So much for humanity's claims to have transcended nature.
EDIT:
(stealing a half-remembered quote from someone else)
"Humans beings are unique in that they are the only known species who produce offspring in order to subsidize their fantasies."
Clearly, it isn't all-consuming.
Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The queen produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed her young.
More so, the drive for reproduction isn't necessarily about kids, but sexuality. Sex sells. A big chunk of our civilization is about food and sex.
The total genetic consciousness of humanity cares for your particular genes about as much as you care for a single hair or cell of skin falling off the greater whole.
It is all-consuming in the sense that it is fundamental to life by definition. (Unless we are to posit some organism arising from proto-life and just 'hanging out' until the end of the universe.) And it is the second half fundamental to evolution -- the other being death.
Yes. Reproductive rates vary over time and due to environmental conditions.
See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example of this. (Though simplistic applicability of this to human society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should probably be discouraged.)
> Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The queen produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed her young.
Other animals act in collective ways. Yes. But it's not talking of collectivism in terms of bees, ants, or wolf packs.
So far as I understand the quote, or the sentiment, it refers to the seeming fact that bees, ants, wolfs, etc, reproduce as a series of drives that function to that end without them needing to be cognizant of that end. Whereas humans, in addition to the compulsive drives of pleasure, etc, require justification. A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as we understand the mental processes of other animals) with prospects a billion years from now. A queen bee doesn't have to justify that more bees are good. Eggs are just cared for, fertilized, hatched in relation to the functioning of the hive and the processes which occur to regulate such. The seeming distinction with human beings is that the course of evolution has perhaps instilled them/us with a sort of, if not a 'meta drive', then a drive to override other aspects of our evolved intelligence which might undermine reproduction. In short, humans don't just 'get horny', they/we also have to 'get religion[1]'. Other animals (again, so far as we are aware, which is admittedly not very far sometimes) don't seem to require any justification on top of 'the mating dance makes me horny', they just 'do it'.
[1] This, of course, should be considered in terms of ideology broadly, rather than just religion specifically. (In addition, I would also contend here that ideology is not an external addition, but a fundamental of human psychology, and to paraphrase Zizek 'the most thoroughly ideological environment is the post-ideological one.'
Of course it does! Bees gather honey literally to survive through winters.
We can even grant that honey bees, for instance, do appear to have some type of awareness of time and space, as indicated by their communicative 'dances'. However, there is a vast gap between encoding approximate seconds to kilometers (in human terms) and the time relations of the heat death of the universe.
Intelligence, self-awareness, these are all things that have developed in various species to varying degrees. And new data generally keep showing that we have previously underestimated just to what degree that is the case.
However, it has yet to be shown that bees (or any other animal) are compelled to instantiate and perpetuate social interactions with the point of advancing propositions such as "people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today."
> billions of years ... survive through the winter
That's G.R.R Martin levels of winter.
EDIT:
I don't want to make it seem as if am I discounting the ability for the deployment of forethought by other animals. There is, however, the issue of any 'horizon of time'. Bees can work to restore a hive in the middle of winter because it is potentially conceptualized, in some fashion, to be necessary. A crow can interface with multiple interlocking scenarios in order to achieve an outcome (usually food). We have cooperative behavior: one monkey distracts the tourist, the other steals the food, etc. However, there seems to be little evidence for any other species having such a notion of time as to extend much more beyond immediate concerns in an active sense. Longer phenomena, such as the reproductive cycles of cicadas, is more linked to environmental factors and internal molecule clocks than it is to what could be defined as conscious relations.
This is not also to say that some species may also have (or in the future have) undergone convergent evolution with regards to this type of mental processing, just that it doesn't generally seem to be the case.
Calhoun's experiments are kinda sketchy and likely are not reproducible. [0] They were extensively promoted as PopSci, especially by Calhoun, but only limited papers where actually published, never the full results, and attempts at reproduction have called into question many of the findings.
[0] https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
Until we have good reproductions, it's probably good to write this experiment off.
But you are likely correct; I should have been stronger in my warnings.
Unfortunately, however, it could be taken that I was indicating the wholesale applicability of a possibly one-off event as explanation to broader and seemingly repeated phenomena (leveling and/or declining population rates in so-called developed countries), rather that just as a possible single extreme instance of population and reproductive instability as generalized example.
