3 ms·

I most cases say, mammals have a desire for sex. Also instinctual love for their offspring and a motivation to feed, care for, and teach them. Humans certainly

I most cases say, mammals have a desire for sex. Also instinctual love for their offspring and a motivation to feed, care for, and teach them. Humans certainly have all that.. But that does still not tally with a pre-meditated rational conscious desire to have children. We certainly wouldnt expect to see that in other mammals. I think the type of conscious decision to have kids discussed in this article may be a socio-cultural phenomenon. There are documented cases of stone-age level people who had not actually made the connection between sex and resultant children. We are not certainly imbued from birth with knowledge like that.

dwaltrip 9y ago
Unless the consciously stated desire is an ad-hoc rationalization of the underlying drives. I agree with you there are also likely strong cultural influences which are unfolding mostly separately from any genetic dynamics.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> I think the type of conscious decision to have kids discussed in this article may be a socio-cultural phenomenon. Survival of memes and survival of genes are a little different, but not entirely independent; once you have a concept of the relation of sex to reproduction (which huma societies demonstrably have had for quite a long time, in general, even if there are some primitive exceptions), a community (and it's ideas) is much less likely to becomem influential, or even survivez , if it doesn't value reproduction unless it's somehow in a symbiotic relation with a community that does; this may be somewhat less true today (an interesting discussion), but in most of human history this would have been a big deal. Also, that aside, it serves as a rationalozation of the lower level drives discussed earlier, and a social value framework that includes elemenrs that provide rationalizations that enable a feeling of understanding of lower-level drives provides a kind of (strictly speaking, fallacious, but that's not important to it's value in promoting acceptance) validation for the whole framework.

dwaltrip 9y ago

Unless the consciously stated desire is an ad-hoc rationalization of the underlying drives. I agree with you there are also likely strong cultural influences which are unfolding mostly separately from any genetic dynamics.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> I think the type of conscious decision to have kids discussed in this article may be a socio-cultural phenomenon. Survival of memes and survival of genes are a little different, but not entirely independent; once you have a concept of the relation of sex to reproduction (which huma societies demonstrably have had for quite a long time, in general, even if there are some primitive exceptions), a community (and it's ideas) is much less likely to becomem influential, or even survivez , if it doesn't value reproduction unless it's somehow in a symbiotic relation with a community that does; this may be somewhat less true today (an interesting discussion), but in most of human history this would have been a big deal. Also, that aside, it serves as a rationalozation of the lower level drives discussed earlier, and a social value framework that includes elemenrs that provide rationalizations that enable a feeling of understanding of lower-level drives provides a kind of (strictly speaking, fallacious, but that's not important to it's value in promoting acceptance) validation for the whole framework.