Recently I had an interesting thought that basically people did almost the same to themselves spontaneously through culture. Which might influence various aspects of human behavior, like social interactions in general, cooperation and means of competition, mate selection. We might have genetic changes that are not maladaptive only in the culture that introduced them. As technology forces culture to evolve it might turn out that huge swaths of human species have their evolutionary fitness suddenly reduced.
Those two are naturally related. If getting pregnant at 10 usually lead to death, then your genes will avoid that if getting pregnant at 10 is common.
However if socially we prevent girls from getting pregnant at 10 then biology can make them go through puberty at 10 without risk, since they will not get pregnant anyway.
Edit: As for the playfulness point, for us humans we punish kids for being playful when they reach 7, so it makes sense that we will evolve to stop playing around at 7 and hence becoming adults already by then. We don't punish pets for being playful though, at least not today.
I'm finding it hard to understand your point or not finding that argument particularly convincing. We can socially change much faster than we can biologically evolve. Meaning, the change in birth age can be heavily influenced by social factors (birth control, resource abundance, requirements for self-sustainment in adulthood) much faster than biology would adapt. We can be extremely socially different than those who lived when it was the norm to be pregnant at 14 while being essentially biologically identical.
Further, we can have multi-modal distributions that undermine the biological assumption. Some groups show much lower birth ages because it's not culturally disadvantageous than other groups. In that context, even if the average age increases, it doesn't mean lower birth age is biologically disadvantageous.
>humans we punish kids for being playful when they reach 7
This needs a citation or at least a definition of what is meant by "playfulness", because I find it hard to believe. I don't know any parents who would want their child to stop playing at 7 years old.
> I don't know any parents who would want their child to stop playing at 7 years old.
Parents don't decide what happens to the kids at school though.
> We can socially change much faster than we can biologically evolve.
If the genes were always there but they died constantly 200 years ago it just meant that we no longer cull those people early, and after a couple of such generations we now have them around. Early puberty is still not common, it just exists, that makes it more likely to be biological than social, if the social changes did it then early puberty would be the norm today rather than a very rare exception.
What's interesting is that rigid culture that forced us to do adult behaviors despite retaining juvenile traits, now when it's getting lifted and replaced with freedom to do whatever you please might leave many individuals maladapted from the evolutionary standpoint to prolonging their genetic line. Which I think is perfectly fine. New generations that are better adapted to the culture of hi-tech freedom will arise from the few that currently accidentally already do the evolutionarily correct thing.
> New generations that are better adapted to the culture of hi-tech freedom will arise from the few that currently accidentally already do the evolutionarily correct thing.
That's one possibility. Another is subcultures which prioritise reproduction over personal freedom will end up demographically dominant in the long-run. Look for example at Kiryas Joel, New York, and similar ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, whose growth shows no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future. Of course, exponential growth can't last forever, but nobody knows what exactly the limit is and when it will be reached – it might not be reached until they've become a very substantial percentage of the population, maybe even the majority.
My elder female dog loves to play and the way in which she plays has only gotten more nuanced over time. She's even adapted to play with me, play with other dogs, play with smaller dogs, and play with puppies.
The basic semantics of her language of play are all the same: she bows, she'll yawn, she barks and does that side-eye glance. Sometimes she'll dance. If she gets really hyped up she'll get the zoomies.
Dogs, from what I've observed, are incredibly intelligent and social animals as they exist today.
A lot of dog play is rehearsing hunting-related behaviours. For example, playing tug-of-war over a toy is practising playing tug-of-war over the kill, which helps to break it up into manageable portions. I wonder if adult domestic dogs are more prone to play because they have limited opportunities to use these natural instincts for real? Maybe in a pack of wild dogs where they are constantly being used for real, they would be less likely to rehearse them
>Recently I had an interesting thought that basically people did almost the same to themselves spontaneously through culture.
I think this already well known in evolutionary biology circles though not through culture.
I don't recollect but it was most likely Robin Dunbar who said it, people ganging together to kill of the most annoying/bullying/maladjusted members.
It's not really about killing maladapted. In each generation of humans more than 10% of them don't pass their genes to next generation. From the point of view of evolution it is as if they got killed young. Mate selection is way stronger mechanism of evolution then plain survival.
I'm sure I did not misunderstand Robin Dunbar, He actually said homicides were common. If a bunch of people hated someone they ganged up and killed him/her, leading to humans being relatively more neotenistic than other primates.
(I used maladapted in a very loose way: especially being maladapted socially, we are not talking about being maladapted phicially and other ways)
