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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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This could make sense from an ev-psych point of view. If you have kids with a genetic dud, presumably your kids will also struggle more with mating, potentially creating a vicious cycle

Nothing that a 36 year old childless woman does makes sense from an evo-psych view. Such creatures would never have existed in the ancestral environment, because women needed to start exchanging their wombs for mastodon steak at 14 or they'd just die of exposure.

But even if they had it wouldn't make any sense, because having a kid with a genetic dud still gives you more chance of grandchildren than does having no kids, which gives you zero chance.

You are assuming that our distant ancestors saw absolutely no value in women other than their wombs. Which might be true, but I am not convinced of it. Even non-human animals are often more complicated than that in their psychological motivations.

having a kid with a genetic dud still gives you more chance of grandchildren

Not necessarily, because of the opportunity cost. It could easily be better in expectation to wait and hope for a slim chance of a better mate down the road.

I'm not claiming it is in her case, but I'm claiming that even the ev-bio-optimal strategy would sometimes wait too long and result in no baby at all.

Infertile women were always a thing. The tale of Abraham and Sarah was intended to be deeply relatable.

Infertile women were always a thing.

I don't think they were, but it's irrelevant to the point. Even if I grant your hypothesis, they weren't a thing that could leave an impression in evolutionary psychology, because no infertile person ever can.

Also, Biblical Times substantially post-dates the ancestral environment.

Counterpoint: insect colonies. Almost all bees in a hive are infertile females, therefore the phenotype of infertility can be selected for, unintuitive as it sounds. In any social species you could have similar "worker bee" individuals who perform some useful role without reproducing themselves, to the point individuals who do reproduce are advantaged by making them.

Of course it can. Thedesire for sexual novelty (reduced if children are produced, ie sense of responsibility) would benefit someone who is fertile who married someone infertile.

Somewhat jokingly, PMS is anger directed at a man who didn't impregnate her this month. Maybe that is evolutionarily beneficial

She's not infertile in that sense. She just made choices.

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