RufusAtticus

And Rufus breathes life into an old thread...

Behavior does not have to be a conscious choice. Desires and wants do not have to be conscious either. I don't decide to be hungry and want food.

Reproduction is the most important function of life. There is no reason to suspect that humans have escaped this. The higher sex drive in males reflects their reproductive strategy to maximize fertility. For humans, there is also selection (cultural and otherwise) to reduce the number of children a man has because he must also invest resources in them. A high male sex drive can be seen to be a vestigal behavior that has been copted for other uses like maintaining pair bonds.

-RvFvS

Dr Rick

You do decide what to do about it, however. You can call out for pizza, buy fixin's for a salad at a grocery store, kill an elk, or just ignore the desire. The stimulus or drive of hunger is inherited and innate, but how you react to it is not.

Important to whom? There is no evidence at all to suggest that the majority of animals have the slightest inkling that they are reproducing when they initate mating behavior, so it can't be important to them. Genes are not conscious entities, so it can't be important to them. Most organisms can't and therefore don't care whether or not they reproduce. They are compelled by a sex drive, not an urge to have offspring.

Just look at what happens when animals become aware that sexual behavior leads to offspring. Unlike most animals, most adult humans know that mating can lead to progeny. Yet, we often use this knowledge to actually thwart reproduction through contraception and abstinence, even in the presence of adequate resources to support more children. If reproduction was our most important function, we would not do this.

One might as well claim that heat production is the most important function of the sun. This assertion would be just as verifiable and potentially falsifiable as yours, and no less meaningful or predictive.

In the resource rich United States, those with the most resources have the fewest children and rates of reproduction are highest among the poor. If we had an innate desire to reproduce, those with greater resources would utilize them to produce more offspring, not less.

Rufus, this is an assertion in need of clarification and substantiation. Co-opted by whom? What makes this drive vestigal? Is the female sex drive also vestigal? You claim that the most important function of life is to reproduce, so how can the driving force behind it be vestigal?

Rick

[ April 23, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

cricket

It's not that it's important "to" anyone. It's that it *is* important; it is the most critical aspect of natural selection. It's that Mother Nature favors those whose behavior leads to reproduction.

Walking-stick insects blend into the foliage. This has been a successful strategy in evolutionary terms. No, they didn't actually strategize, but their body style was selected for because birds of prey often overlook them.

However successful this strategy, it would be for naught if they didn't reproduce.

[ April 23, 2002: Message edited by: cricket ]</p>

cricket

What was the most successful evolutionary strategy of our own ancestors?

Bipedalism? Learning to use fire? Tool-making? No, none of these would have mattered if our ancestors hadn't reproduced.

cricket

It isn't important to them.

It's SEX that is important to them.

However, it's reproduction that actually IS important.

Not to the organisms themselves, but to the course of evolution for their species.

[ April 23, 2002: Message edited by: cricket ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

Bingo! Rick, that's precisely what I've been saying all along. Certain drives -- which I've referred to, usually uncontroversially, as instincts -- are innate. As with all genetically influenced features, what actually happens is determined by how the genetic effects interact with the environment. It's a combination of the two, whether it's physical morphology or behaviour. Genes for growing taller only become apparent in a phenotype which has access to an adequate diet; genes for sharper canines may be, erm, pointless in a mostly herbivorous creature. Similarly, the feeling of hunger can be dealt with by Burger King or braised koala, depending on the environment; the genetically controlled (evolutionarily produced) tendency for our species to communicate by complex vocalisations results in individuals in different environments ending up speaking Engligh, French or Swahili.

Why should minds (ie brain functioning in brains built by genes) not be shaped by evolution too?

Cheers, Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

Who said it had to be important to them? Reproduction is the most important thing life does, since if it doesn’t do it, it will stop existing. (Eating, excreting etc are by-products of the convoluted routes modern genes have to take in order to get themselves copied... do you think viruses are alive, btw?)

Where did the sex drive come from? Might it be that those without one didn’t leave any descendants, perhaps? Animals do not need to know what their behaviour is for in order for them to do stuff that promotes their genes, any more than I need to do a complex calculation of a ball’s trajectory in order to catch it. They do not need to know anything; nothing has to be ‘important to them’. Natural selection will simply preserve those that get it right. And natural selection can only work on stuff that's reproducing.

Sorry, you’ve lost me. How does that analogy work? I suppose it could mean that those things which do not produce heat like that would not be suns, which would be right...?

Oolon

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Dr Rick

Earlier claims on this thread such as "fathers instinctively want to have a lot of children [Rufus], " and "they behaved as though they did [Cricket]" mis-characterized inherited sex drives as an inherited desire to have children or to behave as though one does.

Reproduction itself is not important to most animals: they couldn't care one way or the other whether or not they reproduce. Humans do usually care about having children, but they neither "instinctively" desire lots of them or behave as if they do.

