this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
414 points (98.8% liked)

Science Memes

11802 readers
613 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Yes also this diagram:

Gives you a clear sense of how quickly things are turning.

In a geological sense, all of humanity isn't even a heartbeat.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I might not remember it exactly, but I've heard that about 9 out of 10 people of all our history haven't died yet. Which can be neatly misinterpreted as a surprisingly optimistic chance of not dying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

haha yes, statistics is neat :)

Also, what would you do with infinite time?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Probably the same as I do with finite time - stress myself about things I cannot influence. Or perhaps I'd finally have time to learn not to do that - it's a task for several lifetimes, I'm afraid :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Some of my ancestors came to the United States on the Mayflower and that was only like 8 or 9 mothers ago.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

They were discussing converting the AU to 1 'your mom' as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn't sign on

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I am interested in learning about this metric time.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Oh?

"450 mothers ago" is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.

To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

From your link, I rabbitholed to there and found gold

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It didn't suck exactly, time is just so much more prevalent than other units that switching to a new system was even more contentious. Current time is just as arbitrary (although maximizing for maximum number of prime factors is pretty nice, even if it doesn't mesh nicely with other metric units)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Metric really missed out by not being dozenal. SMH

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

The French tried to impose "metric" time way back in the day. Even they learned that was a bad idea and quietly dropped it. The solar system seems to prefer it's base12 time.

I think it maybe helped give rise the the saying: "The French follow no one. And no one follows the French."

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is framed like 80 generations is a small number, but that's huge. Culture and civilization moves so quickly that even 3 generations ago life is barely recognisable. I can't even imagine what life was like 40 generations ago.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Many people don't realize that the amount of change our culture goes through in a lifetime is unfathomable historically. Before the 1800s it took a good decade for news to truly travel around to everyone in a region, and that was considered timely if it happened at all. Farming, hunting, homemaking, war, stayed exactly the same for dozens of years at a time and changes were usually made abruptly due to conflict before stagnating again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

But after enough stagnation, at least we’ll get the great scattering.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah only 2 generations ago, LGBT people were considered mentally ill. 4 generations ago women were considered unfit to vote. 8 generations ago about half the US though it was OK to own slaves. It takes a while for ideas to die out. That's why US elections turn out the way they do.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Humanity isn't progressing uniformly forward like this. Lgbtqia+ people were considered normal part of society by various cultures. Also Magnus Hirschfeld was an advocate for lgbtqia+ people a hundred years ago. Slavery has been transformed into modern slavery because the western world has found other, more concealed ways to force people into labor. Ideas may die out, but they will pop into people's head again and again.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Two steps forward. One step back

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

two steps forward, random.randint(1,4) steps back.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.

[–] silasmariner 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)

So from your article, it seems to say the opposite

The female average age of conception is 23.2, AND this includes a recent rise, so it would be even lower than that when considering older times

Also, it's unclear if the average also accounts for the fact that there is are significantly more child being given birth to in the very recent past, which would skew the number way up

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

Every time I see people argue this I always wanna ask, are you considering that people don't stop having kids after 1 or 2? I'd wager that most women had the majority of their kids around that 23ish mark when you include that lady who had 10 kids from 15 to 35

[–] silasmariner 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I don't think 23 is wildly off from 25, and honestly this is just the first one I found that mentions it, I've seen various different sources for different reasons in the past. But the average is based on genetic mutations, and obviously in any given human it's irrelevant how large a generation is as to how much genetic mutation is contributed by the generation. Like even if there are 8 billion people today, that doesn't imply that you somehow got more generic inheritance from your parents than they did from theirs back when there were 6 billion people or whatever. Judging average to be the average per generation (a reasonable inference given the methodology) the last few years won't make much of a difference in a timescale of 250k years

I can't find the article I vaguely remember from a while ago, here's another random one that has mothers in the bronze age ranging from 16-40ish https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314262257_Bronze_Age_Beginnings_The_Conceptualization_of_Motherhood_in_Prehistoric_Europe although you can't really infer much about averages from that.

Anyway yeah there have been periods in time when average age of mothers was younger, but generally if you look back on a long timescale it's been older than people seem to assume. Seems to be quite common to have the notion that women all had children at 16 or whatever back in the day but not much to really bear that out that I can find.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Enjoy it while it lasts.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (6 children)

That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

As the other commentator says, medieval Europe was mostly early twenties. Studies of stone age remains suggest a first birth age average of 19.5 and contemporary hunter gather societies have a comparable average. Sexual activity generally begins earlier, during adolescence, but the most "reproductively successful" age for beginning childbearing has been shown to be around 18-19. Also, this age at first birth isnt "Average age of a child's mother" as many women would have multiple kids over their life, so the average sibling would have a much older mother at birth than the firstborn.

Its important to remember that puberty has shifted massively since industrialisation, "menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years in western societies". So the post-puberty fecundity peak, that use to happen 17-19, when women are fully grown enough to minimise birth complications, now happens at a disressingly young 13-15. Not only is this a big social yuck for most western societies, but it's reproductively unideal, because of the complications linked to childbirth at that age.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (17 children)

In Western Europe at least back to the early medieval period it was common for anyone who wasn’t nobility to have their first child around 22. The younger you are the more likely you’re going to have serious (fatal, back then) complications. It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

load more comments (17 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Do we have a community for genealogy?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 2^80^ = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›