

 Meet future woman: shorter, plumper, more fertile  - prat
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17997-meet-future-woman-shorter-plumper-more-fertile.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

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tl
"If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average
woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is
today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter
menopause 10 months later."

This is a non-story. The change they are predicting is unnoticeable 400 years
out.

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req2
Please note that average height a mere hundred fifty years ago was a few
centimetres shorter. The reversal of a trend (admittedly spurred by different
causes) is notable. If you do wish to call a development a "non-story", please
refute it with something more substantial than "the numbers don't look right
to my programmer brain".

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RK
How about: the uncertainties in their extrapolation to 400 years beyond the
present are probably greater than the changes they are predicting.

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req2
Sounds good to me. Thanks.

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bokchoi
And more beautiful!

[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6727710...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6727710.ece)

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fnid
404 error on that link...

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ApolloRising
Link worked for me FYI - Maybe you caught a glitch

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btilly
Not covered by their dataset, but any trait that lessens the effective use of
birth control is definitely being selected for as well.

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naz
The future woman will be Catholic

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Tichy
Could the differences in physique also stem from number of births?

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BrandonM
In addition, couldn't the later menopause be explained as a direct result of
lower oocyte consumption? With 9 months of pregnancy, that's 8 or 9 fewer
ovulation cycles, so wouldn't it makes sense for a woman with an extra child
to have menopause a few months later? I'm no reproductive specialist here, but
that seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

Add in the selection bias (women with later menopause are more likely to have
an unexpected child at a late age), and this really could turn out to be an
experiment with no notable findings.

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req2
Human women have around 400000 oocytes; their consumption is not a limiting
factor.

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BrandonM
Ahh, my mistake then. Thanks for clarifying.

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toadstone
do not want

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icefox
And that is perfectly fine because those who _do want_ will reproduce more and
soon your gene's will be gone.

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randallsquared
Less well represented as a percentage doesn't mean those genes will die out.

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araneae
It does if the trend continues. Yay math.

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randallsquared
With a growing population, a more slowly growing subpopulation can
nevertheless be a smaller and smaller percentage.

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araneae
But the growth would also have to continue. In all real populations,
population size has an upper limit(see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity.>) Of course, it's easy to
forget that if you think about humans because it appears that technology has
increased the carrying capacity for humans to a yet-unknown level. It's true
that humans are going through a population explosion right now, but of course
at some point we'll hit an upper limit.

