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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • It seems to me that the studying is focusing on the extent to which the life of mothers affects the life of children, particularly looking at multiple stages of life including menopause whereupon the mothers of mothers can directly contribute. It isn’t really about K vs. R, but rather understanding that primate mammals are already type K (investing more heavily in fewer offspring) what the effects of self-preservation on the mother are.

    Regarding the comment on “weird conservative ‘women are for breeding’ undertones”

    That seems like a strangely anthropocentric viewpoint. For most primates other than humans, breeding and childrearing are dominated by the females because the successful strategy for males is often to try to impregnate as many females as possible, and the successful strategy for females is often to try to have sex with as many males as possible to help reduce the chances of infanticide.

    It was with the homo sapiens larger brain and the greater negative effect on females that cooperative reproduction strategies became particularly important.


  • I think this speaks to a specific thing that can be transferred to human beings. We often focus on the sacrifice for children which is true and real, but the study shows that parents need to take care of themselves because having your parents alive has an impact on you beyond your weaning stage. I think that even though this study is about primates, that’s a truth that also applies to humans.

    The article looks at females because it’s using datasets from primates, but I also believe this would apply to some degree to both parents in human populations. There is data supporting the fact that the 2-parent household is more ideal than a single parent household (and a household with no surviving parents would be worse than that, even after the weaning period is over for a variety of reasons)

    Primate societies would likely help tribemates who are not direct kin the same as humans do, but both primate societies and human societies see people helping others less than their direct kin. There’s studies showing that stepparents are not the same as parents statistically in this regard.


  • I don’t think that would be useful in the context of what the study was trying to understand, which is the effect of female survival on children of that female.

    The question was about the biological mother, which can be tracked because the mother gives birth. If the biological mother dies but another female continues to behave in such a way to nurture the child, then that is relevant to the analysis only insofar as the primate society took care of the child anyway which would reduce the impact of losing the mother.

    With respect to the father potentially taking on a maternal role, I don’t think the structure of many primate societies is conducive to such research, because primates are typically not monogamous. As a result, neither the researchers nor the primate fathers know who is the father of which baby, and so if a female presenting male were to “take a baby under its wing” after the death of a mother, I would expect that to be similar to a female presenting male who is not the father of the baby and so fit under the data set of death of a mother and just have the effect of flattening out the effects of the measurement.











  • You might be surprised, on many fronts.

    Empathy for others who are not exactly like you is actually considered a virtue when you’re not in the little bubble that is reddit’s toxic, hateful political disease. Despite what you seem to think, empathy for someone who isn’t exactly like you is a key requirement of a healthy marriage.

    Man, I hope I live to see my grandchildren read my book, The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son (He’s born now, and he’s beautiful). I bet parts of it will seem archaic, since it’s directly addressing contemporary issues, but other parts will likely be timeless. It’d be really interesting if I could see them come of age and we’d get to see what they thought of their grandparents. The world will likely be a much different place by then, and not in ways you think.



  • It’s an easy thing to just assume people are stupid. It makes the world nice and simple and if only people would stop being stupid and start being smart (smart like you, obviously!) All the problems of the world would be solved.

    For a lot of people, reality isn’t so simple. The common man is already struggling. Throughout history, the age people get married and have kids has been indicative of the stress civilizations are under, and many people aren’t having kids before they get too old to have kids because that’s the level of stress the common man is under. Global civilization is facing a demographic bomb as every continent except Africa is facing a massive reduction in population in coming decades because nobody is having kids because life is so hard.

    As a study in contrasts, just look at wages vs. rent while I’ve been an adult. Minimum wage went from 11/hr to 15/hr. Meanwhile, my first 2 bedroom apartment was 350/mo, and today you can’t get anything for less than 1200. A few years before I rented, there were decent houses available for $50,000 and today the average house price nationwide is $800,000. (Not the US, obviously)

    So when a bunch of the business leaders and politicians who magically seem to get richer every time something is done “for our own good” – politicians who make as much as a senior engineer on paper but all of whom seem to become fabulously wealthy regardless (huh wonder where all those extra millions came from) while the common man has suffered – get together to figure out new ways to squeeze the common man, is it really so stupid to be skeptical? “Don’t worry everyone, we’re going to make your life even harder but it’s all for your own good.”

    Having the summit in Dubai is fitting – a city of extreme inequality, paid for with oil money, built by slaves, ruled by kings.

    You can try to guilt and shame people into not caring about basic biological drives, but you actually can’t. Entire generations of people have been pushed so far that their family lines will end with them. It’s comfortable enough – like being in a pool of comfortably warm water right up to your neck that you can’t escape from, but when you can see people plotting to add more water to your pool the next step is you drown.

    In previous eras, common people being this stressed out led to the fall of the Roman empire, the French reign of terror, the end of the Romanov dynasty in Russia or the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. While you call people stupid for not listening to their leaders, historically speaking those same leaders will be lucky to keep their heads on their shoulders.