Issues like these reflects an evolutionary blind spot: selective pressure drops off after reproductive age, allowing defects like prostate dysfunction to persist. It's the same reason late-onset neurological diseases remain prevalent.
If it wasn’t in the past, I imagine it will be in the future with how common two working parents is now. We want more kids but we are getting zero grandparent help
You only have to live to your 40s to become a grandparent in natural conditions, and your chances of living to at least your 50s have always been pretty good conditional on living long enough to reproduce at all.
Medieval burial grounds, when examined by anthropologists, do contain some people over 60, but the majority of adults buried there died earlier, typically in the 45-55 bracket.
It wasn't just disease, but also wars and famines. And in women, deaths during childbirth, which cluster in the 20-35 bracket.
Cardinals of the Church, who led peaceful lives, didn't give birth and never went hungry, lived into their late 60s and early 70s even during the Middle Ages. But an average peasant wouldn't.
Probably improved more with lots of siblings from a wide age range. The bigger siblings would do productive work, the younger would take care of the little ones.
The problem there is with your definition of grandfather. Currently, the age for a grandfather in developed countries is 55+. For most of humanity's history, if there were grandfathers, they would barely make it to 55 years of age.
I know you're joking, but it's women that get the short end of the stick in media.
Men are (within reason) considered handsome in media even in old age. Wrinkles and gray hair can be seen as sexy (again, within reason), but only in men.
Women are discarded or relegated to sexless granny roles (except maybe for comedic purposes, where sexuality is the butt of a joke). Actresses are replaced by younger women because they are not sexy enough even when their male equivalents aren't (looking at you, Top Gun: Maverick).
I'm not saying there aren't exceptions in particular movies that deal with this topic; I'm talking about the general trend.
When you ask men who they are attracted to, at least on the surface, it’s always young women. I’m pretty sure the OkCupid stats showed that girls age 20 give or take were peak attractiveness. Reality is of course that guys will “work for food” or attention.
Women are different. It ranges — alot, and is more about EQ and scarcity. If you have a moderate baseline level of physical attractiveness, moderately fit (Jon two miles let’s say), not an asshole, and not living with mom, a 40-60 year old guy is a hot commodity.
If you’ve never stumbled across the older OkCupid blog posts or Christian Rudder’s book (Dataclysm[1]) then I can’t recommend them enough. Super interesting content delivered by a smart and engaging writer
Agreed, but once you reach 60 (like Cruise and McGillis) you're well beyond the forces of natural selection and into the unnatural realm that our longer lives have granted us. Both of these actors are outcompeted in real life by younger people (sex/reproduction wise) yet one of them is still able to secure billing in "sexy roles" and the other isn't... and this is just one example.
This could be natural selection acting against us, but since modern society is artificial anyway, why not make an effort to combat it?
> you're well beyond the forces of natural selection
Are you? By all appearances this is a direct result of it. Visual indicators of age haven't been selected against in and of themselves as strongly with regards to men but a great many related things have been.
Arguably your specific example might constitute an edge case that historically didn't occur with enough frequency to be selected against. Seems like little more than a curiosity to me.
> Are you? By all appearances this is a direct result of it.
This is a result of it when it no longer matters, in adults who no longer matter for breeding purposes. When natural selection acts on humans of age 60+, it's mostly irrelevant. There's nothing to select, they've already done their part. It's just that natural selection is blind and doesn't "know" when to stop -- but we humans know better (this is what I meant later by combat/countering it).
> Arguably your specific example might constitute an edge case that historically didn't occur with enough frequency to be selected against. Seems like little more than a curiosity to me.
Why would it be selected against? All else being equal, natural selection wouldn't exert any particular pressure on old people after they've passed their genes. It's "blind" to them. It certainly doesn't know anything about being media star material! ;)
But it's not an "edge case" for modern humans, especially as we live longer and keep working well into our later years. Modern society doesn't always resemble what the forces of natural selection act upon anyway.
> What are you arguing for here?
The same as the thread starter, only with a focus on women since they get the short end of the stick in this aspect (in media).
Except this seems like a direct result of natural selection, because older men can still pass on their genes. Older women can not as readily pass them on.
> modern humans and our society don't reflect natural selection anyway; many things we do are "unnatural".
That's simply not true. Don't get hung up on the word "natural". It's nothing more than the result of a biased random walk (at least until the eugenicists get involved, at which point it goes meta).
Some of the things selected for can get pretty abstract. Cooperative behavior for example. Despite often being to the short term detriment of the individual it is observed in the wild.
I don't think it's false. The forces at play in modern society are no longer (alone) those of natural selection. This has been remarked on by people like Stephen Jay Gould. Society/culture evolves along different (faster) lines. We do a lot that makes no sense from the perspective of natural selection.
