While you're wondering and worrying about why you and yours are having trouble disseminating your DNA, here's a short blogpost about an interesting population study, kindly passed on by my scientific Roomie.
It's not so helpful in terms of your own fertility struggles to know things like "Pioneers tend to have more babies" -- but data about unassisted fertility in populations might give you pause to think.
I wonder all the time about long-term consequences of reproductive medicine success in terms of the species. Part of that's the influence of my roommate, the mathematical biologist, but related notions have been bumping around in my head since way back when I was trying to force my own DNA to descend.
Do you ever wonder what the Big Picture will look like for humans once we've truly nailed this whole "I want a baby, therefore, I will have one" thing? I ponder it constantly. Beyond the concept of "rights" -- the umbrella question is how will we wind up once we're decades past adherence to "laws of nature"?
If you're not up to reading the blogpost or study, here are a couple of snippets:
The study analyzed marriage and birth records in Canada’s Charlevoix Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean region (northeast of Quebec City) and found that “families living on the edges of the expansions had 20 percent more children than families living at the settlement’s core. They also married one year earlier, on average, and contributed up to four times more genes to the region’s current population.”
and
Pioneering ancestors with high fertility had children who also eventually had high fertility...
