http://www.longevity-science.org/Maternal-Age.pdf

We focus heavily on how much male incels are losers in the game of evolution. Yet there's virtually no focus on the female role in this "loss". The incel was only ever trying to reproduce by donating genetic material and letting her do the gestation.

We don't think of the woman rejecting a man as a "loser". But in strict genetic terms, if she does not get pregnant, that is simply what she is. Her genetic line ends just as his does.

Not only that, but even if her pregnancy is just delayed by a few years, there is a statistically significant reduction in lifespan for her kids.

It's definitely a major risk to delay having kids until after thirty. Over two years of life lost for the kid. Don't get too hung up on the lifespan: it's a proxy for general health. You don't care if your kid dies aged 86? Do you care if she dies aged 30 from breast cancer for which a contributory cause was the delayed motherhood?

If we view each individual as unconsciously trying to force his or her individual genetic pattern forward into future generations, it raises questions about the strange behavior of western female homosapiens.

I'm not getting all moralistic here: if a woman chooses to have kids late, that's her business. But scientifically, it's weird.

Most animals seem to instinctively do the things that give the best chance for their population to be maintained over generations. Whether they opt for the k or r-strategy, they seem to instinctively optimize for offspring health.

But human women are, in amazing numbers, either not reproducing at all, or reproducing crazy late with tremendous burdens on the next generation as a result. At a time when there is zero shortage of food and clean water. At any other time in all of human history, the cheap calories we are used to in the west, would have been associated with a huge population boom.

Basically, we are seeing a scientifically fascinating collapse of the reproductive urge in our species. And it chiefly affects one sex only.

If you knew nothing about the human race except Dawkins' Selfish Gene theory, you would assume that virtually every fertile hetereosexual and bisexual woman would have given birth once by age 27. That "baby fever" would become so overwhelming for women that they would say "screw the financial constraints, my child won't know we're 10% worse off than her classmates' families".

That is the optimal age, as measured by the lifespan of offspring. (Leave it until after 30 and bang!, you've shot two years off baby's life. Statistically. See linked study.)

I'd like it if posters took and objective, Andromedan-eye view. Think of human delay of first motherhood the way a scientist would study the same among earthworms.

Explain why millions of organisms are sabotaging their genetic posterity in a way that other species never do. Don't get moralistic, that is fatal to objectivity.