Yes, that was exactly my point. The edge case is the potential for the selected behavior to work against reproductive fitness - someone young finding someone old attractive even though they aren't likely to get good offspring out of it.
I'm still not clear what you're arguing for. It isn't media giving women the short end of the stick, it's biology. What exactly are you proposing be done about it? I'm not even clear why it's a problem aside from the general desire that scientific advancement should eventually cure us of age related phenomena entirely.
Men season, while women age - The media's portrayal of desirability of old people is a reflection of societal preferences, not the other way around.
Men become wiser, skilled, kinder, more patient and often better providers. Women tend to become argumentative, quarrelsome, bitter (especially those who date often) and rewarded for it. They also tend to dissociate love from sex and manipulate one for the other.
There would appear to be two poles of explanation - that either the media is reflecting desires and not influencing it, or that the media is influencing desires and not reflecting them - or somewhere in-between.
The reflection of biological reality appears easier to justify: that men remain fertile for longer, that the attractive qualities that women care about most (e.g. wealth and personality) tend to improve with age; and that a women's attractiveness is most tied to her skin, which we all know shows aging the most on the body, and is a sign of her reproductive health or ability.
I'm not sure what the argument for the media being able to influence males to the extent suggested would be? Older men were marrying younger women before the printing press, so where did this pressure originate? And what is its mechanism of action?
I'm not saying media is influencing this; this preference clearly showed before media! The media here clearly reflects a preexisting preference, but in my opinion, it also makes the world worse for old people, especially women and actresses.
I'm saying media could be changed from this tendency, since this preference is less relevant in modern society and it hurts actresses. Media is a human construct that can be adapted to new needs, it's not a tool of natural selection!
Changing media wouldn't change the sexual preferences of men, and nowhere am I arguing this. It's like inclusivity in media -- is it ever going to eradicate racism? No, but it will make the world a tiny bit fairer.
I agree that falling back on "it's natural" can be a poor excuse, mainly because humans have the power and intellect (maybe not intelligence, but I digress) to change even what is considered nature, but I'm also not for social engineering, and I've seen such a wild increase in social engineering in media over the past 15, maybe 20 years, that I'd err on the naturalistic side now.
With this specific example, if McGillis had spent as much time and money and effort on appearing young and attractive as Tom Cruise has, maybe she would have been back in her role as well.
Oh, agreed! But it seems that men can remain "viable love interests" as long as they keep their rugged good looks (yes, with cosmetic help, of course), but in women this takes a stronger requirement of looking youthful.
The main problem is that evolution is just not a thing at our modern civilizational time scale.
And I don’t see any problems with late-life reproduction, assuming we can make it reliable and healthy. If anything, some countries desperately need it.
Evolution is really slow on average, but locally it moves quite quickly and probably explains the large variation between members of a species.
Add strong selective pressure to that high local speed and you can change a good part of the genotype within a couple of generations. See: animal husbandry. You can breed a new race of dog within 5-10 generations.
Ethics aside we could probably breed people who can sniff out Alzheimer's in less than 250 years.
Our current late reproduction style will very likely influence future generations health at older ages.
It's probably a wash. Sure people are reproducing later, but it's also more likely that they have recieved some major medical intervention to allow them to make it to that stage. For example, it could be stuff like freezing eggs before starting chemo.
I don't dispute any of your points in general. But at the same time, it brings a nostalgic smile to my face to envision starting a 250-year project in 2025.
Also the moths that "changed" from white to black during and because of the industrial revolution. That was quick, and to me, the best example of how it all works.
With our modern health systems we are pretty much a huge evolutionary blind spot ourselves. Many illnesses that would be filtered out because the carrier wouldn't survive, are now trivial. And on the journey hand we can screen for known illnesses.
I think we are already post evolutionary, or control it ourselves. Not a big issue either IMO, it's totally ok that this is happening.
We are definitely not post-evolutionary; the selection pressures have simply changed. Before industrialization the big two were starvation and infectious disease. Now? Well, it's anybody's guess decade to decade. Certainly sexual selection is still with us.
The article sort of mentions this in passing, but doesn't subject it to much rigor, and the (completely obvious?) counterargument is that by the time it causes male infertility, the affected have already reproduced.
No. The grandparent comment was essentially saying that we, as a species, were not designed to live as long as we do. It’s only been <10 generations since medicine has been a thing. Cancers, dementia etc just weren’t a thing before because we evolved to live long enough to bring our children up to be self sufficient and reproduce, then our job is done. Like the rest of the animal world do.
Modern medicine has messed with this. We weren’t meant to “old”.
