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Comment by jseban | Hacker News Reader

> The majority of humans are going to be parents.

Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.

All living humans come from a long unbroken chain of natural selection and rejection of bad genes and reproduction of only the fittest to enable adaption to a changing environment.

If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection and create survival of the unfittest where every bad gene will reproduce endlessly.

Not having children is just as "natural" as having children, it all depends of how your particular set of characteristics do in the current environment and foreseeable future.

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> Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.

This is an incredibly bold statement. Most people like having sex, and in a natural state (sans birth control, online dating, internet porn, etc) there are going to be a lot of pregnancies. The idea that tax credits, welfare or parental leave is what is driving this situation is ridiculous. This feels more like a dog whistle about the welfare state, but even if you take away those "subsidies", people ain't gonna stop having kids, that's just not how the majority of young people of child-bearing age think.

No but some men would have more than two children, and some men would have zero.

We balanced this out up until recently by sending men to war and other dangerous jobs that made them die before they had a chance to reproduce.

There is an enormous asymmetry between the sexes in our biology and that's the feature that drives natural selection and evolution.

The only reason why all people are able to reproduce are subsidies, otherwise natural selection would reject a lot.

That's just a silly assertion. Many developing countries have little to no subsidies in regards to children and yet their birth rates are higher.

Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.

> Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.

Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.

I think the biggest cause is actually high rates of child mortality. Humans have more children when there is a higher chance those children might not survive.

If women in developing countries had financial freedom and access to easy and convenient birth control, then they would not have high birth rates.

> If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection

Using your own logic: if natural selection is that fragile, then it should evolve or die. We're not called to uphold it in any way; our own selfish genes inevitably predispose us not to worry about an evolutionary mechanism that does not directly affect us or our children.

Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.

It is “natural” in the sense that we wouldn’t be here to talk about it if it wasn’t the case.

> Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.

Obviously the human race somehow made it until we created developed societies. I think you are confusing survival of the human race with survival of our current pension system.

Who knows if it's really better or worse to suddenly allow everyone to reproduce?

For sure it's not "natural", and as far as I can see it would actually reverse evolution to regression instead.

And it seems like we can't really stop it anyway with how many men today are becoming outsiders in society because they get rejected to reproduce.

It’s natural only in the sense of a selection bias: we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t so. Men aren’t the limiting resource here, but if women start having less than 2.1 kids on average, we eventually just disappear. This is just math, not related to economics, morality, or ideology.

> Men aren’t the limiting resource here

Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.

If monogamy is valuable, and I think it is, then most men should be parents as well. I can’t imagine a world with a few guys fathering most of the kids, that seems like it would cause lots of problems.

You can still be monogamous if some women have more children, not every woman needs to have 2 children to achieve that average. A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.

The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".

> A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.

The median is close to the average in kids per women in the developed world. Having four kids is harsh on many women’s bodies; eg my grandma had 8 kids, but she died in her late 50s. While no doubt some couples will want to go for four kids or more, I don’t think it’s ethical to encourage it over a more standard 2 something for most couples.

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