An evolutionary biologist weighs in on the low birthrate thing, and he is fantastic.
The German public was recently shocked to learn that 30% of “their” women are childless — the highest proportion of any country in the world. And this is not a result of infertility; it’s intentional childlessness.
Demographers are intrigued. German nationalists, aghast. Religious fundamentalists, distressed at the indication that large numbers of women are using birth control.
And evolutionary biologists (including me) are asked, “How can this be?” If reproduction is perhaps the fundamental imperative of natural selection, of our genetic heritage, isn’t it curious — indeed, counterintuitive — that people choose, and in such large numbers, to refrain from participating in life’s most pressing event?
The answer is that intentional childlessness is indeed curious — but in no way surprising. It is also illuminating, because it sheds light on what is perhaps the most notable hallmark of the human species: the ability to say no — not just to a bad idea, an illegal order or a wayward pet but to our own genes.
Well whaddaya know.
People are inclined to eat when hungry, sleep when tired and have sex when aroused. But in most cases, we remain capable of declining, endowed as we are with that old bugaboo, free will. Moreover, when people indulge their biologically based inclinations, nearly always it is to satisfy an immediate itch, whose existence is itself an evolved strategy leading to some naturally selected payoff. A person doesn’t typically eat, for example, with the goal of meeting her metabolic needs but to satisfy her hunger, which is a benevolent evolutionary trick that induces the food-deprived to help out their metabolism.
For more than 99.99% of their evolutionary history, humans haven’t had the luxury of deciding whether to reproduce: simply engaging in sex took care of that, just as eating solved the problem of nutrition. But then something quite wonderful arrived on the scene: birth control. Because of it, women (and men) can exercise choice and, if they wish, save themselves the pain, risk and inconvenience of childbearing and child-rearing, indulging themselves rather than their genetic posterity.
And ain’t nothing wrong with that. Read the whole article.
This guy ain’t bad, but I’m still waiting for the “testosterone made him do it” apologists to come around.
Thank god someone said it. All these armchair EP stories about how people have an urge to have children are myopic. Evolution is, above all, “good enough”. Sex got us reproduced. We don’t need a biological drive to have children to get it done.
Oh, I just drew my first Evo Psych defender in my female screen names post!
In other species, sex is tied to reproduction in that females are only receptive to sex during heat cycles. Humans are not the same way; sex is not only divorced from cycles of fertility, it’s also possible, desirable even, to have orgasms without penile-vaginal sexual contact.
So methinks a slightly more complex model of human sexuality is in order.
Kin selection also needs to be taken into account – if your siblings have reproduced you’re still technically successful.
Well, voila! I’m successful three times over, then.
I guess this pretty much explains why after my husband refused to share equally in household/childrearing responsibilities–a very unattractive quality in my opinion–that we miraculously stopped reproducing.
Kick-ass article!
Evolution is, above all, “good enough”. Sex got us reproduced. We don’t need a biological drive to have children to get it done.
The weirdest version of this that I heard was from a woman who was disconsolate about having needed a C-section rather than giving birth vaginally, and argued that she must have some built in biological drive to push the baby out. Um, no. Back when your genes were being developed, C-sections weren’t an option, and by the time you got to the “push” stage, how you felt about it didn’t make a darn bit of difference to whether you reproduced.
It’s less weird when applied to the desire to have kids – at least liking kids enough to take care of them probably got selected for in adults, as cuteness probably got selected for in kids, and some of us do feel the desire for children as if it were a biological drive. But clearly, if there’s any “drive to have children” selection going on, it’s weaker in most people than the “drive to have sex” selection. And I can’t imagine there’s any “drive to push your baby out naturally” selection going on at all.
WOW! I THOUGHT I had FREELY DECIDED not to have children!!!!!!
You would not believe the number of people – friends, family, boyfriend, strangers – who have told me that “it’s not too late,” that I will “change my mind,” that “of course you’ll have children,” and have implied – and STATED – that I am NOT normal for not wanting children. My own boyfriend has even stated that my childlessness is “selfish” and goes against what “we are put on Earth to do.” (It should be noted that he is older than me, has three almost grown children, and doesn’t want anymore.)
Perhaps I should move to Germany…
First off – I still get a distinct chill up and down my spine in any article that mentions “German Nationalists” as relevant, particularly to something like “falling German birthrates.” Jibblies.
Second, zuzu: This is sort of a pointless diversion, but it’s interesting to try to imagine a human society where we weren’t permanently sexually receptive, but had a distinct ‘mating season.’ That’d lead to all sorts of exotic customs and rituals (not to mention concerns about travelling between climates and into the Southern Hemisphere). The case has been made (I’m being vague here because I don’t remember where or when) that human sexual receptivity was a prerequisite to our development as sentient beings. But there you go.
it’s interesting to try to imagine a human society where we weren’t permanently sexually receptive
Well, Ursula LeGuin did imagine it, with the twist that it was also a society where people weren’t permanently male or female (but became one or the other during their mating period).
