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brin_bellway[cw: (strong) reproductive coercion, disordered eating, death, infanticide]
I'm not sure how much of this is projection and selection bias on my part--for all I know there are whole *swaths* of *humans* out there that are like this but that I don't see, or who keep quiet about it--but it continually surprises me how *strong* this species' reproductive drive is.
I was rather under the impression that humans have a relatively weak reproductive drive on the whole because of a long history of reproductive coercion. Until quite recently--and in many areas still--whether or not one *wanted* children was simply not a major factor in whether or not one *had* them, and so the selection pressure wasn't there.
These people have *even more* reproductive coercion! Not just cultural (though there's a lot of that) but *biological*: it is--barring, perhaps, heroic doses of birth control--*physically impossible* for a woman to die of old age childless. Even celibacy won't suffice: this is one of those species where sex is merely the trigger for parthenogenesis, and if you go long enough without deliberately triggering parthenogenesis it'll happen anyway.
It *doesn't matter* whether or not they want children: they'll have them whether they like it or not. So why did Nature bother to make this species so obsessed with them?
---
Well, okay, I *guess* I can see why the men would need some, to keep them from abandoning the children. But the women *must* walk into the trap sooner or later, and so it should need no bait to lure them in.
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It's really unfortunate for them, because if they weren't so obsessed with babies there'd be a better overpopulation solution available to them than their current one: instead of distracting half your researchers with starvation, let them live out their lives normally and then kill one female child from every batch. One out of every three adults births three living offspring. That's a stable population.
(yeah, yeah, I know, easy for *me* to say, I don't *have* an intuition that infanticide is morally wrong)
I'm not sure how much of this is projection and selection bias on my part--for all I know there are whole *swaths* of *humans* out there that are like this but that I don't see, or who keep quiet about it--but it continually surprises me how *strong* this species' reproductive drive is.
I was rather under the impression that humans have a relatively weak reproductive drive on the whole because of a long history of reproductive coercion. Until quite recently--and in many areas still--whether or not one *wanted* children was simply not a major factor in whether or not one *had* them, and so the selection pressure wasn't there.
These people have *even more* reproductive coercion! Not just cultural (though there's a lot of that) but *biological*: it is--barring, perhaps, heroic doses of birth control--*physically impossible* for a woman to die of old age childless. Even celibacy won't suffice: this is one of those species where sex is merely the trigger for parthenogenesis, and if you go long enough without deliberately triggering parthenogenesis it'll happen anyway.
It *doesn't matter* whether or not they want children: they'll have them whether they like it or not. So why did Nature bother to make this species so obsessed with them?
---
Well, okay, I *guess* I can see why the men would need some, to keep them from abandoning the children. But the women *must* walk into the trap sooner or later, and so it should need no bait to lure them in.
---
It's really unfortunate for them, because if they weren't so obsessed with babies there'd be a better overpopulation solution available to them than their current one: instead of distracting half your researchers with starvation, let them live out their lives normally and then kill one female child from every batch. One out of every three adults births three living offspring. That's a stable population.
(yeah, yeah, I know, easy for *me* to say, I don't *have* an intuition that infanticide is morally wrong)