We inherit drives, including an urge to have sex, but not our adult behavioral responses to these drives.

There are many functions that are essential to life, so there is really no point in prioritizing reproduction as "the most important" because there would be no life without respiration, either (even viruses would cease without it because their would be no cellular mechanisms available for viral use).

Of course we inherit our drives, and they, like every inherited trait, are subject to RM & NS. However, there is no evidence or reason to believe that any animal inherits a desire to have children.

Rick

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

Two items conflated there. Animals go to great lengths to obtain mates, lay nutrient-rich eggs in appropriate places and look after them till they hatch. So reproduction is important to them (important, understood, meaning stuff that is a high priority for them to do: they don’t need to know what or why they do it). The second bit is that, what’s not apparently important to most animals is what happens afterwards. Usually the kids are on their own -- and are equipped to look after themselves. Fair enough. However...

Mammals are an obvious exception: they take the process of mating and getting to produce offspring another step forward, blurring or ignoring the developmental boundary called birth -- holding the fertilised egg inside, feeding it as it grows, and then also looking after and feeding the babies after birth. Some sharks, similarly, retain their eggs within their bodies and nurture the growing foetuses in a placenta-like organ. (Once born, the sharklets are on their own of course.)

Aside for creationists: if a placenta is such a Good Idea (tm), why do only some sharks have it, and why is it structurally quite different to the mammalian one?

Also, the whole principle of kin selection shows that animals indirectly do ‘care’ about their offspring. Of course a vervet monkey doesn’t know that sounding an alarm call is helping its genes survive; nor do termites defending their mound to the death. They don’t have to know anything. That is, however, what in effect happens, because those that do it de facto leave more offspring than those that don’t.

Yup, that comes with being a mammal. Call it a caring-for-young drive, to avoid ‘instinct’.

Lots of them? Some animals such as fish go in for huge numbers of offspring and consequently ignore them once they’re born; others -- mammals again the obvious example -- go in for fewer, and invest more in each one. Most animals do something in between. I expect (anyone provide details?) that seahorses, where the male carries the embryos till fully formed, and the Surinam toad (Pipa pipa), which carries its spawn-cum-toadlets under the skin of its back, produce fewer offsping than ‘ordinary’ teleosts or anurans, balancing the greater investment with fewer which are more likely to survive. Humans are the quintessential high-investment-low-numbers. So lots of them? Maybe, maybe not. But until contraception, the point was moot anyway. The result was that most pre-menopausal ‘mated’ women spent most of their time pregnant.

No, not behave as if they want babies: the drive is to have sex, and lots of that. That drive leads, automatically and inevitably till Ms Stopes, to having babies. It may not be what people want, but it’s an accidental by-product with evolutionary consequences.

Jeanie, Jeanie full of hopes
Read a book by Marie Stopes.
But I see from her condition.
She must have read the wrong edition..

And I’m inclined to suggest that you’re wrong anyway: given the ubiquity of pets, and the prevalence of (and personal anguish and desperation involved in) fertility clinics and adoption, there seems to be a human need to have babies, to have some childlike thing to look after.

Arrgh! Bloody determinism! How many times do Dawkins and others have to point out that genes do not, as they are accused of arguing, determine things. It is always always ALWAYS the interaction of genes through phenotypes with the environment! A bacterial gene for methicilin resistance is probably useless in the wild. A gene for (ie which helps wire up the brain so that this behaviour is more often used) standing and fighting a predator instead of running might be good or bad, depending on what the commonest predator is in the area at the time. A gene ‘for’ learning language would be employed to learn the language of the culture it is in, or would be useless if the child is raised by wolves. A hypothetical gene ‘for’ added aggression might find the body it helped build in prison, or in a rugby / US football national player or a boxer, depending on the environment that body is in. In an environment where sex is no longer automatically tied to babies, we are free to choose. Oddly enough, the vast majority of people choose to have babies, despite all the problems they cause.

I wondered how long it would be before ‘genetic determinism’ turned up. How come environmental factors such as culture, which Rose et al (and you Rick?) would promote as far more important than genes, are not seen as just as deterministic, if not more so? Your genes are your own property, culture is imposed on you from the outside.

But this is the logical conclusion of where life came from. If you accept that life started as a string of molecules, then the principal -- only? -- thing that set the molecules of proto-life apart from any old hydrocarbon or benzene ring was their ability to make copies of themselves. Sometimes with errors. Enter natural selection. Thus, as I said, all the other features are side-effects of taking more and more circuitous routes to get replicated.

Sorry Rick, but <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> No, we and all animals inherit drives which de facto mean that having children is what generally happens. Sure, we human can overthrow the tyranny of the selfish genes. But the tendencies, the drives, the instincts, still remain, otherwise there'd by nothing to be overcoming. And as above, I’d query a lack of drive in humans for wanting children.

Cheers, Oolon

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Dr Rick

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

[ April 24, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>