> > 1) The stylised demographic facts appear to be that the birth rate
> falls
> > as populations become wealthier, that this fall in the birth rate is
> due
> in
> > significant measure to an increase in the number of childless
> households,
> > and that within populations in both the developed and developing
> worlds,
> > the incidence of childless households increases the further up the
> income
> > distribution you go.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > The best the Dawkinsites I've spoken to seem to be able to come up with
> > seems to be just-so stories about the management of large and small prides
> > of man-cubs on the plains of Africa. But I don't see how this can explain
> > the decision to have no family at all.
> >
>
Though I have quit the list, it is only fair enough that I enable the good Professor Dawkins to express his own views on this subject, in language that turns out to be curiously appropriate. This from the revised 1999 edition of _The Extended Phenotype_ (p. 36):
"Lay critics frequently bring up some apparently maladaptive feature of modern human behaviour - adoption, say, or contraception - and fling down a challenge to 'explain that if you can with your selfish genes.' Obviously, as Lewontin, Gould and others have rightly stressed, it would be possible, depending on one's ingenuity, to pull a 'sociobiological' explanation out of a hat, a 'just-so' story, but I agree with them and Cain that the answering of such challenges is a trivial exercise; indeed it is likely to be positively harmful. Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an environment radically different from the one in which its genes were naturally selected. The question, about the adaptive significance of behaviour in an artificial world, should never have been put; and although a silly question may deserve a silly answer, it is wiser to give no answer at all and to explain why."
And something else to be borne in mind in any other discussions of 'Dawkinsites' [a term of high praise, I would have thought](p. 29):
"A large part of this chapter has been based upon the assumption that a biologist might want to speculate on the Darwinian 'function' of behaviour patterns. This is not to say that all behaviour patterns necessarily have a Darwinian function. It may be that there is a large class of behaviour patterns which are selectively neutral or deleterious to their performers, and cannot usefully be regarded as products of natural selection."
Just letting the prof speak for himself. By the way, _The Extended Phenotype_ is much better than _The Selfish Gene_ ... pity it's so much less read.
Bye, all (and this time, the long goodbye, truly).