Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
Psychologist David Barash makes a welcome, and very overdue, point in an interesting Op-Ed in the LA Times: the well-documented decline in birthrate, and the rise in voluntary childlessness in Western cultures, not only does not conflict with a theorized evolutionary-psychological drive to reproduction, but is an expression of the fundamental freedom from evolutionary pressures that gives human nature its unique qualities.
In traditional evolutionary theory, reproductive success is all; those who die with the most kids win. Evolutionary psychology and sociobiology put this in more complicated perspective - altruism, kin selection, and all that - but it was still understood that getting your gametes over the hump, as it were, was the goal of life. This makes voluntarily non-reproductive lifestyles - whether homosexuality, delayed reproduction (with its risk of failure), or plain “childlessness by choice” - seem positively unnatural, and thus, in the naive fallacious naturalism that so often characterizes the right wing, that much more immoral. “Contracepting”, or not having kids by whatever means, becomes not merely religiously irritating to those of the familiarly thin skin, but somehow perverse, an attack on the species imperative to survive and prevail. Or so it may seem.
Barash defends sex for its own sake (a stance the more pathetic for its boldness in this benighted day):
For more than 99.99% of their evolutionary history, humans haven’t had the luxury of deciding whether to reproduce: simply engaging in sex took care of that, just as eating solved the problem of nutrition. But then something quite wonderful arrived on the scene: birth control. Because of it, women (and men) can exercise choice and, if they wish, save themselves the pain, risk and inconvenience of childbearing and child-rearing, indulging themselves rather than their genetic posterity.
This study is getting some play, purporting to show that a large percentage of medical-malpractice tort suits are ill-grounded. According to these reviewers, 40% of all malpractice suits filed are “frivolous”, and some actually come from patients who were not even injured! Commentators are already touting it as the smoking gun for malpractice “tort reform”. I think the reasonable conclusion is exactly the opposite.
