Lumpy
September 26, 2012, 1:32am
33
I’m adding to this old thread because I recently found something pertinent. This year a novel by David Brin was published called “Existence”, and in one passage someone says exactly what I was trying to ask when I started this thread. To quote the end of chapter 32, the section headed “Disputation”:
Why did we escape (even barely) the Malthusian Trap? Some credit the fact that humans can separate the recreational and procreation aspects of sex.
Animals feel a compulsive drive to mate and exchange genes. Some scatter their offspring in great numbers. Others care intensively for just a few. But animals who finish this cycle and are healthy enough, routinely return to the driver of it all- sex- starting the process over again. Its power is rooted in one simple fact: Those who felt its urgency had more descendants.
This applied to us too, of course, till technology gave us birth control.
Then suddenly, the sex compulsion could be satisfied without procreation, with amazing effects. Everywhere that women were empowered with both prosperity and rights, most of them chose to limit childbearing, to concentrate on raising a few privileged offspring instead of brooding at max capacity. We became a non-Malthusian species, able to limit our population by choice, in the nick of time.
Too bad it can’t last. Today, some humans do overbreed. These tend to not be the rich, or those with enough food, or who have sex a lot. They are having lots of kids because they choose to
It’s evolution in action. As time passes, the locus of compulsion will shift from sex to a genetically-driven, iron willed determination to have more kids…
…and then we’ll be a Malthusian species again- like the “Motie” beings in that novel The Mote in God’s Eye , unable to stop. Unable to say “enough”. A fate that may commonly entrap a great many other species across the cosmos.
Before that happens to us, we had better finish the job of growing up.