Society

[Nick]

I would also like to add that, as it appears to me, homosexuality is more popular and accepted in wealthy areas.

You must be american
Its kind of naieve to think that its accepted in the States. I mean, look at this gay marriage thing. I find it being illegal simply retarded. What, are people going to be like "Oh, cant marry, I better become straight now"?
No, we couldnt let gay people marry. Marriage is a sacred institution *cough* . The United States, home of Jennifer Lopez and Brittany Spears, and their infamous wedding(s). A celebrity can get married for LESS THAN A DAY, but two people of the same sex who want to get married, cant?
Give them a break, they got enough to worry about, what with bullying in school and awkward treatment by straight folk.

[Halley]

The Industriallist:

What you say is true to an extent. When the economy is doing well in an area, people tend to have more children: thus the baby boom generation.

However, in areas where there is a high rate of mortality, there is also a high rate of birth. This is true of humans and it is true of animals.

Take, for example, whales. They generally have a low mortality rate; you don't just see dead whales floating around every day. They also have a low birthrate--single births, years between births. Then take spiders. They have an exceptionally high mortality rate, being fairly low on the food chain. Spiders also have TONS and TONS of babies. If spiders didn't have lots of babies, one day they would die out.

The same goes for humans in areas where deadly diseases and infant mortality are more common. If the people in these areas did not maintain a high birthrate, their population would eventually cease.

Overpopulation is a growing problem because death rates (due to the spread of medicines and education about health in periphery countries) are slowing. Birth rates all over the world (but especially in places with low death rates) are gradually slowing as well, but it will be a long time before they can catch up, since death rates drop first.




Nick:

No, homosexuality is not completely accepted in the US. But it is becoming more and more accepted; much more accepted than it was, say, 50 years ago. It is also much more acceptable here than in most other places in the world.

(Personally, I don't think the government should have any say so in marriage whatsoever. What you and I do with our personal lives is our own damn business. If I get a husband, why the hell should the government have to know about it? If I get a wife, what difference does it make to them? If I get a whole bunch of spouses, I still fail to understand how that affects the way government is run. I say if we ban gay marriage, let's ban straight marriage, too!)

[The Industriallist]

Humans are one species, not several different ones. The spiders follow the same reproductive strategy if you make sure every spider lives it's full natural span. The whales won't breed faster if you start hunting them. Humans breed based on variable instead of fixed patterns, unlike any other animal I know of.

It is an observed fact that 'developed' countries have birthrate fall-offs. Why that is isn't clear, but it's often attributed to cultural changes resulting from better living conditions.

----

Government gets into marriage because marriage is promoted by the government. Married couples get tax benefits and any number of benefits apply only to a person, their spouse, and their legal children, for example. Thus the toehold. Then when something juicy that whips up support with a handy special interest group comes up, well, they aren't extending government power, are they? The government always regulated marriage...
Very much.
But if you want to "ban straight marriage"...the laws that do exist against gays behaving in all ways as if they were married are essentially unenforcable now and probably overturned by the S.C. recently. So if they want the name but don't need the legal benefits, they can find a non-government officiator to call them maried in whatever cerimonial manner they prefer and then treat it as true.
Frankly, I agree that the government shouldn't be involved in marriage at all.

[Pirog]

It is an observed fact that 'developed' countries have birthrate fall-offs. Why that is isn't clear, but it's often attributed to cultural changes resulting from better living conditions.

There are very logical reasons for that.
In "developed" countries people study longer and doesn't have time to get children until they are settled with stable work etc. The energy it takes to study or work your way up to a good position within a company is more than many can take while taking care of a child at the same time and most companies makes sure not to hire parents of small children.

There is also no real need for offspring. With a functioning pension system etc. there is no real need even for a relationship, except for the social part. In poor countries a family is needed to take care of each other where society doesn't and you need to have children so that they can take care of you when you get old.

