On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Eric Franz Leher wrote:
> > 2) Is this not a very severe problem for most sociobiological
> > theories, or for any theories which rely on "the desire to propagate
> > genes" as being a major determinant of human behaviour? At the very
> > least, it is an anomaly to be explained away, that those members of
> > society who might be thought to be best placed to have large families,
> > tend not to.
>
> it is wrong to view individuals that do not breed as making no
> contribution to the perpetuation of the genes they carry. You do not
> need to perpetuate genes through your children - you share on average
> the same percentage of genes with your children as you do with your
> siblings, so if you do not breed yourself but nonetheless contribute to
> the survival of the children of your brothers or sisters, you have
> 'perpetuated your genes' . . . This is the basic reason why the
> demographic shift doesn't have to contradict standard Neo-Darwinian
> reasoning.
I don't see how this fixes things, Eric. If upper income people have smaller families on average, then they also have fewer siblings on average and those siblings themselves have smaller familes, cet par. And the reverse is also true: the poor not only have larger families, but also more siblings with larger families. If anything, this line of reasoning seems to multiply the power of DD's objection.
Michael