A common practice (but not universal) in traditional societies is that when twins are born, one of them is killed (sometimes being buried alive), because it is not possible for the mother to rear both children. Most traditional societies can be classified as hunter-gatherers and food is a scarce resource for them.
It’s unclear to me whether that’s true. I think the main point why it’s hard for a mother to rear multiple children at the same time is that for a hunter gather that requires carrying around multiple people.
Hunter gatherer populations don’t grow to the point where starvation is the primary means of preventing population growth. That would create more childhood mortality then we are seeing. (I did run computer models and starvation as limit for populations just doesn’t work out to get hunter gatherers to become as old as they become)
I’m not skeptical about the practice existing but about the reasoning for it existing. Carrying around two two-year olds at the same time likely will be hard for a women.
After reading https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ui6mDLdqXkaXiDMJ5/core-pathways-of-aging I want to know whether it’s evolutionary plausible that transposons alone would limit human lifespan to ~100 years. Given that transposons doublicate themselves, natural selection has to somehow prevent them from growing to take up the whole genome.
To understand that I created a model in python. My simulated people have as many chromosomes as real humans do and at the moment 5 genes per chromosome.
There are literature values about average age of hunter gatheres and my simulated hunter gatherers die much earlier. I think that to get the model to work I would actually need to simulate violence between them because that’s important for population sizes. If there’s not enough food people are likely going to kill each other before they starve.
I haven’t yet worked that violence and the social dynamics in my model and don’t really know how to go about that. If someone wants to collaborate and work this into the model I’m happy to do that.
Hey that sounds really cool. Happy to have a chat about it if you want or to give you feedback about it. I am a bioinformatician myself and work on genome evolution (in bacteria though)
It’s unclear to me whether that’s true. I think the main point why it’s hard for a mother to rear multiple children at the same time is that for a hunter gather that requires carrying around multiple people.
Hunter gatherer populations don’t grow to the point where starvation is the primary means of preventing population growth. That would create more childhood mortality then we are seeing. (I did run computer models and starvation as limit for populations just doesn’t work out to get hunter gatherers to become as old as they become)
I was sceptical at first too, but a few months ago I went to Uluru, where I bought this book (https://www.booktopia.com.au/i-am-uluru-jen-cowley/book/9780648412007.html), where aboriginal people themselves explained how this was a common practice a few decades ago.
I am really interested to know more about the models that you mention, if you can share some more info that would be great!
I’m not skeptical about the practice existing but about the reasoning for it existing. Carrying around two two-year olds at the same time likely will be hard for a women.
After reading https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ui6mDLdqXkaXiDMJ5/core-pathways-of-aging I want to know whether it’s evolutionary plausible that transposons alone would limit human lifespan to ~100 years. Given that transposons doublicate themselves, natural selection has to somehow prevent them from growing to take up the whole genome.
To understand that I created a model in python. My simulated people have as many chromosomes as real humans do and at the moment 5 genes per chromosome.
There are literature values about average age of hunter gatheres and my simulated hunter gatherers die much earlier. I think that to get the model to work I would actually need to simulate violence between them because that’s important for population sizes. If there’s not enough food people are likely going to kill each other before they starve.
I haven’t yet worked that violence and the social dynamics in my model and don’t really know how to go about that. If someone wants to collaborate and work this into the model I’m happy to do that.
Hey that sounds really cool. Happy to have a chat about it if you want or to give you feedback about it. I am a bioinformatician myself and work on genome evolution (in bacteria though)