Csihar, unlike Spyder I don't think I win forumquest when people write long posts. It's nice to chat with people who actually think about things. However, I think you are missing most of my main points. I shall try to limit the Usenet style before the forum explodes.
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If mice started producing a small number of offspring and investing heavily into child-rearing they would go extinct. They survived because they didn't
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The whole point of r/k theory is that these behaviors are optimal in their respective environments.
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They way you have worded this is that in order to reach peak performance in a period of abundance you should be r-selected and in scarcity K-selected.
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Right. And remember, everything is epigenetic. If you take a genetically r-selected migrant from Southern Italy and throw him into a Chicago 1890s slaughterhouse, you get a k-selected asshole who would happily take a flamethrower to a Kraut bunker in World War I. Conversely, if you take a a genetic k-strategist and put him into a modern environment, you get someone like Swilleville who thinks "I hunt and kill but I try to minimize their pain".
You have to ask 'Why does this organism exist an environment of abundance' ? Since all life expands exponentially, the only possible answer is that it has some check upon its growth. Either that check comes from internal competition (k-selection) as scarcity grows, or from external sources like disease and predators (r-selection). Africa is the latter. On balance the Chinese and Europeans are the most k-selected races, but there are plenty of r-selected Chinese and Europeans and k-selected Africans. I remember watching a video about Ken Norton training like hell for his match vs Ali so he could buy his son a hotdog. It's not a racial thing.
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The closer third and second world countries get to being a first world country, the more meat and diary is consumed. This doesn't fit your theory, in fact it is the opposite of what you claim. You can talk about age but lets bring in correlation and causation. I'm not going to go into this much at all (because we all know what it means) but it's something you don't seem to take into account much at all. My explanation that people are living in closer proximity to animals (in terms of 'loved ones' as opposed to livestock) fits much better.
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Obviously meat consumption will rise as economic limits are lifted. Going from 'dirt poor' to 'poor' will not produce r-selected individuals. Your claim of correlation vs causation also seems dubious as I am not going into the wild and evaluating pairs of data and observing a correlation. I am starting with a theory and looking for evidence that falsifies it. In this case, it passes the test and remains valid. Plus, the inverse causation (as people get older they get crankier and hate animals more) is clearly wrong. Meanwhile your explanation is virtually tautological (people who like animals like animals).
This is the part that is going to be most uncomfortable for you. But k-selected people are on balance simply BETTER at being people than r-selected people. It's tautological: k-selected people are programmed to outwork and out compete r-selected people (the r-selected person might be more evolutionarily successful, though).
Of course, r-selected life is a lot more FUN. It would be great if we could all live forever in an American University circa 2010 and bathe in a relaxing cocktail of mind-altering drugs and easy sex. But the problem is that r/k theory applies to nations as well. Did you know that later Romans were highly promiscuous? Rome conquered the world, became suitably r-selected, and were promptly conquered by more k-selected groups who wanted it more. The magic of free market capitalism is that it maintains k-selection without Hobbesian violence. Meanwhile, modern progressives espouse an anti-competitive ideology of open immigration, sexual deviancy, and government handouts that is literally suicidal under the guise of empathy. It needs to be utterly torpedoed before Western Civilization completely collapses.