Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.
We haven't escaped any biological imperative. We still have sex. The desire to have sex is the biological imperative that produces offspring, and we haven't lost that. It's because we invented birth control that now the desire to have sex is not enough. We need a desire to have kids. Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
> Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
Natural selection doesn't work like that.
There is no guarantee that traits appear because they are needed ; only that traits that somehow appear may spread if they are useful or associated with something else that is useful.
But don't we have that trait already in some form? Some people want kids, others don't. The traits that make a person more likely to want kids will become more common.
If we don't have such a trait and the decision to have kids is based entirely on the environment, then this evolution will be cultural instead of biological. Cultures that have more kids will replace those that don't.
My point is more theoretic that an actual reflection on what will actually happen, because I'm not better than the next person at predictions. Simply put: just because a species needs to change in order to adapt, doesn't mean they do. Geologic strata are littered with species that no longer exists.
As for culture, it is not a static thing, or indissociable from individuals. My grandmothers had 6 and 8 kids, most of my cousins have 0-2 kids. So considering my grandmothers' behaviour and my cousins', Are they from the same culture? Will people that reproduce more today convince their children to do the same?
In either analysis, it's really hard to use natural selection as a predictive tool.
We, or at least some of us, most definitely have such traits.
Holding newborn babies tend to have a quite obvious and equally instant hormonal effect on a lot of people. For some people, even a few such encounters may be enough to induce baby fever.
And there are other factors at play, too, that are also inheritable. Factors like impulse control, introversion / shyness, ambitiousness drive and tendency to magical /religious thinking may all affect the number of offspring one way or the other.
So all that is needed is a few generation of strong selection pressure for such traits, and we're back to overpopulation again being a much bigger threat than population collapse.
Even better, invent tools so we can still hump like rabbits but not be burdened with the results. Good stuff. Evolution gonna take a while to figure out a response.
Unless it already figured it out, and placed the solution in the gene pool. In that case, a few generations of natural selection is all that will be needed.
Does it not strike you as strange though that so many different nations / cultures are all seeing the same downward trend at the same time? There is something about it that feels like a biological imperative.
We have better things to do than hump like rabbits? We don’t need kids to work the farm, or to provide net positive muscle power input to the economy. We have machines for that.
>higher rates than before (welcome hookup culture)
Got any source to back that up? All surveys I have seen point to younger generations having less sex, fewer relationships, and even just drinking less than their ancestors. Remember, the boomers were the "free love" hippies and then STDs became a serious concern, and we decided we should warn kids about consequences of sex.
A fire has no cortex whatsoever, and yet if fire did not continue doing what fire does in order to stay fire - turn things that are "not fire" into itself- it would cease to exist altogether. That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.
edit: I expected apathy at best from a comment this deep in a thread. Now, granted, HN does not stand for Hard Nihilism, but four downvotes with zero explanations in under an hour suggests there is an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics.
> That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.
Even if it is correct (which you haven’t tried to support, just claiming that you know best), how is it relevant? If there’s no bigger picture then what’s wrong with going extinct which should push us to procreate? The comparison to fire - the human population is the highest it’s ever been and still increasing so it doesn’t seem like we are “going out“, and if that was happening the collapse of civilisation would lead to the loss of the ability to mass manufacture birth control and loss of the medical systems supporting them at some point, and the population would go up again after that, wouldn’t it? Fire runs out of fuel, but human food grows on trees - less humans leads to more ecosystem regeneration which could support more humans.
> "an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics."
I thought we were “just“ hydraulic systems? Just LLMs? Just clockwork? Humans are just {recent scientific discovery of the era} is an interesting view on its own but is it relevant to the thread? "We are just thermodynamic systems ... so we should reproduce"?
OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones.
If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.
