Nature

[supergee]

"Nature wants 5 of your 7 children dead. It wants you dead by 50. Everything better than that is brought to you by science & technology"–David Frum

ETA: There are two things wrong with this quote:
1. It’s overly optimistic. The men live to 50; the women die at 25 after bearing the 7 children
2. It personifies. I don’t believe Nature wants us dead; it just acts that way.

Being a person, I cannot believe in a personal God, either Earth Mother or Sky Father. If Nature were a person, it would be the sort of abusive parent whose rule is: “If I catch you not paying attention to me, I will hurt you. And I may hurt you anyway.” But the first step from paranoia to paranoid schizophrenia is taking it personally.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Which is why my maternal grandfather was one of 22 all of whom survived to adulthood................

[ironyoxide]

>...the first step from paranoia to paranoid schizophrenia is taking it personally.

Putting that one in my quote file...

[supergee]

Glad you liked it.

[arlie]

I disagree about the gendered life expectancy modification. I don't have statistics handy, and humans have lived in a lot of environments, with a lot of tech levels. So it would be difficult to give a data based answer without getting into an argument about e.g. subsistence farmers not being typical, or modern foragers not living in the same conditions as our pre-agricultural ancestors. But everything I've read suggests that there are/were "old" people of both genders, and that males were pretty good at dying due to violence and accident, violence being both human-animal (hunting) and human-human. (Of course females died from both of those causes too.)

[magenta]

Actually, some of the women survived to bear a lot more than 7 children, and the women who survived lived a lot longer than the men, on average, because they were tougher.

[johnpalmer]

Technically, a short lifespan almost always means high childhood mortality. Once you make it to adulthood, there are still plenty of ways to die, but they're not as likely as people think. Humans are tough.

So, no, nature doesn't want you dead at 50. 60-70 is when nature *wants* you dead. Before then, it'll gladly kill you if you give it half a chance, and that includes doing many day to day activities when the dire dice of destiny are about to land with both sixes down.