[Halley]

Among demographers, there are many commonly accepted theories for why birth rates in developed countries are lower than in developing countries. One of these is precisely what I am speaking of: in areas with high mortality rates, people choose to have more children to increase their chances of having children who survive. In developed countries, children are almost guaranteed to make it to adulthood, and so parents are less driven to have so many. There are, of course, other factors, but I bring up this particular one because it goes along with my argument about homosexuality in developed countries vs. developing countries. Anyway, here are some links which agree with me about the link between mortality and fertility rates:


http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english ... ocial/pgr/

Death and birth rates have declined over the past several decades. People are living longer in both industrial and developing countries because of increased access to immunization, primary health care, and disease eradication programs. Many parents are realizing that as health conditions improve, more of their children are likely to survive, so they are choosing to have fewer babies.

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/EnvSC102Notes/HumanPop.htm

When death rates are high, birth rates are also often high to compensate, as parents want at least 2 children to survive to help care for them in old age.

When death rates fall, the attitudes which contributed to high birth rates do not change as quickly.

Over time, couples often do choose to have fewer children.  If you know that all will live, then only conceive as many as you want to raise.

http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/th ... /texta.htm

Why have death rates and birth rates declined? Death rates have declined largely because people have more access to better health care and better nutrition. Birth rates have declined because parents are more confident that their children will live to adulthood; more people have access to family planning; and more girls are receiving basic educations, and are choosing to start their families later in life and to have fewer, healthier children.

Alright, so you don't like the whale/spider example. That's fine; you make a very valid point. Granted, I don't know enough about specific populations of animals to provide you with my own observations, but here is an article I stumbled across which mentions meerkats:


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 080055.htm

...meerkats may reproduce faster when numbers are high enough to allow bands of scouts to stand watch for each other. Similar effects have happened to humans.

Halley

[Nick]

The spiders follow the same reproductive strategy if you make sure every spider lives it's full natural span.

And where do you get this info from? Perhaps there are different sociological factors in spider society as well. Maybe spiders who live in some countries have more food than others, or other variables, etc.

Well, obviously we know more about the sociological tendencies of humans... we ARE human. Fact of the matter is, there probably have been no studies on what influences the reproductive habits of spiders. If so, I am willing to bet noone here has read any

[The Industriallist]

The spiders follow the same reproductive strategy if you make sure every spider lives it's full natural span.

And where do you get this info from? Perhaps there are different sociological factors in spider society as well. Maybe spiders who live in some countries have more food than others, or other variables, etc.

Well, obviously we know more about the sociological tendencies of humans... we ARE human. Fact of the matter is, there probably have been no studies on what influences the reproductive habits of spiders. If so, I am willing to bet noone here has read any

Hmm. Trying to think... you might have me at reading anything directly on it. However, generalizing from similar creatures about which I have read, I think I can make a sound claim that for most species of spider, all adults attempt to mate each year that they are alive (some live one year, but some have longer life spans). The number of eggs actually produced may depend on conditions, and the number of survivors even more so, but the degree of effort will be the same for all spiders physically capable of it.

So there

And there have almost certainly been far, far more actual, scientific studies of spider reproduction habits than human. Scientists devote there lives to such subjects. All sciences are kind of thin on humans. They make really lousy experimental animals. And being human doesn't even make us that good at predicting out own personal behavior, let alone anyone elses. We know far more about societies of ants than of humans.

When death rates are high, birth rates are also often high to compensate, as parents want at least 2 children to survive to help care for them in old age.

When death rates fall, the attitudes which contributed to high birth rates do not change as quickly.

Over time, couples often do choose to have fewer children. If you know that all will live, then only conceive as many as you want to raise.

The devil is in the second line. Even in the US they aren't all there. In developing countries it's even worse. That's what helps 3rd world countries plow themselves under.

But:

In wealthy areas, I'm sure people don't think, "Hey, the money's rolling in; I think I'll be gay/have fewer kids!" But it is still an interesting phenomenon which I suspect is an instinct with evolutionary ties.

Remember this? Your quotes all view humans as adjusting mentally, not biochemically. In other words, according to your sources, they do exactly think that.

[Halley]

I'm not very sure what you're getting at here. There is a very clear correlation between death rates and birth rates. Death rates drop first, and then birth rates drop. Most, if not all, developed nations have already gone through this; they have reached replacement level or lower, meaning the number of births is equal to or less than the number of deaths. If their populations are growing, as many of them are, it is only because of immigration.

