CharonY

Considering that the context seems to be reproduction, that is a reasonable limitation (i.e. large and small gamete producers). But then it does indeed make no sense to focus on the human species for the rest of the, I am not sure what to call it. Argument?

The issue I have is that our classification of instinctive behaviour is really only specific when we talk about (almost) reflexive behaviour. There are examples in higher vertebrates which at this point (and it took really long to establish that) are considered higher levels of thought and planning. But at a simpler level, often data is missing as we don't have good experimental designs that are not simply variations of the ways we think. This has led to the rise of newer concepts such as that of behavioral flexibility (i.e. some understanding that animal behavior is not necessarily bound by instinctual constraints). A challenge which behavioural scientists are looking at is how identify what an animal understands about its environment how problems are solved using that knowledge.

Probably it has been said already and I missed it, but one way to think about it is that a brain (and potentially similar structures) are necessary but likely not sufficient to whatever one might define as mind.

How does your assumption square with reality? Is every woman constantly pregnant? Is the availability of women limiting the size of human populations? What is the evidence? If a hypothesis does not square up with reality/data one should revise one's assumptions, rather than doubling down. Starting with wrong premises results in wrong conclusions, even if the steps in-between are logical. Asking questions suggests that one is open to new information. What is your response to the information outlined in the posts above? In fact, have you perhaps bothered to google the term "gonochorism" and its evolution? That makes it way easier than trying to describe it the way you continue to do. Information is out there, but one has to seek it out (and be willing to learn).

Generally speaking, a self-limiting disease would not lead itself to a larger outbreak (essentially, if the effective reproduction number is >1. Rather, in a typical infection model the limit is based on proportion of immune to susceptible folks and is parametrized by e.g. infectious period and basic reproduction number). However, a combination of awareness training, testing and educating/isolating folks have managed to reduce the number of new infections (in the above framework it is basically reducing the effective reproduction number). Without that, it would likely have continued to circulate. As I said, the fact that it was going down was seen as a public health success, whereas the fact that it circulated to multiple countries was seen as a failure. The latter also showed us (together with the COVID-19 lessons) how badly most of the world is prepared to contain outbreaks. These numbers seem to to come from reports published (I think New England Journal of Medicine) and were from 2022. This particular outbreak was from clade II mpox, but past infections tended to hit younger folks (especially in Africa). That is another thing that has been discussed, mpox does occasionally break out, mostly in West in Central Africa. The 2022 outbreak also made headlines probably because it not only reached over 100 countries, but epicenters were in the Americas (especially US, but also Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) and Europe, which also explains the age demographics. Since 2022 numbers in those regions went down, but are still lingering at low numbers in Africa and a small surges in 2023 in South Asia and Western Pacific regions. Just to re-affirm that it is not simply gone.

I think there is a distinct difference how the public and how public health are seeing these events. Here is the thing, when mpox started to spread, it was kind of a best case scenario for public health intervention. It is moderately harmful, but not catastrophic, has visible symptoms, diagnostics exists and it requires direct contact to spread. Especially with elevated public health control still ongoing and rapidly deployed monitoring efforts (including wastewater testing), the assumption was that it should have been easy to mount a rapid response. What actually happened is still being discussed. However, what clearly did not happen was an early containment, it ultimately spread across multiple countries and was declared a so-called public health emergency of international concern in 2022. The case numbers went down in 2023 and the emergency ended, and some consider that an success (around 100k infections in more than 100 countries). But critics highlight the issue that the most effective control, early containment, failed utterly, and that just in the wake of the lessons from COVID-19, casting doubts on future outbreak control efforts with more dangerous infections.

That is not how nature works. Nature does not follow any ideals or thinks ahead. Whatever works, works. If it leads to reproductive success it will stick around. If it doesn't, it vanishes. You cannot think of nature like a planning entity and expect to be scientific about it.

If that was the case, why is hermaphroditism not the dominant reproductive strategy?

