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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3877 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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I’ve heard it said we shouldn’t worry about fertility because eventually those with pro-fertile genes will even things out. But this isn’t true, isn’t it? Pro-fertile genes are just “sexual desire”. The modern world takes the people with the most fertile genes and makes them infertile through artificial sexual outlets (casual sex, porn) and artificial intimacy outlets (parasocial relationships, pity politics). So there’s no optimistic evolutionary solution to infertility, there’s only a cultural solution. Or am I missing something? There’s genes for wanting to ejaculate when seeing a woman, but no gene for “wanting to ejaculate inside a woman and wait nine months to create a child”.

We know this isn't true because fertility is about 30% heritable, which means there has to be some genotypes that increase fertility unless the studies that have found this result are wrong.

More important than sexual desire is probably just liking children. There are genes for liking being around taking care of children, as anyone who has seen a young woman around small children knows.

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