Mortality rates in developing countries are dropping. So are fertility rates. But the death rates drop first; the birth rates have only recently begun to drop as well. The world's population is still growing, but that growth is slowing down and most demographers suspect it will level off in the next 100 years or so. (Granted, they aren't entirely certain--there are thousands of factors which could come into play to affect population growth on down the road, such as the AIDS virus or genocide.)

These developing countries are not doing well at the moment, but their conditions ARE improving. Overpopulation is a serious concern, but these countries obviously are NOT plowing themselves into the ground when their people are steadily living longer and longer; they seem to be doing something right here! This is nature for you; this is population balance for you. All populations, animal or human, eventually regulate themselves.

We, as humans, are regulating our populations. This is done on an individual basis (for example, choosing to have two kids rather than three), but it comes out to a total effect: the lower the mortality rates, the lower the fertility rates. This effect is simple, self-driven population control.

The only reason that population numbers are rising so rapidly is because of the drop in death rates. Human populations have only really boomed, begnning with industrialization, and it's no big surprise since industrialization decreased the number of people dying each year. In more recent years, with the advances of medicine and communication, the death rates have been dropping at an ever-increasing rate.

I don't understand how adjusting mentally is unlike adjusting biochemically. The brain after all, is a structure designed of evolution, is it not? We (usually, anyway) consider our choices before we make them, but that does not mean instinct isn't behind it all. It is instinct which drives so many of us to want certain things: to want our children to survive into adulthood or to want lots of help getting food. Humans do not think objectively; we, like all living things, exist the way we do because this the best way our species has found to survive over the millenia.

[Nick]

Hmm. Trying to think... you might have me at reading anything directly on it. However, generalizing from similar creatures about which I have read, I think I can make a sound claim that for most species of spider, all adults attempt to mate each year that they are alive (some live one year, but some have longer life spans). The number of eggs actually produced may depend on conditions, and the number of survivors even more so, but the degree of effort will be the same for all spiders physically capable of it.

If you are going to put it that way, I dont think that Africans have more sex than your average westerner. We just have condoms and common knowledge of contraception.

And there have almost certainly been far, far more actual, scientific studies of spider reproduction habits than human. Scientists devote there lives to such subjects. All sciences are kind of thin on humans. They make really lousy experimental animals. And being human doesn't even make us that good at predicting out own personal behavior, let alone anyone elses. We know far more about societies of ants than of humans.

Hmmm... I'm gonna have to disagree on that. I think that there are more studies of any kind on humans than on any other kind of animal/insect. We like to know about ourselves.

[kroner]

yeah, but the studies on animals are biology, a legitimate science.
the studies on humans fall under the jurisdiction of of psychology aka "load of crap".

[Halley]

Psychology IS a lot of, hm, theories that just sound good (IMHO). Demography, however, is NOT a type of psychology, by any means.

[Nick]

Or sociology. Sociologist, sick 'em!

[The Industriallist]

I'll argue against psychology in all it's forms any time.

As Halley says, demography isn't one of them. Deomography would be a section of applied statistics, yes? But from that you can only make WAGs about the reasons for trends you observe.

When studying other species we regularly use controls, stable, closed conditions, and many repeated experiments to draw conclusions. When you work with humans, best case you'll have a smallish, loosely regulated study group who are aware of your experimentation. You have minimal controls, and you can't keep rerunning the experiment until you get things right. Then you draw conclusions from that, because your lousy study was very expensive and you need more funding. That makes bad science.

[Pirog]

Hehe, I'll rather trust psychology than statistics...that's for sure.

[The Industriallist]

Statistics are reliable and accurate when you have large, representative sampling sets.

The problem is, you have to know what the statistics are actually telling you, and not claim more.

A lot of the bad use of statistics comes from either using a statistic for shock value without reference points or from looking for a single correlation and then acting as if that proves a claim about causation (The Hunter's earlier statistic on crime and race). You can possibly disprove causation with statistics, but you can't prove it.