Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Maybe Slightly More Fertile?

Having blue/green eyes, maybe this means I'm slightly more kid-producing than someone with no blue whatsoever?

The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids.

3 comments:

amar rama said...

heh, I always get a kick of correlation/causation syndromes.
That is a pretty broad assertion that blue eyes = having more kids (esp. since what is implies is non blue eyes is lesser kids). I would love to see how the population growth of Asians and the far east trended in the past 10K years.

In either case your fertility factor is legendary and the society does not need this study to be convinced ;-)

amar rama said...

Related article

Unknown said...

Yeah, I'd think that even if you could prove that blue eyes == greater fertility, such effects would be massively dwarfed by societal effects (agricultural societies having more kids to work the fields, poor (and particularly uneducated) societies having many kids, highly developed societies (especially one with low immigration rates from the aforementioned societies) with large costs to raise each child having few kids, etc..).