"...while Kirkasant was not a very fertile planet, and today its population strained its resources, no one had considered reducing the birthrate. When someone on Serieve had asked why, Demring's folk had reacted strongly. The idea struck them as obscene." (p. 744)
Pro-survival attitudes and behaviours can become contra-survival in changed conditions.
Every extra mouth to feed represents an extra pair of hands to do work to produce food or something else to exchange for food. Kirkasant is in a high-radiation star cluster but Kirkasanters have reinvented faster-than-light interstellar travel. Some can continue to have large families whereas others might learn that they do not need not to, in which case they will begin to question their inherited ideas of obscenity. The single certainty is continued social change, especially in response to drastically changed circumstances.
2 comments:
Human beings don't -need- a reproductive instinct, and I doubt they would develop one under any survivable circumstances.
(We do have sexual and child-nurturing instincts.)
But human birthrates can vary widely over very short periods of time through cultural changes.
England's population grew rapidly in the 1500's; by the 1680's through the 1720's it was slightly declining, simply because 25% of women never married and unmarried births were extremely rare.
Or to take a modern example, the TFR of China as recently as the 1970's was over 6 children per woman; now it's about 1.
A TFR of about 6 is pushing the biological maximum, which is probably between 7 and 8.
So -cultural- adjustments would pre-empt biological ones.
Kaor, Mr.Stirling!
But we should understand Kirkasant as the exception to that general rule, where humans did evolve an instinctual drive to reproduce.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment