July 8, 2006
ANOTHER JUST SO STORY:
Sex is essential, kids aren't: Why are 30% of German women choosing to go childless? Free will, baby. (David P. Barash, May 10, 2006, LA Times)
THE GERMAN PUBLIC was recently shocked to learn that 30% of "their" women are childless — the highest proportion of any country in the world. And this is not a result of infertility; it's intentional childlessness.Demographers are intrigued. German nationalists, aghast. Religious fundamentalists, distressed at the indication that large numbers of women are using birth control.
And evolutionary biologists (including me) are asked, "How can this be?" If reproduction is perhaps the fundamental imperative of natural selection, of our genetic heritage, isn't it curious — indeed, counterintuitive — that people choose, and in such large numbers, to refrain from participating in life's most pressing event?
The answer is that intentional childlessness is indeed curious — but in no way surprising.
One of the most endearing qualities of the Darwinists, though it helps make it impossible to take them seriously, is their dual insistence that Man is nothing special but that he's uniquely broken free from Evolution. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2006 8:43 AM
Get with it. Not Darwin, Spencer plus Gots.
With military defeat comes loss of confidence and loss of will, and voluntary extinction. Polemos pater panton, we say, and the opposite holds true. This is not biological evolution, but something which has taken place in less than sixty years.
The Japanese experience has been at least as bad.
Posted by: Lou Gots at July 8, 2006 9:13 AMMr. Judd;
I really hope that you never wrote any software in your job, if this puzzles you.
On the other hand, most of the modern sociobiologists seem far too deterministic and unwilling to accept that buggy systems do odd things for no particular reason.
Puzzles? No. Amuses. Almost as much as you continually comparing it to writing software but thinking you don't believe in I.D..
Posted by: oj at July 8, 2006 10:09 AMLou: Not just the defeat, but also the subsequent neutering.
Posted by: David Cohen at July 8, 2006 12:02 PM