Emil O W Kirkegaard

Not sure if anyone's checked for the concurrent obesity epidemic soaking up testosterone (and even in low-BMI, the diet that would cause obesity otherwise).

>Adjustment for a concurrent secular increase in body mass index reduced the observed cohort/period-related changes in testosterone, which no longer were significant. Good to know the secular decline in androgen levels is merely caused by fat people, at least.

But the interesting thing is fertility is *declining* with greater food availability. One would think evolution would do sharply the opposite: when the sun shines make humans.

Perhaps the evolution of cryptic ovulation in humans may have arisen in part due to a tendency for increasingly intelligent animals to *avoid* costly, risky, and painful reproduction-- i.e. hiding the risk not only from others but also from themselves.

https://twitter.com/locus_of_ctrl/status/1020980252426637313 …

based onhttps://twitter.com/evolving_moloch/status/1020568958301114368 …

Ah, so interposing extended family demands for progeny as a second stage between the development of cryptic ovulation and the development of ideologically-pronatal organized religion. Plausible. Interesting that all three tend to be deemed burdensome and aversive.

It's even worse imo. Newson uses network modeling (his other paper, didn't get there yet) to show that pro-natalism needs constant reinforcement through kin networks. In urban-type networks (wide, non-kin-based), "anti-natalist" memes arise which drive civilization to collapse

Plausible. I am skeptical about 'collapse,' though, since any new variation that incentivizes higher TFR will be amplified against the background of a slowly shrinking, 'cooling' societal context. Given hundreds of millions of people, development thereof is nearly inevitable.