Posted on 06/07/2012 9:30:08 AM PDT by neverdem
You have an interesting theory, but according to biologists neither strategy is superior. If so, how do they account for human dominance of the planet?
They don’t. My opinion, based on the evidence, is this, and I hold it very strongly.
r-strategists were first characterized because scientists wanted to understand invasive species, and why they exploded in number in a new environment, while other species would multiply more slowly. It turns out invasive species followed the r-strategy, and as a result, they could multiply incredibly fast - but only in times of ease, and free resource availability. And they didn’t produce the kind of evolutionary complexity and fitness which would allow them to take over harsher, more fitness-requiring environments.
K-s produce fitness, due to their embrace of competition, but they multiply slower, so they don’t spread as well.
The advantage humans had was our pre-Liberal r’s took off when our home territory overpopulated, and turned K. They spread into every area where resources were freely available, and the environment didn’t require high fitness. They were a human version of an invasive species, and their r-strategy fueled their spread.
As the r’s exhausted each new areas’ resources, things got competitive and they fled, and behind them emerged the K’s who then competed with each other for resources, and established fitter populations which multiplied slower, more in harmony with the environment. As the whole planet fell to us, fitter, more able K’s also spread into, and colonized harsher environments, which required higher levels of fitness to survive.
Humans gained superiority because we combined the invasive species qualities of r at the edge of our spread, with the fitness of K as we acquired a firm foot hold in each new territory. Once established worldwide, our K-natures embraced competition, and evolved us to this state, with the fittest periodically spreading out and taking land over from the less adapted, worldwide.
The main advantage of my work to politics is that Liberals can’t dispute it. Liberalism embraces every value of “r” and Conservatism embraces every value of “K.” And telling everyone that freaks Liberals out, since they can’t refute it.
True liberals do not reproduce rapidly. The slugs who leach off of society and vote for liberals to keep the free stuff coming DO reproduce rapidly. But those are not true liberals. They are just barely conscious marginally useful bags of meat who do not really have any agenda that extends beyond next week’s paycheck.
Dude ... Seriesly?
>This makes me wonder. Is there any fool proof way to avoid catching a sexually transmitted disease?<
Good thing rape is illegal...
"But on arriving at the jail, the officers did not find them there. So they went back and reported, “We found the jail securely locked, with the guards standing at the doors; but when we opened them, we found no one inside.”" - Acts 5:22-23
“True liberals do not reproduce rapidly. “
Yes, but why do true Liberals reproduce more slowly? Less mating? Less promiscuity? Some K-aspect to their nature? Nope, it’s birth control and abortion.
GSS and gallup data show Libs are more likely to be more promiscuous and support single parenting and out of wedlock births more. In a state of nature that would increase birth rates. It still will, among the more impulsive, less intelligent, less responsible, and less conscientious, who don’t stick to a birth control regime.
But the intelligent and conscientious Liberal’s birth rates are cut because one of the r-strategy’s traits is to seek to minimize parental investment. In nature, where sex always leads to preganncy, this would raise reproductive rates, because you spend less on each child, and can therfore produce more total children.
Modern Liberals, though can use birth control and abortion to eliminate parental investment. And they do. Abortion has killed 50 million, who were probably mostly Lib offspring.
Add in a hundred million or two hundred million, or more whose conception was prevented through birth control, and you would have higher Lib birth rates. Imagine how these urges to promiscuity and low-investment rearing played in primitive times, before we even were conscious of the fact that sex made babies, and you would have even more births.
Of course, my point is not that Libs are “r” (though you can argue that). If you want to extrapolate, you can een argue that Libs probably descended from r’s, and you would probably be right, since they have all the urges.
But my core observation, which is wholly inarguable, is that Liberalism as an ideology embodies every “r” trait, even if the minimizing parental investment trait cuts birthrates among some Liberals, when combined with modern technology. And this is why issues of family intertwine as they do with issues of economics, issues of foreign policy, and issues of personal freedom.
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