10/15   It occured to me this morning that treating women as equal to men has,
        so far, proven to be a poor choice for our society evolutionarily.
        This suggests the practice will probably die out evenutally.
        \_ Too soon to tell. I suspect that the socities with faster growth
           rates may be subject to a massive die-off sooner or later.
        \_ What do you mean?  Fewer offspring?  Fewer offspring may be the
           only long-term viable evolutionary strategy due to environmental
           limits.
           \_ That's a salient point, but it requires that all societies agree
              to limit reproduction.  You may get two sets of societies, 'the
              moral slow reproducers' and the 'immoral fast reproducers.' There
              will still be an environmental catastrophe, but the fast
              reproducers will have many more people than the slow reproducers.
              The result is the fast reproducers wipe out the slow reproducers
              in resource wars.  There is historical precedence.
              \_ Oh you mean like in California, the whites are getting
                 wiped out by the exploding Latino population? You RACIST!
              \_ Historical precedent is invalidated by technological
                 advantage.  When the slow reproducers have a massive military
                 technological advantage due to not living at or below bare
                 subsistence, numbers won't matter.
                 \_ This assumes that the slow reproducers live in segregated
                    political states. In reality there are slow vs. fast within
                    each political entity, especially now with multicultural
                    immigrant states. Therefore in the long run we have the
                    same result.
                    Multicultural states are therefore bad for the species,
                    because they lead to global homogenizing of cultures.
                    Diversity decreases in favor of the fastest-growing
                    domininant subcultures, leaving the population as a
                    whole at greater risk.
                    \_ There is about five assumptions you are making here,
                       none of which you have justified, but I will start
                       with the largest. Do you honestly believe that having
                       a multicultural state in say The Netherlands has any
                       effect on culture in Chad?
                       \_ Not so much, but it affects the culture in the
                          Netherlands. Multiculturalism is happening mostly
                          in countries which have slower birth rates
                          than the countries where the immigrants come from.
                          Large amounts of immigrants from [3rd world highly
                          populated country] have the potential to, in the
                          long run, make the culture in the host country
                          more like the 3rd world country.
                       \_ Not the pp, but jumping in here: actually, yes.
                          If NL hires guest workers from Chad, and those
                          workers come to appreciate the liberal freedoms of
                          the west, they'll export those ideas along with the
                          cash remittals. Consumerism has been shown over and
                          over again to be much more prolific than any
                          religion or ideology, given sufficient access to
                          resources and products.
              \_ Or you can get mass die off of the fast reproducers, which
                 we will probably see in a generation or two.
                 \_ A mass die off caused by what?  Is there some magic
                    disease that only infects people who have more than 2.2
                    children?
                    \_ Famine, disease, warfare, the usual things that
                       cause mass die offs, what else? It is already starting
                       to happen in some of the overpopulated parts of Africa.
        \_ You're begging the question; the societies which treat women
           equally are significantly out-competing the societies which
           don't.  -tom
           \_ Not in population, which is probably the most important metric
              from an evolutionary perspective.
              \_ Not if you're talking about survival of the society
                 (as opposed to the genotype).  -tom
           \_ In what way?  If there was a world wide plague which wiped out
              a few billion people, the less technically dependent people
              would have an advantage in numbers and societal structure in
              the aftermath.
              \_ So why aren't well all cockroaches.  Oh yeah, because pure
              \_ The U.S. is much better equipped to deal with a world wide
                 plague than India or China, partly because we haven't
                 overpopulated in the way those countries have.  If plague
                 with high mortality hits and the U.S. drops down to 100
                 million population and China drops down to 200 million,
                 does that mean China is doing beter?  -tom
              \_ So why aren't we all cockroaches.  Oh yeah, because pure
                 biomass is not what makes something a dominant species.  This
                 is especially true when talking about memes instead of genes.
                 \_ Cockroaches don't (can't?) compete in our ecological
                    sphere. We can eat cockroaches for example. Other humans
                    do compete with us: they use the same resources and inhabit
                    the same gene pool. Domination only matters if the dominant
                    ones are willing to crush the subordinate ones like
                    Nazis, an ideology which has been rejected. Hitler was a
                    Nazi. And thus the discussion is complete.
                 \_ You aren't cockroaches because the cockroaches are the
                    cockroaches.  Who says cockroaches haven't already won
                    from a survival and evolutionary perspective?  Long after
                    your pathetic species has imploded, the taken for granted
                    little cockroaches will still be here skittering about,
                    doing our cockroach things.  We pity you, human.  We've
                    already won, you just don't know it.