I’m not skeptical about the practice existing but about the reasoning for it existing. Carrying around two two-year olds at the same time likely will be hard for a women.
After reading https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ui6mDLdqXkaXiDMJ5/core-pathways-of-aging I want to know whether it’s evolutionary plausible that transposons alone would limit human lifespan to ~100 years. Given that transposons doublicate themselves, natural selection has to somehow prevent them from growing to take up the whole genome.
To understand that I created a model in python. My simulated people have as many chromosomes as real humans do and at the moment 5 genes per chromosome.
There are literature values about average age of hunter gatheres and my simulated hunter gatherers die much earlier. I think that to get the model to work I would actually need to simulate violence between them because that’s important for population sizes. If there’s not enough food people are likely going to kill each other before they starve.
I haven’t yet worked that violence and the social dynamics in my model and don’t really know how to go about that. If someone wants to collaborate and work this into the model I’m happy to do that.
Hey that sounds really cool. Happy to have a chat about it if you want or to give you feedback about it. I am a bioinformatician myself and work on genome evolution (in bacteria though)
I was sceptical at first too, but a few months ago I went to Uluru, where I bought this book (https://www.booktopia.com.au/i-am-uluru-jen-cowley/book/9780648412007.html), where aboriginal people themselves explained how this was a common practice a few decades ago.
I am really interested to know more about the models that you mention, if you can share some more info that would be great!
I’m not skeptical about the practice existing but about the reasoning for it existing. Carrying around two two-year olds at the same time likely will be hard for a women.
After reading https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ui6mDLdqXkaXiDMJ5/core-pathways-of-aging I want to know whether it’s evolutionary plausible that transposons alone would limit human lifespan to ~100 years. Given that transposons doublicate themselves, natural selection has to somehow prevent them from growing to take up the whole genome.
To understand that I created a model in python. My simulated people have as many chromosomes as real humans do and at the moment 5 genes per chromosome.
There are literature values about average age of hunter gatheres and my simulated hunter gatherers die much earlier. I think that to get the model to work I would actually need to simulate violence between them because that’s important for population sizes. If there’s not enough food people are likely going to kill each other before they starve.
I haven’t yet worked that violence and the social dynamics in my model and don’t really know how to go about that. If someone wants to collaborate and work this into the model I’m happy to do that.
Hey that sounds really cool. Happy to have a chat about it if you want or to give you feedback about it. I am a bioinformatician myself and work on genome evolution (in bacteria though)