Hmm, 6 orders of magnitude. If you are limiting fatherhood to conception that would be about 5 minutes for the man; times 1,000,000 then, 5,000,000 for the woman equals 3472 days, or 9.5 years. Not a bad approximation, except that that obviously isn’t the absolute minimum the woman could invest, as she could give it up for adoption after birth, or about 432,000 minutes, only 5 orders of magnitude larger than the father.
Shouldn’t you be including recovery time in that minimum?
Then you should also exclude the first few months, when (from what I’ve seen) aren’t that bad.
Also, why focus on the minimum rather than the typical in practice
Because that’s what my awesomeness-o-meter (which is what started this subthread) seems to respond to, especially given that Pragmatist put it in terms of sperm.
Let’s call it 4*10^5 minutes, then.
My response was to what is ‘minimal obligatory’—assuming the obligation is placed by biology, rather than law or honor or reason. Over a lifetime of care, the differences vary more by couple than gender, I’d expect.
I had pulled a figure out of my ass, and then divided the normal duration of a pregnancy by it to see whether the result was reasonable, but I must have goofed with the maths because I had got 23 minutes.¹ (Fixed.)
Yes, a man can take shorter than that to just ejaculate, but then again it’s not like pregnancy completely prevents you from working throughout its duration.
Hmm, 6 orders of magnitude. If you are limiting fatherhood to conception that would be about 5 minutes for the man; times 1,000,000 then, 5,000,000 for the woman equals 3472 days, or 9.5 years. Not a bad approximation, except that that obviously isn’t the absolute minimum the woman could invest, as she could give it up for adoption after birth, or about 432,000 minutes, only 5 orders of magnitude larger than the father.
Shouldn’t you be including recovery time in that minimum?
Also, why focus on the minimum rather than the typical in practice or father’s investment which is most likely to lead to grandchildren?
Then you should also exclude the first few months, when (from what I’ve seen) aren’t that bad.
Because that’s what my awesomeness-o-meter (which is what started this subthread) seems to respond to, especially given that Pragmatist put it in terms of sperm.
Let’s call it 4*10^5 minutes, then. My response was to what is ‘minimal obligatory’—assuming the obligation is placed by biology, rather than law or honor or reason. Over a lifetime of care, the differences vary more by couple than gender, I’d expect.
I had pulled a figure out of my ass, and then divided the normal duration of a pregnancy by it to see whether the result was reasonable, but I must have goofed with the maths because I had got 23 minutes.¹ (Fixed.)
Yes, a man can take shorter than that to just ejaculate, but then again it’s not like pregnancy completely prevents you from working throughout its duration.
I actually had no idea how it would end up before I did the math. You must have read the Fermi post*.
*(Not to imply you couldn’t have read about it beforehand; just a figure of speech)
I have, but IIRC I hadn’t when I wrote that comment.