Meet future woman: shorter, plumper, more fertile | Hacker News Reader

Meet future woman: shorter, plumper, more fertile

newscientist.com

23 pointsprat20 comments

"If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later."

This is a non-story. The change they are predicting is unnoticeable 400 years out.

Please note that average height a mere hundred fifty years ago was a few centimetres shorter. The reversal of a trend (admittedly spurred by different causes) is notable. If you do wish to call a development a "non-story", please refute it with something more substantial than "the numbers don't look right to my programmer brain".

How about: the uncertainties in their extrapolation to 400 years beyond the present are probably greater than the changes they are predicting.

Sounds good to me. Thanks.

And more beautiful!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6727710...

404 error on that link...

Link worked for me FYI - Maybe you caught a glitch

Not covered by their dataset, but any trait that lessens the effective use of birth control is definitely being selected for as well.

The future woman will be Catholic

Could the differences in physique also stem from number of births?

In addition, couldn't the later menopause be explained as a direct result of lower oocyte consumption? With 9 months of pregnancy, that's 8 or 9 fewer ovulation cycles, so wouldn't it makes sense for a woman with an extra child to have menopause a few months later? I'm no reproductive specialist here, but that seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

Add in the selection bias (women with later menopause are more likely to have an unexpected child at a late age), and this really could turn out to be an experiment with no notable findings.

Human women have around 400000 oocytes; their consumption is not a limiting factor.

Ahh, my mistake then. Thanks for clarifying.

do not want

I am blinded by your sparkling wit =/

And that is perfectly fine because those who do want will reproduce more and soon your gene's will be gone.

Less well represented as a percentage doesn't mean those genes will die out.

It does if the trend continues. Yay math.

With a growing population, a more slowly growing subpopulation can nevertheless be a smaller and smaller percentage.

But the growth would also have to continue. In all real populations, population size has an upper limit(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity.) Of course, it's easy to forget that if you think about humans because it appears that technology has increased the carrying capacity for humans to a yet-unknown level. It's true that humans are going through a population explosion right now, but of course at some point we'll hit an upper limit.

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