Kelvyquayo, pet mage of Jabober wrote:
ever notice that it's the poor that seem to have more kids?
I guess fu[b][/b]cking is a cheap way to spend your "quality time" aye?
I've got a theory on that one... (yeah, surprise. I know!).
I think it's some kind of very low level survival trait buried in our subconscious. Assuming the concept of "survival of the fittest" does hold some water, then each organism will take actions to ensure that it produces offspring that survive to perpetutate its genetic code.
Humans have a really long cycle between birth and procreation (typically 12+ years at a minimum). So the natural response to harsh conditions is to have more children once you reach the age at which you can procreate. You're essentially ensuring survival of your genes through quantity. If there's an 80% total child mortality rate given the conditions you live in, you've got to keep poping out babies as fast as you can, right?
That parts pretty well understood. However, I think that it's not the *actual* presence of harsh conditions that triggers this, but the percieved presence of harsh conditions. While our biology can certainly detect physical things like exposure to elements, hunger, etc, the sex drive isn't purely biological. There's a mental aspect to it as well. At some point the mind has to percieve a set of conditions that it percieves as "harsh" and respond by having more children. It can't just be directly physical because those are generally going to be short term effects which may not be reliable over time.
I think that when the subconscious percieves that the person is living in conditions that meet the "harsh" criteria, it pushes the person to procreate more to respond. But given that direct physiological conditions wont always be accurate, I suspect that over time we evolved a "mental perception" trigger. It's whether you *think* you are living in difficult conditions that triggers it, not whether you actually are. Much of that mental perception is going to be based on whether the person feels they are providing for themselves sufficiently. So someone who works hard, and earns good pay knows on a very basic mental level that he's comfortable and will likely live a long happy life, and so his drive to procreate is low. Someone who's unemployed, maybe has drug problems, and mentally simply does not see a long and prosperous future for himself will feel an increaed drive to procreate.
Even if we provide that person with all that he needs to survive, that drive will still be present. If we provide him with medical care and a place to live, and food on his table, at some basic level he'll know that he's not supporting his livelyhood and at some level his mind will interpret this as a "harsh" condition. Surviving because you got lucky or someone helped you out isn't sufficient to ensure long term health (or at least certainly would not be a measure of that for most of the development of humans). Only survival that comes from one's own work and efforts will produce a real mental perception of long health and success, and reduce the drive to procreate.
But what do I know?...
