I think that how long we live influences our decision to delay having children. If we live to 40 we may decide it’s time to have children as soon as it is biologically possible, this was we can raise them and perhaps see our grandchildren. But with longer lifespans it looks attractive on the surface to delay children and enjoy a carefree adulthood longer, but that incurs problems that are not obvious and can only be seen with the light of scriptures:
God’s order to humans is be fruitful and multiply, this single commandment was laid down right after God made man and woman (Gen 1:28). Unless A&E violated that single commandment there would be no need for a second, therefore the fruit (outcome) of the tree is the same as the violation of be fruitful and multiply.
The temptation of Eve was “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” Gen 3:6. Which fits today with delaying children/contraception/abortion. If woman does not have children they can get a job (good for providing food), stay in school, go to college (gain wisdom), be attractive to the opposite sex, play the field (pleasing to the eye).
We can see the outcome of Eve’s decision, namely Cain, unquestionably a troubled child, who committed the first murder, which is not good for a long life of a species. Very possibly Cain came about spiritually and was held in Sheol (underground) and tormented till finally A&E decided to have children. Also Cain became a restless wanderer.
Today we lengthen, not shorten, the period that we go before reproducing, violating the commandment that God first gave us, and reap death and curses, which manifests itself genetic and other disorders (generational curses), and IMHO would produce a society which is in decay, actually apparently accelerating adaptation, not reducing it as it is man operating outside the will of God and having to deal with increasing effects of generational curses and devote more resources to overcome them, which is part of our adaptation, though not genetic evolution the use of drugs to help are efforts to adapt.
Thank you for your answer. As I understand it, this seems to only apply to humans, as it involves, human actions, sin and following (or not) God’s commandments.
How does this apply to other forms of life on this planet, which do not, as I understand it, have an ability to believe, and whose motivations are largely instinctive?
I wouldn’t say it’s as instinctive as it appears, but I believe that animals are spiritually locked into certain patterns and social structures. As we use animals to study, God also uses them to show us different social structures that exist in humanity. As such there is a vast difference between one kind of animal and another. In animals we can see structures where the old are forced out on their own, or a member, even a leader of a ‘pack’. Others where both genders share the child raising effort, others where one gender does most/all, others where the offspring are totally on their own. Others where reproduction of the colony is controlled by a single female and examples where a single male is the father of a entire colony. We can also look at the structures that mimic the natural when man gets involved in making the same structure, such as we may find in dog breeders.
So the effects of having a older (post reproduction) generation varies depending on the kind of animal. For varying of the animal kind, what you may call evolution, it would appear like shorter generations and environmental stressors should cause faster adaptations, but spiritually the opposite may happen, going further from the original design may be pushing that animal out of the island of stability and eventually to extinction or at least need human intervention.
(My underlining) Plenty of people will dispute that selection is gene-based. I won’t dismiss it altogether but I feel the standard hasn’t been met for proving it.
And the rest of your argument seems faulty to me because it appears to be based on the idea that selection can somehow globally recognize the overall effects of a gene on a population. Individual organisms reproduce, or don’t (and yes I’m aware of group selection, colony species, etc.) And they neither know or care what this will do to their descendents, the rest of their species, or their environment. Why should any organism die just to “give it’s descendents room”? How could selection recognize this? And if an organism’s descendents can’t outcompete it, why should it die for them anyway?
Populations expand to the limits of their food supply anyway, so immortal individuals aren’t going to make much of a difference anyway.
You have to remember that, although selection is a blind process, it can lead to results that look a whole lot like strategy or design in hindsight. Yes, critter X has no way of knowing that his early demise will improve his descendants’ success, but if he happens to die a little younger because of some mutation(s) and his offspring are better off because of it, many of them are going to have the same trait, and it will begin to predominate in the population.
At this point, when things are working out well for critters Y, Z, AA, BB, and their great-great grandcritters, the human mind tends to jump to the conclusion that critter X was pretty clever indeed, when, in fact, concern for his hypothetical descendants had nothing to do with it.
When I was taking an anthropology-senescence class several years ago I read a paper (or a few, it’s hard to say after reading 200+ papers for one class) about Why Is There Senescence. It said, as far as I can remember,
-Organisms have a limited amount of energy. This energy can be put toward self-maintenance or reproduction in varying proportions.
-Young organisms, pre-pubescent, put all their energy toward self-maintenance, but post-puberty they will put more and more into reproduction, hence the aging and deterioration over time.
-The reason they put some toward reproduction instead of all toward self-maintenance, is due to accident/predation-deaths. With enough self-maintenance a cell can generally fix itself of disease, but you can’t heal yourself out of being eaten or falling down a cliff or being near a volcano or whatever.
-Therefore, over time, organisms will become more likely to have died (not more likely each year of course) due to these non-healable deaths. Well, if you have a 99.9% chance of having died after 30 years due to accident or predation alone, why bother with trying to be fully self-maintaining for 31 years? Put that 0.1% toward reproduction, it’ll help slightly more.
-Eventually the ratio between energy toward maintenance and energy toward reproduction balances itself through ‘experiments’ where they get the maximal benefit between likelihood of death, and offspring to carry the organism’s genes post-death.
The article(s) I read involved massive mathematical models as well, which according to the article(s) predicted almost spot on the best reproductive/lifespan ratios for quite a few mammals tested from the mice-type high reproducers (extreme risk of early death so short lifespan before old age kicks in, many offspring) to the elephantine-type high maintainers (low risk of death so long lifespan before old age kicks in, few offspring).
You know, the old guy who smites uppity women who look over their shoulder and plays practical jokes on pharaohs. That guy.
I don’t know I’d put a lot of faith into the infallibility of “spiritually locked into certain patterns and social structures”; after all, this is also the guy who ran waste disposal channel right next to the orchard, and turned the retina backwards on vertebrates (though he did the direction right on cetaceans, so clearly he has an engineering revision process).
Say you did have some sort of gene that enabled your body to self-repair, so you’d be able to reproduce and live for 1000 years. All of your descendants will have this gene as well. This gene costs you a little extra energy than your brethren, but whatever, times are good. You have lots of children, and they have lots of children, and sooner or later you’ve out-expanded your resources and have to scale back on having so many kids. Instead of having generations every ~20 years like everyone else, your society needs to have generations of ~100 years. Whatever, times are still ok.
Now, 900 years later, the climate starts to slowly change, or a new foreign disease starts cropping up. Your society is now spending extra energy for this self-repair gene, so lots of people are dying off. Not only that, but your great-great-great-great grandkids are still competing with your children and yourself for resources. There haven’t really been a whole lot of generations to be able to adequately develop a mutation to fight the climate change or the disease, so even more people start dying off. The hardship eventually wipes out almost everyone, and whoever is left gets invaded by a band of outsiders that only live to ~60, but have had 45 successive generations to evolve, while you were *still *putting out your first one. Whatever trace of your lineage gets slowly diluted until nothing is left.