Does childlessness drive people crazy?

From an evolutionary perspective, childlessness is as bad as death: either way, your genes die with you. (Unless you’re a bee or ant, which you’re not.) Quite obviously, you are descended from people who successfully reproduced, not from the millions of creatures throughout Earth’s history who didn’t. Adaptations that led to your ancestors reproducing got passed down to you, while adaptations that failed to make your ancestors reproduce didn’t. As a result, the vast majority of us have a rather strong inclination to do whatever it takes to reproduce.

I know this is incredibly basic stuff, but you wouldn’t believe the number of people I have encountered who swear that humans do not possess instincts related to reproduction.

Males and females have followed a different historical path toward reproduction, for both the obvious reasons (women bear the brunt of childbearing,) and some less expected ones. Like that, while about 80% of women historically reproduced, it looks like only 40% of men did.

What happens when people don’t have children? On a biological level, something needs to kick in and get them out there, where they can meet people and fuck. Or overthrow society, kill all of the other males, and then fuck. After all, the continuing existence of society means nothing when you don’t have kids.

When men have children, their testosterone drops. The more time men spend around their children, the more their testosterone drops. This is very sensible: it prevents men from murdering their children.

Since American society has, since its founding, afforded enough resources for most men to marry and have children, the normal state for American males by their thirties has been relatively low testosterone. Today, however, millions of people are choosing not to have children, do not live with their children, or are delaying childbearing for decades.

Men who do not have children/live with them do not have this drop in testosterone. They have the testosterone of evolutionary failure, of increasing aggression until, well, they reproduce or die. (Or just get old.)

If I really wanted to embarrass people, I could tell of some of the absolutely nutty things men I know have done to try to get laid. Rational thought and risk assessment go completely out the window. People act like they have gone mad.

The evolutionary pressures on women have been different, but I can’t imagine that they were non-existent. Like men, they probably find pregnancy and babies calming–meeting people requires aggressive, social behavior that (often) leads to violence, but raising babies requires being a quiet, responsible homebody. It’s probably not a coincidence that childbirth triggers, in some women, actual depression.

Women with no children seem, at least anecdotally, highly aggressive. Their willingness to overthrow society is well-known.

On the plus side, childlessness probably drives a certain amount of creativity. The childless can take more risks, and are driven to succeed. But this is not to say that high levels of aggressive hormones are, long term, great for your brain or overall health.

Has Australia gone Totally Nuts?

Is having a loving family an unfair advantage? from ABC Radio National–the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Or is it just philosophers?

Western moral philosophy is completely broken because “academics” do not understand the basics of how morality works.

Normal people understand morality. People who were dropped on their heads as infants generally understand morality. Philosopher Adam Smith, however, thinks,

‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’.

The test they devised was based on what they term ‘familial relationship goods’; those unique and identifiable things that arise within the family unit and contribute to the flourishing of family members.

For Swift, there’s one particular choice that fails the test.

‘Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realise these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.’

…

“I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,”

Jesus effin’ Christ, this guy is an idiot.

Of course, anyone who studies inequality and sets themselves up as an expert on the issue and says things like, “I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families,” is an idiot. We have studies on these nifty people called “identical twins” and what happens when they are adopted by two different families and raised in different environments.

What happens is not very much. Within the normal range of parenting (like, not beating your children and locking them in the closet,) measurable life outcomes like criminality, IQ, income, etc., have more to do with the kids’ genes than with their adoptive parents’ parenting.

(Where parenting probably does matter is how much your kids like you. If you’re a jerk to them, they probably won’t call you very often.)

So, no, inequality is not caused by people reading bedtime books to their kids. It’s not caused by sending them to private school, and parents sure as hell don’t need philosophers to come up with complicated theories to justify being nice to their kids, because normal people don’t suffer these delusions.

“According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’”

Riiiight. Remember, you pay actual money to send your kids to university so they can be taught by these people.

“‘When we talk about parents’ rights, we’re talking about the person who is parenting the child. How you got to be parenting the child is another issue. One implication of our theory is that it’s not one’s biological relation that does much work in justifying your rights with respect to how the child is parented.’

For Swift and Brighouse, our society is curiously stuck in a time warp of proprietorial rights: if you biologically produce a child you own it.”

This is because most humans would knife you before letting you take their children away from them, because the instinct to take care of our children is a basic biological drive honed by thousands of years of evolution. Morality is an evolved instinct for taking care of our children. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand morality, though you might get by simply by listening to the collective wisdom of thousands of generations of your ancestors who managed to successfully raise children.

“Then, does the child have a right to be parented by her biological parents? Swift has a ready answer.

‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’”

I am normally a peaceful person, but this guy actually inspires a deep, burning hatred, but that might just be my fear that this guy is going to try to kidnap my children speaking.

Rights are a social construct. Ethnicity is kind of a construct, and kind of a biological reality. Identifying with and getting along with one’s parents is based entirely in reality. It has to do with things like “are my parents jerks?” and “Do my parents understand me?”

So let me tell you a little secret of some relevance: I was adopted. My adoptive family was very loving and very kind. I am now, as an adult, in contact with my biological family, from whom I was, shall we say, unjustly removed. My biological family is also very loving and kind. No one here was jerkfaces; I am grateful to everyone.

I have a much, much stronger connection with the biological family I only met as an adult than I have with the adoptive family that actually raised me. I can’t help it. These people are like me in deep, fundamental ways. They have the same or similar hobbies as I do. They struggle with similar problems. They reason about the world in the same ways. We have instant shortcuts to understanding each other.

So, even though my adoptive family was super-loving and awesome and I love them and so on, the idea of trying to run a whole society like this, the idea of depriving everyone in society of that basic instinctual connection with the people around them that you non-adopted people don’t even realize you have, is kind of horrifying.