Given the ability to medically remove, store, and artificially inseminate eggs, current technologies make it possible for a woman to produce many more children than the historical limit of ~50 (i.e. one every 9 months for a woman’s entire reproductive years), and closer to the limit (note that each woman produces 100,000s of eggs).
I don’t have a worked out plan, but I could see a woman removing most of her eggs, somehow causing many other women to use her eggs to have children (whether it’s by finding infertile women, or paying people, or showing that the eggs would be healthier than others’), and having many more children than historically possible.
I suspect many women could have 50-100 children this way, and that peak women could have 10,000s of children this way, closer to the male model of reproduction.
I’d be interested to know the maximum number of children any woman has had in history, and also since the invention of this sort of medical technology.
I imagine that such a world would have a market (and class system) based around being able to get your eggs born. There are services where a different woman will have your children, but I think the maximizer world would look more like poor women primarily being paid to have children (and being pregnant >50% of their lives) and rich women primarily paying to have children (and having 1000s of children born).
I think the notion that people are adaptation-executors, who like lots of things a little bit in context-relevant situations, predicts our world more than the model of fitness-maximizers, who would jump on this medical technology and aim to have 100,000s of children soon after it was built.
I also suspect that population would skyrocket relative to the current numbers (e.g. be 10-1000x the current size). Perhaps efforts to colonize Mars would have been sustained during the 20th century, as this planet would have been more obviously overflowing, though probably we would just be using way more of the surface of the Earth for living on.
I think the notion that people are adaptation-executors, who like lots of things a little bit in context-relevant situations, predicts our world more than the model of fitness-maximizers, who would jump on this medical technology and aim to have 100,000s of children soon after it was built.
I think this skips the actual social trade-offs of the strategy you outline above:
The likely back lash in society against any woman who tries this is very high. Any given rich woman would have to find surrogate women who are willing to accept the money and avoid being the target of social condemnation or punitive measures of the law. It’s a high risk / high reward strategy that also needs to keep paying off long after she is dead, as her children might be shunned or lose massive social capital as well. If you consider people’s response to eugenics or gene editing of human babies, then you can imagine the backlash if a woman actually paid surrogates at scale. It’s not clear to me that the strategy you outline above is actually all that viable for the vast majority of rich women.
I’d argue some of are IGF maximizers for the hand that we have been dealt, which includes our emotional response, intelligence, and other traits. Many of us have things like fear-responses to heavily hard-wired that no matter what we recognize as the optimal response, we can’t actually physically execute it.
I realize item 2 points to a difference in how we might define an optimizer, but it’s worth disambiguating this. I suspect claiming no humans are IGF maximizers or some humans are IGF maximizers might come down to the definition of maximizer that one uses. And thus might explain the pushback that Nate runs in to for a claim he finds self-evident.
Given the ability to medically remove, store, and artificially inseminate eggs, current technologies make it possible for a woman to produce many more children than the historical limit of ~50 (i.e. one every 9 months for a woman’s entire reproductive years), and closer to the limit (note that each woman produces 100,000s of eggs).
I don’t have a worked out plan, but I could see a woman removing most of her eggs, somehow causing many other women to use her eggs to have children (whether it’s by finding infertile women, or paying people, or showing that the eggs would be healthier than others’), and having many more children than historically possible.
I suspect many women could have 50-100 children this way, and that peak women could have 10,000s of children this way, closer to the male model of reproduction.
I’d be interested to know the maximum number of children any woman has had in history, and also since the invention of this sort of medical technology.
I imagine that such a world would have a market (and class system) based around being able to get your eggs born. There are services where a different woman will have your children, but I think the maximizer world would look more like poor women primarily being paid to have children (and being pregnant >50% of their lives) and rich women primarily paying to have children (and having 1000s of children born).
I think the notion that people are adaptation-executors, who like lots of things a little bit in context-relevant situations, predicts our world more than the model of fitness-maximizers, who would jump on this medical technology and aim to have 100,000s of children soon after it was built.
I also suspect that population would skyrocket relative to the current numbers (e.g. be 10-1000x the current size). Perhaps efforts to colonize Mars would have been sustained during the 20th century, as this planet would have been more obviously overflowing, though probably we would just be using way more of the surface of the Earth for living on.
I think this skips the actual social trade-offs of the strategy you outline above:
The likely back lash in society against any woman who tries this is very high. Any given rich woman would have to find surrogate women who are willing to accept the money and avoid being the target of social condemnation or punitive measures of the law. It’s a high risk / high reward strategy that also needs to keep paying off long after she is dead, as her children might be shunned or lose massive social capital as well. If you consider people’s response to eugenics or gene editing of human babies, then you can imagine the backlash if a woman actually paid surrogates at scale. It’s not clear to me that the strategy you outline above is actually all that viable for the vast majority of rich women.
I’d argue some of are IGF maximizers for the hand that we have been dealt, which includes our emotional response, intelligence, and other traits. Many of us have things like fear-responses to heavily hard-wired that no matter what we recognize as the optimal response, we can’t actually physically execute it.
I realize item 2 points to a difference in how we might define an optimizer, but it’s worth disambiguating this. I suspect claiming no humans are IGF maximizers or some humans are IGF maximizers might come down to the definition of maximizer that one uses. And thus might explain the pushback that Nate runs in to for a claim he finds self-evident.