Issues like these reflects an evolutionary blind spot: selective pressure drops off after reproductive age, allowing defects like prostate dysfunction to persist. It's the same reason late-onset neurological diseases remain prevalent.
Perhaps less common but 30s would probably be more likely.
It wasn't just disease, but also wars and famines. And in women, deaths during childbirth, which cluster in the 20-35 bracket.
Cardinals of the Church, who led peaceful lives, didn't give birth and never went hungry, lived into their late 60s and early 70s even during the Middle Ages. But an average peasant wouldn't.
What's "in the past" here? Last 200 years? 500? 1000? In evolutionary scale, those numbers are a blip.
Hides long list of ethical problems with the concept
And I don’t see any problems with late-life reproduction, assuming we can make it reliable and healthy. If anything, some countries desperately need it.
Evolution is really slow on average, but locally it moves quite quickly and probably explains the large variation between members of a species.
Add strong selective pressure to that high local speed and you can change a good part of the genotype within a couple of generations. See: animal husbandry. You can breed a new race of dog within 5-10 generations.
Ethics aside we could probably breed people who can sniff out Alzheimer's in less than 250 years.
Our current late reproduction style will very likely influence future generations health at older ages.
I don't dispute any of your points in general. But at the same time, it brings a nostalgic smile to my face to envision starting a 250-year project in 2025.
Icelanders are a well-studied population when it comes to genetics. Frequency of some traits meaningfully changed among them in last 100 years.
Source: this book: https://www.amazon.de/dp/0198821263?ref_=pe_109184651_110380...
Men are (within reason) considered handsome in media even in old age. Wrinkles and gray hair can be seen as sexy (again, within reason), but only in men.
Women are discarded or relegated to sexless granny roles (except maybe for comedic purposes, where sexuality is the butt of a joke). Actresses are replaced by younger women because they are not sexy enough even when their male equivalents aren't (looking at you, Top Gun: Maverick).
I'm not saying there aren't exceptions in particular movies that deal with this topic; I'm talking about the general trend.
Women are different. It ranges — alot, and is more about EQ and scarcity. If you have a moderate baseline level of physical attractiveness, moderately fit (Jon two miles let’s say), not an asshole, and not living with mom, a 40-60 year old guy is a hot commodity.
This could be natural selection acting against us, but since modern society is artificial anyway, why not make an effort to combat it?
Are you? By all appearances this is a direct result of it. Visual indicators of age haven't been selected against in and of themselves as strongly with regards to men but a great many related things have been.
Arguably your specific example might constitute an edge case that historically didn't occur with enough frequency to be selected against. Seems like little more than a curiosity to me.
> why not make an effort to combat it?
I don't follow. What are you arguing for here?
This is a result of it when it no longer matters, in adults who no longer matter for breeding purposes. When natural selection acts on humans of age 60+, it's mostly irrelevant. There's nothing to select, they've already done their part. It's just that natural selection is blind and doesn't "know" when to stop -- but we humans know better (this is what I meant later by combat/countering it).
> Arguably your specific example might constitute an edge case that historically didn't occur with enough frequency to be selected against. Seems like little more than a curiosity to me.
Why would it be selected against? All else being equal, natural selection wouldn't exert any particular pressure on old people after they've passed their genes. It's "blind" to them. It certainly doesn't know anything about being media star material! ;)
But it's not an "edge case" for modern humans, especially as we live longer and keep working well into our later years. Modern society doesn't always resemble what the forces of natural selection act upon anyway.
> What are you arguing for here?
The same as the thread starter, only with a focus on women since they get the short end of the stick in this aspect (in media).
And, like I also said, modern humans and our society don't reflect natural selection anyway; many things we do are "unnatural".
That's simply not true. Don't get hung up on the word "natural". It's nothing more than the result of a biased random walk (at least until the eugenicists get involved, at which point it goes meta).
Some of the things selected for can get pretty abstract. Cooperative behavior for example. Despite often being to the short term detriment of the individual it is observed in the wild.
We are by nature dopamine machines, and will try to hit it as long as possible.
I'm still not clear what you're arguing for. It isn't media giving women the short end of the stick, it's biology. What exactly are you proposing be done about it? I'm not even clear why it's a problem aside from the general desire that scientific advancement should eventually cure us of age related phenomena entirely.
The reflection of biological reality appears easier to justify: that men remain fertile for longer, that the attractive qualities that women care about most (e.g. wealth and personality) tend to improve with age; and that a women's attractiveness is most tied to her skin, which we all know shows aging the most on the body, and is a sign of her reproductive health or ability.
I'm not sure what the argument for the media being able to influence males to the extent suggested would be? Older men were marrying younger women before the printing press, so where did this pressure originate? And what is its mechanism of action?
I'm saying media could be changed from this tendency, since this preference is less relevant in modern society and it hurts actresses. Media is a human construct that can be adapted to new needs, it's not a tool of natural selection!
Changing media wouldn't change the sexual preferences of men, and nowhere am I arguing this. It's like inclusivity in media -- is it ever going to eradicate racism? No, but it will make the world a tiny bit fairer.
Men become wiser, skilled, kinder, more patient and often better providers. Women tend to become argumentative, quarrelsome, bitter (especially those who date often) and rewarded for it. They also tend to dissociate love from sex and manipulate one for the other.
I think we are already post evolutionary, or control it ourselves. Not a big issue either IMO, it's totally ok that this is happening.
The ethical problems were fun to read about! But would be significantly less fun to live through.
Just kill all offspring if one of the parents die of some unwanted cause.
Allows people to still get kids in the optimal age, yet applying old-age selection pressure.
Modern medicine has messed with this. We weren’t meant to “old”.