morality aside, the men who donate sperm will have an outsize influence on the genetic diversity of our species.
Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale.
also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time:
will humans still have a 50:50 gender ratio of men to women? seems like sperm donation facilitates a much lower number of men required to maintain populations.
will humans still desire relationships with the other gender, or will we be more like bears (men show up for 20 minutes, do the deed, then don't help raise the kids)?
In general 50:50 ratio is observed in most species even with great variability in male reproductive success because the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50.
> the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50
It's the other way around: the selection pressure drives the expected offspring to become equal. The expected offspring for an individual of a certain gender is (total offspring)/(number of individuals of that gender). The fewer individuals of one gender there are, the higher the expected offspring and the greater the selective pressure to produce more offspring of that gender. So the gender ratio is self-stabilizing.
This is really a quite surprising and profound fact, worth pondering.
Naively, one would think that if you have (in some antediluvian setting) village A with 50 men and 50 women, and village B with 10 men and 90 women (and children born with that gender ratio, respectively), that village B could "produce" way more offspring and grow faster.
A naive "group selection" view of evolution might even predict something like that to happen.
But, in village B, there is an incentive, so to speak, to cheat and have boys at a higher ratio, because that would increase expected total number of offspring. So, the gender ratio stabilises around 50/50 - a Nash equilibrium, if you will.
Sort of like the prisoners' dilemma; at the end of the day, the selfish actors will choose to locally optimize.
Btw, this argument about the sex ratio stabilizing at 1:1 is known as Fisher's principle. Fisher made another really interesting observation about how extremely exaggerated male ornamentation, like in peacocks, reaches its equilibrium when the aesthetic advantages from a large, attractive tail becomes offset by the practical costs of being slower, needing more food to produce said tail, being highly visible, etc. This one's called "Fisherian Runaway". These purely aesthetic traits will "run away" all the way up until they becoming detrimental to survival.
The momentary blip of availability of sperm donors, moral acceptance, combined with eventually-to-be-figured-out reduction in overall fertility will probably have zero effect on our evolutionary trajectory.
Possibly not on a smaller scale. The man with the most children was a ruler of Morocco with 888, and there was a guy breaking into sperm banks to replace the sperm of astronauts, neurosurgeons and all the rest with his own. He apparently sired over 600 children.
I don't think an increase in sperm donor activity will necessarily make much of a dent. The growing demands of industrial society and the perceived diminishing value of having a family compared to life's other pleasures won't be so easily resolved through readily available sperm.
On that note though, perhaps relationships might be less common. Who knows, maybe we'll turn into bears.
Got a chuckle out of the Genghis Khan comparison. If I was an archer on a rampart, and I saw one of these guys on horseback dressed in Mongol armor, I'd probably laugh so hard that I'd fall right off the wall.
No action on jobs, no progress on IP infringement or tech transfer, no action on currency manipulation or subsidies, trade deficit remains huge.
And that's without mentioning the TPP or South China Seas or treatment of minorities or Hong Kong and Democracy or basic human rights or Covid.
China is a huge issue. The huge issue of the next decade. Its the only thing I agree with Trumps manifesto about. But on all these fronts, trump has at best achieved nothing and at worse looked weak, weakened the Web of alliances that made China hesitate and make the US look weak and ineffective.
He rolled over on trade, the deficit jobs and ip in his failed little "trade war". He rolled over when he supported Xi over protestors. He's been too busy making hay and fucking up to properly question why zoonotic viruses keep coming out of China so he's rolled over on that too.
Failing to ban tiktok is yet another example of how poorly he's done.
Seriously, reasonable people on all sides agree that China is an issue. No one can say trump has made any progress on China.
this is just marketing before their IPO. The goal with the launch of airbnb.org is to generate press coverage of their brand, which will generate marketing for their IPO, which will hopefully help their IPO be more successfull.
gas stove are just the next target of the global warming alarmists. See san francisco's recent ban on them.
This is just a propaganda piece in order to manufacture the public perception that we should give up the absolute miracle that is the ability to have a safe cooking fire, with adjustable and controllabe heat levels, with the turn of a dial.
climate change cultilsts literally want to throw away the pinacle of 1000s of years of cooking technology and replace it with inferior products.
do you have any evidence that they aren't people? if so, i'd like to see it. actually, i'd like to see any methods of determining if a reddit user is a bot or not.
Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale.
also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time:
will humans still have a 50:50 gender ratio of men to women? seems like sperm donation facilitates a much lower number of men required to maintain populations.
will humans still desire relationships with the other gender, or will we be more like bears (men show up for 20 minutes, do the deed, then don't help raise the kids)?
lots of interesting implications to consider.