Imagine if, instead of business, this was war:
Minnesota-based gym company Life Time Fitness, Inc. will pay $86,000 and furnish significant relief to resolve a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency announced today.
The EEOC charged in the suit that after two job interviews, Life Time Fitness told Emily Carpenter, who was applying for a job at its Rockville, Md., location, to come in to complete new hire paperwork so she could be placed on the schedule. When Carpenter emailed the gym with her work availability and advised that she was 35 weeks pregnant, the gym failed to schedule her for work and stopped communicating with her. A manager finally told her two weeks later that her position had been placed on hold and two other people had been hired. The manager encouraged her to apply for a position at another Life Time Fitness facility opening later that year, the EEOC said.
Such alleged conduct violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions…
EEOC Regional Attorney Debra M. Lawrence added, “Unfortunately too many women still experience pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. We are pleased that this settlement corrected this situation by providing monetary compensation to Ms. Carpenter, as well as other measures that will protect other women and applicants from sex or pregnancy discrimination.”
In an environment of free resources, the rabbits can create rules to punish those who do not hire pregnant females. But in real K-selection, some group is going to die, and if one group is filled with pregnant women who all need maternity leave on the day of the big battle, that group is the one which will be dead. Compared to that, a fine is meaningless, and after all the rabbits who want the fine are dead the fine is gone anyway.
When you look at how instinctually K-strategists want to use solely males in warfighting, and how r and K can switch with resource availability, you almost wonder if a specific urge like that can be encoded through minor alterations in gene transcription rates controlled by epigenetics. Could you reintroduce the desire to not use women in combat, solely through caloric restriction and pleasure-limitation? Could some environmental trigger as gross as less glucose ingestion produce an actual alteration in neural structures that encode thoughts, simply by altering the structures involved by altering gene transcription rates?
You have to wonder how much of our thinking is just structural response to environmental conditions, with us along for the ride.
Spread r/K Theory, because the mechanism is programmed deeper than we think
[…] Imagine if, instead of business, this was war: Minnesota-based gym company Life Time Fitness, Inc. will pay $86,000 and furnish significant relief to resolve a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit filed by the continue […]
It’s like Starship Troopers. It’s SciFi, I know, but seemed anthropologically sound. All the female characters seemed to be just playing war. Every single one also ended up WIA/KIA. The combat was fun to watch though, makes you want to tag along and kill bugs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rx8_vjbXX4
Oh, cripes. If you’re going to hold up Starship Troopers as an example of r/K selection, at least reference the book and not that abomination of a film.
I’ve noticed a correlation between people who follow paleo/primal/ketogenic/WestonPrice/whole food type diets, (which are higher in fat/protein and very low in grains/sugar/starch) and traditional K-select values, such as high value parenting, fitness, competitiveness, and striving for self-sufficiency. I’ve wondered which comes first, the change in diet or the change in values.
###you almost wonder if a specific urge like that can be encoded through minor alterations in gene transcription rates controlled by epigenetics.. Could some environmental trigger as gross as less glucose ingestion produce an actual alteration in neural structures that encode thoughts, simply by altering the structures involved by altering gene transcription rates?
###correlation between people who follow paleo
next time your at Starbucks compare-contrast espresso/straight coffee drinkers (if you can find any) with the frap drinkers. my unscientific stereotypical gut would swear there’s an r/K divide.
interesting. If the high carg/low fat diet is somewhat to blame. A great discussion on the falling testosterone levels in Western men seems aproriate here. After all higher T is associated with more agressiveness, which would lead to either socially acceptable conflict (read contact sports) or unaccaptable (read physical fights).
I’ve long suspected that the drop in dietary cholesterol is a drop in our sexual hormones. And it also seems to be increasing dimentia. Basically braincells are made up of cholesterol, and from a molecular level testosterone, estrogen and cholesterol are all very close in structure. So that the body may have a pathway from cholesterol to the sex hormones (NOTE I AM NOT A MEDICAL OR EVEN A BIO/CHEM person. I’M ONLY MAKING AN POTENTIAL OBSERVATION).
It is also worth noting that in 1306 to 1308 there was a cold induced crop failures/famine in Europe (primarily what is now England, France, and Germany – but it also affect other areas). The resultant colder temps changed Europe from grain eaters to meat eaters. That is they could grow animals on the grasses available, but could not grow crop grasses like wheat given the colder temps. With an increase in meat consumption, there’d be an increase in dietary fats and protiens.
This literally could have been a trigger to move the r/K cycle of Europe towards K – I see the r/K cycling as a varrying on a scale so it osscilates in a group between say 5 and 7… something like the diet shift mentioned above might make it go 6 to 8 instead.
>So that the body may have a pathway from cholesterol to the sex hormones
That is dead on, actually. Cholesterol is a building block for sex hormones, and stress hormones.
I find the idea the food pyramid may have fostered rabbitry fascinating.
Do you think Agriculture is a r-stimulus? Because it certainly mimicks the food of prey species more closely.
It certainly forced many people due to subsequent population boom to rely on it lest they starve.
I agree, it is. It also allows essentially free resource availability, at least until populations multiply up enough dependents who can’t grow stuff themselves.
What fascinating is how the groups that are pastoralists(indo-europeans) made the agricultural peoples that they conquered much more K-selected as a result of their influence:
https://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-last-10000-years-and-the-rise-of-patriarchy/
There was a humongous y-chromosome bottleneck at the time. Which ties back to meat-eating vs grain-eating humans.
That is interesting.
What I found fascinating is how pastoralists(Indo-Europeans) injected K-selected behavior into the agricultural societies they conquered:
https://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-last-10000-years-and-the-rise-of-patriarchy/
Maybe this ties in with meat-eating vs grain eating?
There also appears to be a biblical case against this too explicitly:
”The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God” (Dt. 22:5).
This verse is a prohibition for cross-dressing when it comes to men. But the restriction placed on women here is not simply the reverse of that. When a man is getting kinky in the way described here, it is a straightforward transvesite problem. But going the other way, we should notice a different problem. Notice the odd construction — “that which pertains to a man.” The Hebrew underneath is keli geber, and should be read as the “gear of a warrior.” Whether we are talking about a man in fishnet stockings, or a woman decked out in full battle regalia, we need to recognize that God finds it loathsome. So should we.”
It appears God finds battle regalia on a woman equivalent to cross-dressing. Dressing as a male.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/crossdressing-and-the-military/
Josephus in his book Antiquities of the Jews I.4.8.43. interpreted this Deuteronomy 22:5 as to include women putting on battle regalia.
Yep, I also noticed that correlation some years back. No doubt about it, in my mind.
Not only are men are inherently superior in physical capabilities. But that they are more easily replacable than females.
Since more males are born than females and that an excess of females after all would not negatively impact the groups reproductive capability as severely as when women are involved in combat as well.
Exactly. It’s blatantly obvious. I watched the series Vikings for a while until I couldn’t take it anymore. The notion that these 7th century (or thereabouts) people would risk their babymakers by sending them into battle is beyond absurd. Of course it’s just more Girrrrrllll Power nonsense.
Got turned off the series as soon as the grrl power nonsense came on.
I do expect though that at the beginning stages of K-selection. K-selected men would be forced to kill r-selected armed masculine women.