who don't. It's like I said, whatever people perceive to be a problem is not actually a problem because it corrects itself without any interventions.

It depends on what you consider the problem to be. I personally didn't think there is a problem, but if you define the problem to be "population decline until there are no people left", your solution doesn't work. Unless maybe you consider other mammals to be people too.

I haven't defined any problems or solutions but certain people do seem to have defined the problem like you have. What I said specifically was that whatever people perceive to be a problem with the global human population is self-correcting (from a biological perspective) because those who voluntarily choose to not procreate will be replaced by those who are more than happy to have as many children as possible.

If someone has a different perspective on this then they are welcome to make their version of the problem explicit and concrete and explain what exactly they propose as a valid intervention for fixing it. I suspect and am almost certain they have not thought about the issue as rigorously as they think and are simply parroting popular talking points they've seen and heard on social media platforms about the impending collapse of civilization caused by declining birth rates.

You don't recognize that people can think. You assert that the offspring behave like the parents. You imply that the offspring are defined by their genes. You have no concept of the cultural transmission of ideas. You imagine that looking at everything biologically is correct. Your reasoning is bad, and you should feel bad.

Not really sure if serious or not but good try anyway. For the record I thought your response was very funny.

I didn't really mean it, I was channeling Zoidberg from episode 72 of Futurama ("your music's bad, and you should feel bad"). But I do get the impression that you have cloth ears.

On some days my cloth ears are more dry than on other days so the sounds are more or less muffled depending on ambient conditions.

The problem is usually reframed as factually accurate claims that the number of people in most countries is below the replacement rate, and thus the number of people over working age swells whilst the number of working age people is set to shrink.

The implications of this may have been exaggerated of course. But it's quite clear that it is not being "self corrected" by the offspring of people who do choose to have more children than the replacement rate being genetically [or culturally] predisposed to breed like rabbits...

The elderly vastly outnumbering the working population is a symptom of sudden and drastic population count decline and is a different problem even if it is correlated.

Biology and evolution by definition is determined by those who reproduce offspring, those who do not will be replaced by those who do. Put another way: Generation B and onwards are the offspring of Generation A who reproduced.

I mean, sudden and drastic population declines are literally the subject of the thread.

Or more specifically, that humans in many parts of the world are reproducing at below replacement rate.

Reproduction below replacement rate means that those who do not reproduce offspring are not replaced by the offspring of those who do.

Nobody is arguing that Generation B aren't the offspring of those who reproduced, they're arguing that this detail is essentially irrelevant to how many children Generation B will have and therefore birth rate decline need not be "self correcting" and empirically isn't in much of the world.

I think you're misunderstanding what "replace" means.

Given a long enough time span, everyone alive will be the children of those who reproduced. Generation B will be composed of Generation A reproducers. The world of tomorrow will be owned by those who reproduce today.

>Biology and evolution by definition is determined by those who reproduce offspring

Not true. If my brother reproduces, then about half of my genes are still getting passed on. If my cousin reproduces, 12.5% of my genes are still getting passed on. If the argument is that pure gene selection will determine the outcome, then you can’t treat genetics as some simplistic binary.

Your genes aren't your brother's or cousin's and vice versa. Imagine a tree, if you fail (or choose not) to reproduce then your branch will be a dead end. Other branches who did successfully reproduce will continue the tree.

The predisposition may be cultural rather than genetic.

Religious people belonging to certain religions/sects do have a lot more children even in the contemporary world. Maybe the world of 2100 is going to be a lot more religious than today.

The development is certainly visible in, say, Israel, or even migrant communities in Europe. Europeans must now be a bit careful not to insult Islam; that wouldn't be the case fifty years ago.

Animats wrote that in the top level comment.

> The countries that are above breakeven (2.1 children per woman) are all in Africa or are dominated by religions which oppress women. And poor.[4] "Peak baby" was in 2013 worldwide.

>There are two futures, both bad. "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant", or "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights."

I can imagine some other developments. Maybe parenting will become professionalized, kids will be born in artificial wombs and specialized pairs will take care of 10 of them at once.

It sounds wild, but we already professionalized a lot of other activities that were "naturally" done by households, such as fuel gathering, cooking, home construction and small agriculture.

What a brave new world. But what happens when the machine stops?

What happens if other machines stop? The ones that carry food into megacities or provide drinking waters to millions?

We are now very, very far from our hunter-gatherer roots.

I'm aware of that. That's why I questioned the validity of the idea, because it seems too risky to rely on. Probably unsustainable because the ever faster changes of the 'meteorological machine' will disrupt many other mechanisms, because they are too slow to adapt.

The idea of mechanizing/automating/centralizing that stuff is irking me in general. One could argue that the biologisms which evolved us, and we with and through them, are just another, rather imperfect way of doing this, by slow, biologic means.

IMO this only leads to transhumanism, which I consider BS, because it will produce shadows/weak simulations of the real thing and philosophical zombies.

Didn’t ECHR take note of a Austro Hungarian imperial law still in the books to that effect?

Far from being "ludicrous", there are genetic predispositions for literally everything that humans (and other species) do, especially including core features of biology like the strength of reproduction motivations.

The pool of replicators can prune itself in many ways (indeed, it must), but that doesn't mean that those prunings are having any effect on the pool of genes. The relative frequency of fertility-relevant alleles is just as likely to remain stable. It's called Hardy Weinberg equilibrium and it's the default state for large populations that are not experiencing predation or expanding into new niches.

That's good to know.

Personality traits are a whole lot more heritable than it's fashionable to admit.

Birth rate doesn’t seem to be very heritable, given the amount it can change over relatively short periods of time.

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#/media/File%3A1910-... shows it going from 8 around 1940 to 12 around 1957 and back down to 7 around 1972 in the USA.

If you are barking mad ane propagate , i choose you, evopokemon

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