no one is having babies mon ami. birth rates are declining.
it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. dying before reproducing ensures that number stays 0, but you can still hit sexual maturity and not reproduce.
plus there is a fertility window -- after 50 most humans, male or female, ain't having kids (a handful of rockstar types whelping babies at 80 notwithstanding).
there is a TON of meaningful pressure in our environment, like the inability to have a living wage reducing how many Gen Z's are marrying and having kids.
> it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born.
Technically, it's about averaging offspring (weighted by your genetic contribution to them) across all of time. If you have 30 children, and all of them starve to death before reproducing, you've reproduced less than your neighbor with the one child and one grandchild.
But that's impossible to calculate, so mostly we just have to work with number of children. This detail, though, is something you might want to keep in mind when looking at reports of "effective population" in the past. Any actual population in the far past who end up being wiped out in the middle past are excluded from the "effective population" that we calculate.
it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. dying before reproducing ensures that number stays 0, but you can still hit sexual maturity and not reproduce.
plus there is a fertility window -- after 50 most humans, male or female, ain't having kids (a handful of rockstar types whelping babies at 80 notwithstanding).
there is a TON of meaningful pressure in our environment, like the inability to have a living wage reducing how many Gen Z's are marrying and having kids.