Big day, wandering thoughts

Today was all about the chores. Painting moldings, varnishing furniture, taking Ollie to the dog park, and raking leaves. Oh those dammned leaves and the blisters I get from raking them! Anyway, while I was mindlessly raking I had some mindless thoughts. I think it might have been something about the play Chris was recently in, "State Fair" and also maybe thoughts about Chris and I trying for a kid.

I was reflecting on how the times have changed basically. It used to be (pre-1960's) that when folks felt a powerful sexual attraction towards one another, the first thoughts they would have were about how quickly they could get married, since sex was hard to have without the resulting children. But then the pill came along and it changed a fundamental, cross-cultural social system that had been in place for tens, maybe hundrteds of thousands of years. Don't get me wrong, I'm not postulating that the institution of marriage per se has been around that long, but I do expect that homo sapiens have always been social animals and that girls and boys who fucked probably stuck with each other long enough to keep the resulting newborns from dying of exposure.

It makes me wonder how the pill is changing the pressures of natural selection in homo sapiens. I have a long list of speculations on that point, the first most obvious one is that we are simply having less kids. It used to be that women would have lots and lots of kids. Sure, I know industrialization had a lot to do with that, but even so, after industrialization and before the pill, people still had a rough time having an affordable amount of children. The pill has helped alot on that score. But now women who may have been gentically prone to not have a viable pregnancy until after a miscarriage or two or three may be selected out of the gene pool more effectively because of the pill. People who were more emotionally attatched to the first person they had sex with may not have as much of a selective advantage as they once did (like the penguin mate-for-life strategy). I wonder if the whole sexual revolution was predicated on the idea that all of our social conventions had no basis in biology. After all, married people do report greater happiness over thier lifespan. If monogamy were purely a social thing, I expect people would feel happier being more promiscuous in a post-pill world. What are the selective consequences of conception being a choice rather than an accident? Will the passion that caused 16 year-olds to marry in 1947 wither and die? Will people begin to evolve strong emotions against contraception rather than towards biologically attractive mates? Or will our drive to procreate shift from being emotional to intellectual? Might this help explain the explosion in autistic children?

Letting my thoughts wander, lots of people have assumed that the correlation between the introduction of the MMR vaccine to increasing rates of autism is causative. I really do wonder if it has more to do with altered selective pressures due to the pill and industrialization as a whole. The rates of autism started jumping in 1972 in this country, and in 1978 in the UK. The pill was introduced in these countries in 1960 and 1961 respectively, but the pill didn't become widespread until later and of course people who took the pill were having thier kids later still. It seems reasonable that we wouldn't begin to see any contribution of the pill to increases in autism until a decade later. Of course, if there is a connection between the pill and autism, it could be simpler than what I've rambled about above. It might just be that autism is more closely correlated to people having kids later in life (which is still a consequence of the pill) as is the case with schizophrenia.

I guess that's enough mind-wandering for tonight. Does anyone else have any speculations on how the pill might be changing the selective pressures on humanity?