My interest is confined strictly to the rat populations themselves. The particulars of the designs involved and for the issues that were introduced by them, I think that to be the more interesting part.
Any applicability to human sociology I would regard as ridiculously erroneous at this stage. (Or perhaps any stage. We tend to cross-associate species too much sometimes.)
Though, I wonder if reproducibility may not, here, be as useful as we think. It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species.
Except Calhoun didn't do the basic stuff to rule out the obvious non-social causes for population breakdown. He didn't take offspring from the colony and test to make sure they still could reproduce healthily in a new setting. Calhoun doesn't clearly specify all the starting conditions, but at least one run started from 4 breeding pairs which introduces the possibility of inbreeding as a close call. There are also diseases that cause sterility and odd behaviors in rats.
So basically until someone can reproduce the experiment properly, there is pretty much zero epistemic content that can be drawn from the Calhoun experiments except as a cautionary tale about taking self promoting scientists at their word rather than demanding their data as well.
Would it have been better to talk about bivalves[2] and baboons[3]?
I would generally prefer bivalves to baboons.
But then I would be accused, again, in trying to illustrate a general phenomena or principle, of drawing a line to some vector of particular conflux between species A and H. sapiens, ala the domain of Jordan Peterson's lobsters.
The problem is, I am afraid, in such discussions as these, my posts will have to account down to the punctuation, lest one correction will need be issued or question be raised, in which case the totality of the thing is blown to the proverbial kingdom come by its (and my) inability to account for the sum totality of a minute portion of the universe. (A trivial failing, I admit, but one I have to own up to.)
Except perfect is never going to be good enough.
It's similar, after a fashion, to having to deal with young earth creationists. Yes, but where is the transitionary fossil between H. habilis and H. erectus? The counter claim will then arise that there are differences in opinion as to whether H. ergaster is a precursor to H. erectus or categorizable in terms of inclusion with H. erectus.
The question is: why do I put in the effort?
Maybe because silence, inaction, is always likely in support of something. Neutrality can likely only exist at minimum if the subject and phenomena are not extant within the same light cone. Practical considerations might allow for a smaller distance, but might as well be thorough.
Ultimately, I have to be fine with misstepping. Failure, after all, in the end, is the only option.
Returning to Calhoun a moment, since I might as well ride the derailment off the cliff (semper desistas semper exieris[4]), the final outcome of Newton's Flaming Laser Sword is that swaths of reality functionally cease to exist. Of course there is epistemic content. That content is not applicable within a scientific framework, that is very true. But something, unless the entirety was fabricated, did happen. Maybe Calhoun purposefully funneled the experiment into his result, The Mad God of Universe 25. Maybe he was the Harry Harlow of rats. But the basics of it are that reproductive rates changed and the population collapsed. Maybe it was from disease. Maybe it was from inbreeding. Maybe it was from the food. Maybe it was from the design of the enclosure. Maybe one day Calhoun decided to climb into the enclosure and stomp them all. Maybe it was all these things together. It's not much. But 'pretty much zero' is not zero.[5] As almost everything I tend to post proves, close enough doesn't cut it.
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[1] Yes, I am aware this is not a 'real' word, and I don't care. Another few hundred years and it will be a word. It's been independently derived too many times.
[2] https://jpswad.people.wm.edu/Martins%20et%20al%202018%20-%20...
[3] https://www.princeton.edu/~baboon/publications/2003AJHB.pdf
[4] I won't claim this is grammatically correct. My latin classes were more than two decades ago.
[5] (Bees, interestingly enough, can be taught the concept of zero, which puts them ahead of human toddlers.)
[1] https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/scent-man-23549...
EDIT:
Even so, it would have helped even more if my original example hadn't been functionally useless.
Psychology in particular has a problem with many papers poorly assessing their own generalizibility and making much stronger/broader claims than are justified by the actual design of their study. This, combined with the widespread teaching of badly run "famous" studies such as Calhoun, drove me to abandon getting a degree in that field.
If you live in a developed nation, you probably feel secure that humanity will not perish without you having kids. You are allowed to simply enjoy life as you wish and not have kids if you choose (at least, that is my ideal).