I think the discussion has veered off way into the speculation area. Several points are at best misconceptions. For example: This is inaccurate as certain fish species are hermaphrodites (and obviously vertebrates). This is not how evolution works. Whatever has reproductive success will exist. A predominance of gonochorism in certain groups of organisms suggests that either a) it leads to higher reproductive success than hermaphroditism (under the given environmental conditions) or perhaps that b) there are developmental constraints which limits the conversion from one system to another. Explanations for both have been proposed in a previous post.

I think you are looking at the wrong cause- the combination of rising cost of living plus the pandemic pause has caused a lot of folks to re-evaluate their job situation. Quite a few people have quite (at least for a while) and there is significant amount of folks who are looking for other (better) jobs. Following the the pandemic effect, there was a rapid drop in unemployment, continuing a trend start around 2010 and is at its lowest since the 90s. So in that regard it is small wonder that badly paid position are hard to fill. This effect is also seen in sectors such as academia where postdocs were easy to get in the past, but now it is difficult. Those folks are not typically CERB recipients, either. So the handout is really a narrative without really any evidence (and ignoring much stronger factors). I will also add that I am also teetering at getting annoyed by younglings, which basically just means that I am getting old. But what I have been hearing from students is that increased cost of living basically means that such work is not necessarily beneath them (though for the more urbanized students it might be), but that they would not do it for minimum wage. The argument is that given the current cost of living, other work is a better use of their time. There is simply not a huge segment of folks that would like to take minimum wage jobs (regardless of CERB or not) and for quite some time this has been the domain of immigrants almost everywhere in the world. But with Canada's increase in cost of living, and the rising resentment against immigration (some more, some less justified), this results in a combination of unfilled lower-paid jobs but also record employment rates. I will also add yet another issue to the pile: service jobs are going to be hit the hardest. Generally speaking, Canada has a productivity problem, but certain jobs that are hard to automate, such as faculty but also especially small restaurants, always had the challenge of disproportionately rising salaries. This is one of the reasons why many small restaurants are family operations, for example. With increasing outward pressure (high food and housing prices), these business are unable to keep up with salary demands. You are quite correct. Been in Canada for quite a while- I have been living and working in quite a few countries by now. Also, I have never been an American. I just lived there for a while. And I often do find it curious, if unsurprising, if Americans and Canadians share similar arguments, even with different systems (I guess the cultural impact of USA shows).

This is not how this works. You cannot simply claim something like: While the authors state that: Not only is this misquoting the paper, but it is actually drawing the opposite conclusion. Misunderstanding, or even worse, misrepresentation of citations is failure of science 101. So specifically for the population outlined in OP there are no such conclusions. Again, this is science 101, we do not jump to conclusions by cherry-picking bits and pieces from different papers. The main gist of Pontzer's work is fundamentally that energy expenditure remains constant and that (as mentioned before) PA does not increase expenditure by much. So the key element here is really that energy consumption is the key factor in terms of obesity (or lack thereof). The body has a lot of capabilities to regulate expenditure and it even factors such as stress can increase the expenditure. Now if you look at other papers from the same author in follow-up papers on Hadza populations (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.12785) there are several hypotheses:

In other words, it is your claim, not that of the authors. Read the discussion, they come to a different conclusion.

It was a common internet thingy. On IRC you would need to provide a unique nickname and the command for it is nick. Might have other origins, too.

This is a trend in many countries. I believe in the past voting differences were mostly split along factors such as age and education, but increasingly in the young segment there is a split between men and women. With young men increasingly favoring autocrats.

I believe other countries, including the US had similar initiatives. Also the benefits were for a total of something like 7 months, IIRC, so it would be surprising to have long-term impact on employment several years later. There are a range of issues why folks cannot find workers, and we actually see a reflection of it in academia, but it certainly was not due to CERB. There is a general change coming (not all of it good) and I think the older generation (up and including mine) is going to be caught up in it.