Re #2, humans are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. One of the adaptations we execute is that we believe in and sometimes act in accordance with a notion of morality. It’s true that we are no longer in the EEA so further evolution could change or even eliminate our current notions of morality, but it doesn’t follow that it would change it so that we thought maximizing our inclusive genetic fitness was the true morality. After all, the first time evolution had a chance, it didn’t do that.
We’ve only known about evolution for two centuries, and the modern prosperous environment (compared to the ancestral environment), post-demographic-transition, is about equally new. This is the first time in evolutionary history that someone who wants to have a dozen children can pretty much just do that.
In the ancestral environment, the fittest humans weren’t the ones who wanted to have the most children, or who thought it was moral to maximize their genetic influence over the future. They were the ones who were good at making tools, or good at making friends with people who make the tools, etc. That’s different now. Over millions of generations of simulated evolution, I expect the gene pool to become overwhelmingly dominated by people who want to have a lot of kids.
In the EEA, anyone could have as much sex as they wanted provided they found a willing partner (and sometimes even if they couldn’t). It didn’t make it so that they thought morality was having as much sex as they could. Morality is more complicated than that. There are more variables to select on than just desire to have sex / children, and I suspect this will be true in future environments just as it was true in the EEA.
That said, I agree with your last statement that after sufficiently long most people will explicitly want to have a lot of kids. (Note that this isn’t a statement about morality though.)
Re #2, humans are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. One of the adaptations we execute is that we believe in and sometimes act in accordance with a notion of morality. It’s true that we are no longer in the EEA so further evolution could change or even eliminate our current notions of morality, but it doesn’t follow that it would change it so that we thought maximizing our inclusive genetic fitness was the true morality. After all, the first time evolution had a chance, it didn’t do that.
We’ve only known about evolution for two centuries, and the modern prosperous environment (compared to the ancestral environment), post-demographic-transition, is about equally new. This is the first time in evolutionary history that someone who wants to have a dozen children can pretty much just do that.
In the ancestral environment, the fittest humans weren’t the ones who wanted to have the most children, or who thought it was moral to maximize their genetic influence over the future. They were the ones who were good at making tools, or good at making friends with people who make the tools, etc. That’s different now. Over millions of generations of simulated evolution, I expect the gene pool to become overwhelmingly dominated by people who want to have a lot of kids.
In the EEA, anyone could have as much sex as they wanted provided they found a willing partner (and sometimes even if they couldn’t). It didn’t make it so that they thought morality was having as much sex as they could. Morality is more complicated than that. There are more variables to select on than just desire to have sex / children, and I suspect this will be true in future environments just as it was true in the EEA.
That said, I agree with your last statement that after sufficiently long most people will explicitly want to have a lot of kids. (Note that this isn’t a statement about morality though.)