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qalmakka 4 days ago

Exactly - as if evolution cared enough about keeping us healthy after childbearing age. It's hard to state "yeah we've evolved to live like that, of course it's good for us" because clearly keeping us alive after the age of 40 really wasn't _that_ necessary for human survival. There's a lot of perfectly natural stuff that hurts us, including sunlight. Most cancers will only occur in the latter half of our lives, where usually a human historically had already had several children that are now old enough to survive on their own.

papyrus9244 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> because clearly keeping us alive after the age of 40 really wasn't _that_ necessary for human survival.

That's a very common misconception. Being alive after 40 is quite necessary if you are a member of a gregarious species that (bar exceptions) always lives in community. And it's not only about the survival of your own genes, it's about the survival of the genes of the whole community.

DoctorOetker 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Selection pressure does not simply select on "did or did not reproduce" it selects on reproduction rate (compare 2 individuals, both having parented a first child, but one dies afterwards while the other continues to occasionally reproduce before dying. The latter displays higher fitness.

Its like any poisson process, a recent event does not inherently lower the probability density for the next event.

Achieving the minimum necessary for reproduction is not representative of the distribution of reproductive success scores.