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Why are there so many humans?

#1
C C Offline
https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/human-...evolution/

EXCERPTS: Something curious happened in human population history over the last 1 million years. First, our numbers fell to as low as 18,500, and our ancestors were more endangered than chimpanzees and gorillas. Then we bounced back to extraordinary levels, far surpassing the other great apes.

Today [...] many species are critically endangered. Meanwhile, the human population has surged to 7.7 billion. And the irony is: Our astonishing ability to multiply now threatens the long-term sustainability of many species, including ours. What happened? [...] Saving women time and energy is central to increasing the population. And humans have developed numerous technological and social ways of accomplishing this that differ from our great ape relatives.

[...] Somewhere along the evolutionary road, humans started to favor new ways of having and raising their young. Mothers began weaning their infants earlier. ... Breastfeeding is calorically expensive. It takes a mother about 600 extra calories a day to produce milk. So, the sooner she stops nursing, the sooner she can biologically support another pregnancy.

[...] Our ancient ancestors also fed, sheltered, and cared for youngsters who were weaned but still growing. This gave them a better chance at surviving than nonhuman great ape young, which fend for themselves after they’re weaned.

[...] Having lots of kids is great for the success of the species. But there’s a hitch. Mothers don’t have enough hours in the day to care for their babies full time while providing for their older offspring. That’s especially true because the unique aspects of the human diet give mothers a lot of tasks to juggle.

There are simply not enough hours in the day for any one person to accomplish all this. So, our ancestors came up with a solution. That solution was cooperation—but not the kind of task-sharing many species engage in. Hunter-gatherers developed a distinct feature called intergenerational cooperation: Parents help kids, and children help parents.

This is not a trait we share with the other great apes [...] among humans, intergenerational cooperation means it really does take a village to raise a child. ... Fathers and grandparents certainly play important roles in supporting their families. But it’s not enough. ... My research suggests a much more obvious source of help has been overlooked: kids. Other than mothers, children provide most of the child care in many cultures. And 7- to 10-year-olds do the bulk of the babysitting.

Children are also responsible for processing much of the food and running the household. [...] Children in agricultural communities are also hard workers. ... between the ages of 7 and 14 [kids] devote two to five hours a day to domestic and field work. Teens between the ages of 15 and 18 labor about 6.5 hours a day—as much as their parents. [...] Thanks to this multigenerational help, a woman can spend time doing what only she can do: have more children. So, children increase the population, but their labor is also a built-in engine to fuel their community’s fertility and speed up reproduction.

With intergenerational cooperation and a diversity of dietary strategies, our ancestors multiplied and weathered population bottlenecks. Just after 1800, the human population hit 1 billion. [...] There is no question ... that humans have been incredibly successful. The question is: How long can we maintain that success and still be sustainable? The answer, like our secret to growth in the past, stands on the shoulders of cooperation... (MORE - details)
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
I think the more prolific a species is means their chances of surviving an apocalyptic event improves dramatically.
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#3
stryder Offline
One way to potentially think about the world is it literally is a giant petri dish. How I mean is that it's pretty close to a closed system, don't get me wrong you've got people like Musk and Bezos that both want to pierce the outer value and "open" it up and there is always the threat of things falling on our heads. In a closed system there is supposedly a point of equilibrium where a fluctuation occurs between certain values where it can't get any higher without something giving. (I would of posted a version of Conways "Game of Live" using a closed system however due to the simplicity of the game it's limited in actually speculating true results since rather than reaching a high equilibrium it usually reduces significantly to a point where continued growth is impossible and "stalemating". Doom and gloomists might speculate it as proof of a near extinction event on the horizon, but like I mentioned it's really down just to the simplicity of the game lacking various "random" events that tend to keep everything volatile.)

To my knowledge the origin of the game itself was based upon a petri dish of bacteria, the concept that the bacteria once it reaches an impassable barrier (the dishes wall and lid) would then fluctuate through a state of constant death and regrowth, at least while resources like sugared water are present.

While it might be a macroscopic analogy based on a simple life form, it still has relevance to our own existence. If we overbreed, we become a scourge that reaches that impassable wall sooner, which in turn them means for colonial survival that death events (cullings, war, famine, pestilence, bankers) are a Machiavellian necessity. Death events don't actually have to be death, it could actually be more "Communistic", well Marxist through the "Redistribution of wealth" such as stealing a bunch of iphones during a completely unrelated riot.

The problem is however we need to work out how to defeat the menace of an impassable wall, either by climbing out the petri dish or learning how to make it a little bit bigger or learning how we can deal with reductionism.

There are certain anthropological examples such as pigmy tribes, Where scarce resources over time have lead to an evolutionary trait of reducing the size of the individual thus reducing the overall needs on the tribe itself. (In medieval times it's even suggested that people were a lot shorter than they are nowadays which could be down to a mixture of resource scarcity and population number)

Due to how our world markets have allowed the richer countries access to resource and materials has lead to larger people both in height and gait, which in turned is heading ever faster towards unsustainability. Saying all this though I'm not suggesting people should start "binding" their children on birth to reduce the size of their development.
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