People always seem to forget that Europe has been having this problem for almost a century now. I did my undergraduate thesis on the relationship between contructions of homosexuality and the “depopulation crisis” of late ninteenth-century France and it’s amazing how you see the same freak outs as you do now. The reason back then was the same as now: people didn’t want to have children that they couldn’t afford to take care of adequately. So they came up with any form of birth control they could at the time.
Of course that’s not how it was perceived by nationalists. Instead it was evil women or effeminate men ruining the species and not following their biological drives. Some things never change.
I’ve often thought it would be more convenient to go into heat twice a year than to get my period 13 or 14 times. And if everyone was on the same cycle, we could make it a holiday!
In my case the “drive to have children” was very strong, but one child cured it. The “drive to have sex” keeps coming back.
What book is that? I read a manga with the same plot.
I believe it’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I tried to read but never managed to finish.
That’s her famous “Left Hand Of Darkness”, along with one or two short stories with the same setting. It has, I think, held up well and contains the marvellous line “The king was pregnant”.
The book is The Left Hand of Darkness – in their society a person who was only 1 gender all the time was a sexual pervert, it was scandalous to always be “in heat” b/c only during those mating cycles did anyone have a gender or sexual urges.
I like the term “crpytic ovulation” that describes how no one knows by any external appearance that women are in heat. The words just sounds nice together.
Exactly Kate…. I had a pretty strong desire to have children, but after three that particular desire is nowhere around anymore. Of course, at 8 months pregnant, the desire to have sex doesn’t happen very often either… however, I’m sure it will be back a couple months after this baby is born and I have trouble imagining the desire to ever have children again. I hate being pregnant.
And if everyone was on the same cycle, we could make it a holiday!
Jeebus. That’d be one hell of a party.
Julie, I have two kids and thoroughly hated both pregnancies. I wanted the babies desparately but just never could find anything pleasant about morning sickness, weird cravings, and being the size of an SUV. I have it on good authority from my cousin, who just had her third child 2 years ago that, indeed, you will want to have sex again. Probably in 2008, but you will. I’ll be sending you many good thoughts.
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Since LeGuin was brought up, I’d like to mention Sherri Tepper: She too described an annual procreation festival in Gate to Women’s Country.
Now that I’ve been snapped out of Rothian tomes, Octavia Butler.
And C. J. Cherryh, in Cuckoo’s Egg, just as a passing reference.
What we really need is some anthropological/archaeological discovery that early humans would abandon babies if it would help the survival of the tribe. After all, they aren’t any use in getting food for a good 8-10 years, and that whole time you’ve got to keep them fed.
Ditto for some sort of “euthanizing” the elderly who were past their ability to reproduce or get food. Can’t you just see wingnut heads exploding over that?
There might be something problematic about birth rates that are too low to carry on the human species, but we won’t have to really worry about it for another 50 years at least.
Thanks for the good thoughts Karen!! 2008 sounds about right at this point, I think. At least I’m not alone in this whole “I hate pregnancy thing”. I love my kids fiercely and deeply desired all of them, but I really despise being pregnant and really have no desire to do it again.
I’m going to have to second piny: Le Guin is good on these issues, Butler is better. Even her worst novel trumps Left Hand of Darkness which, while good, still has some anti-lefist, willy-inducing passages. (Not that it can’t be good and anti-leftist, a la The Lathe of Heaven–about as stirring a screed against New Deal politics and social amelioration–only that Left Hand‘s consistently undermined by it in a way Lathe isn’t.
That said–a bifurcating comment, this will be–as someone dissertating on evolutionary theory and literature, and who therefore reads much of the soft- and hard- evolutionary biology and psychology, I feel qualified (if not yet credentialed) to say that the “problem” doesn’t exist. People have been saying as much since the 1890s, i.e. that we are both determined to behave in certain ways but able, via human society, to do otherwise; it’s just that there’s going to be a cost, evolutionarily speaking, to doing otherwise. In this case, the cost is simply not reproducing. That would have been quite a cost in the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness” (EEA)–though even there, as noted above, it could be mitigated by the success of one’s close relatives–but now? In 2006? That standard shouldn’t even apply.
Another way to say this is that while the evolutionary model is itself scaleable, that doesn’t mean the events being scaled are analogous. Another way to say this: sure, natural selection probably does work within and between human societies, but that doesn’t mean it works in the same way it once did in the EEA. There’s no reason it should, either, since the environment to which we now adapt is, I don’t know, slightly different from the one in which we evolved. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing to evolutionary psychology, however. I think there is, but the field itself is currently in its infancy, and it’s working with models too crass to catch the nuance of contemporary life.
In short–you know, the very thing this comment isn’t–I think there’s a difference between saying “these were the conditions in which human beings evolved” and “these conditions still govern human behavior today” or “these conditions are more natural because they were the ones we evolved in, even though we’re evolving in different ones today.” The evolutionary psychology/biology group doesn’t have nearly a sophisticated enough model to even begin to address the second, and the third’s propaganda and uninteresting to anyone who doesn’t already buy its premises.
I swear I don’t remember having seen David Barash’s byline nearly as often before David Horowitz named him one of the 100 (101? 2? 3?) dangerousest professors. He seems a good guy, by and large, so kudos to DH for providing him with more name recognition.