Wealth and power may have played a stronger role than 'survival of the fittest' | Hacker News Reader

Wealth and power may have played a stronger role than 'survival of the fittest'

sciencedaily.com

21 pointshappyscrappy15 comments

The headline is total clickbait. The abstract of the paper says:

"In contrast to demographic reconstructions based on mtDNA, we infer a second strong bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages dating to the last 10 ky. We hypothesize that this bottleneck is caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males."

"caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males" is a reasonable hypothesis, since the bottleneck affected males more than females. But who pulled "wealth and power" out of their rear end? That's just one possible cultural change. And why would you lead with one possible version of a hypothesis rather than the actual data and results (which are interesting in their own right)?

There are lots of possible ways that cultural changes could have caused a male-specific pattern of reproductive variance. Maybe settling down into agricultural societies changed how (and how much) men fought and died in conflict. There are lots of possibilities; "wealth and power" is a total guess. But that's the part that makes it into the headline.

Horrible but widespread misconception - "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean survival of the strongest with the best genes / physical traits. It means what it says, "survival of the fittest". To fit in, to be adaptive, to deal with the situations at hand. In that sense, the wealthy are the fittest. Those who ensure their survival and reproduction the best are the fittest. Whatever traits that might require.

Not sure how 'wealth' is related to fitness? Poor people are renowned for reproducing much more than the wealthy in modern times.

That's not actually true, more wealthy men have more children than poor men on average. Wealthy women have fewer children on average.

The discrepancy is wealthy men often have children with more than one women.

PS: There are a lot of incorrect studies on this issue as you really need to do DNA testing to accurately track # of children it's also important to track older people as men can have children into their 60's.

This has some sources:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/08/31/the-poor-and-th...

But... I'm not sure it's a fair comparison. If the poor reproduce much earlier than the rich you're comparing multiple generations with a single generation.

By the time our hypothetical "fit" billionaire has just finished his family of three, a hypothetical "less fit" poor male may already be a grandfather.

Of course, this doesn't include unofficial offspring, multiple marriages, and so on.

It seems quite hard to get accurate numbers.

Americans are below the replacement rate so having more generations results in fewer not more offspring.

In historical terms can this be accurate other than "successfully gave birth to children who than successfully gave birth.." ?

I'm reminded of the intro to Idiocracy, where successful birth giving and "fitness" have long been separated : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmRCixQrx8

The problem with "survival of the fittest" is that people don't understand that "fitness" is a technical term in evolutionary biology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_%28biology%29 And once you understand the technical meaning.. the phrase is really close to being a tautology.

This is ridiculous. "Survival of the fittest" is not about who is physically stronger but who is fitter for their environment. And since most human's environment is a human city, monetary wealth is basically higher fitness. I wish these articles stopped spreading the LIE and MISCONCEPTION of what "survival of the fittest" means.

"Survival of the fittest" needs to stop being parroted, full stop. It is not an accurate way to describe evolution and reproduction.

"Death of the unfit" (or failure of the unfit to reproduce as an identity for "unfit") is a much more accurate way to phrase it.

That's semantic quibbling. How about the degree of fitness, controlling how many children are produced? How about fitness for raising/protecting children? There's definitely a correlation, and 'survival of the fittest' is a reasonably concise expression of that correlation. Its definitely not black-and-white failure/success at reproduction.

Also what about the unknown cost of the fitness in a future setting. For example, losing flight may be more fit in any given generation, resulting in a flightless species that then gets wiped out when a new predator is introduced.

I fail to see how it's 'just a guess', by any stretch of the imagination.

Agriculture introduced a larger amount of resources on a scale not seen before. Evolutionary psychologists successfully predicted that women who preferentially mated with men capable of investing resources in their offspring (thereby ensuring their offsprings' survival) would have left more descendants than women who did not. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mating_strategies#Sexual_...). This is not the only factor, but it is a large factor.

So for while most of our biological history nature selected for favorable physical attributes (virility, strength, agility, immunity, etc.) fitting the external environment, cultural institutions selected instead.

Looks like we had a war, the male peasants were conveniently wiped and the women were the spoils of war for the few but well armed conquerors...

Wealth can even have a negative effect in survival when each other around you is poor and has nothing to lose (as most of soldiers).

I love Hacker News!

I came to up-vote the inevitable "fittest is relative" type comment. Instead, I find 5 of the 6 main comments are saying it :-). (Now 5 of 7, because I'm totally contaminating the conversation with my observer comment.)

Thank you for restoring my faith in science education!

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