My neighbor across the street breeds bulldogs, and the female recently gave birth to six puppies. The father had been dead five years, but his sperm had been frozen. God knows how many puppies he's fathered. That got me thinking about women as reproductive bottlenecks. A woman can perhaps have 15 babies in her life (my father's mother had nine), but a man can impregnate thousands of women.
I don't consider this bottleneck a good thing. For one thing, r-selected retards can outbreed us K-selected smartyguys.
Society got around this in the past by killing the more criminal r-selected (yay for one less Michael Brown!) and also parents had a say to whom their kids married, to make sure they didn't end up with male or female Michael Browns.
No matter, that bottleneck has caused horrendous problems. Let's put it this way: great men such as Adam Smith and Isaac Newton never reproduced. But as for the retarded (think Idiocracy), the world is being flooded with them.
I used to read a lot of science fiction in my early teens, not because it make me imaginative, but because I was imaginative and thus drawn to it. But I remember reading Brave New World and the babies in test tubes (try the TV series, Space: Above and Beyond for vat-grown babies).
Right now human sperm and eggs are being frozen, and then sometimes implanted in surrogate mothers.
It's a way beyond that bottleneck.
What's next? Artificial wombs? It's coming. You know it is.
What will this do to the value of women? Their value sexually is close to zero, at least for men who can get women. If men can get designer babies grown in artificial wombs, with the eggs of whatever woman they choose (and I'm sure those special eggs would cost a lot of money), then who needs the average woman?
Sex cheap, the bottleneck bypassed, making women's reproductive value cheap...the only thing left that makes women worthwhile is love. And what is to be done with that?
Brave New World, indeed.
Poster Comment:
I've met people who think this is a good thing so we can create designer babies. It'd be a lot easier if all women wanted to have sex with Turtle and then Turtle's descendents could take over the world.