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To: Ilaine who wrote (15025)	2/14/2002 9:30:56 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 74559

CB - ...Fathering a lot of human children, most of which die, is bad for the children.... OTOH, overall evolutionary success will favor that over fathering a couple of children, both of whom die. Regards, Don

To: Ilaine who wrote (15025)	2/14/2002 10:44:38 AM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

40 life expectancy includes like 30% infant mortality or more - people who survived childhood usually lived longer than 40.

To: Ilaine who wrote (15025)	2/14/2002 11:53:40 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

<The historically short life expectancy of humans - less than 40 years - suggests that there is no genetic advantage for reproducing after 40.> But that's an average. Those who lived until 70 [the biblical age] still had plenty of life left in them and plenty of reason to be part of the reproductive stakes. One of the psychological traps of statistics is to think of people as 'the average' and to dump that onto everyone. If the average life expectancy of a species was 11, it could still leave plenty of that species reproducing at 100 [there would have to be a very skewed death rate with lots at a young age, but few at older ages - perhaps due to having learned how to live successfully with the ignorant young being eaten by something]. Having acquired the 'how to live' abilities, it would then pay to live a longgggggg time to keep reproducing. Old guys are like that. Grandmothers obviously have evolutionary advantage because mothers switch off at 50, but live easily until 70 when their last child would already be having children. They can easily go on until 80. <There is no ecological advantage to human children if the man who sires them vanishes> True, but there is advantage to the disappearing sire and that's what DNA propagation is about. The mother will go like crazy [literally] to keep the offspring alive, even though the sire shot through. If 99% of those children fail to reproduced and their line stops, it's still a worthwhile strategy for his DNA because one of them carries on and the others compete for resources with the unrelated offspring from other sires. It's competition, with death the arbiter, in the DNA stakes. It's a world which is quite divorced from our daily perception [which operates on a very short time scale]. DNA competition works over 100s of years with death the norm for 99.999% of DNA. Sure, those sired but abandoned children will also compete with said sire's other children, who he might actually stick around to play Dad for, but because he is sticking around, those better-protected children will have as good a chance as others of succeeding in the DNA stakes. Except that societies that have that sort of social mayhem going on would be less competitive than with solid societies with more robust breeding, so they'd tend to be over-run by societies with good Dads who go like crazy to protect their spouse and offspring. Waste is NOT a thing which evolution favours. Maximum probability of DNA replication is where it's at. Any waste is a waste and will be filtered out unless there's a countervailing advantage in some other way. For example, there's huge sperm 'waste' but that's essential as a competing male. Women don't waste eggs, effort in menstruation etc when they are nursing. Their reproduction shuts down [mostly] until the baby is eating other stuff too. Male answer syndrome, [good DNA selection for that - a guy without an idea is filtered out; most ideas are bad, so DNA filtration through the sieve of life lets through only the better of the bunch - hence the big lump over our eyebrows. It's very much a work in progress]. Mq