The logic of reproduction

The-Rigger wrote: »

For a long time, I have strugged to find a reason why it isn't predominantly an act of incredible self indulgence.

[Facetious] The most egotistical thing anyone can ever do :P [/Facetious].

The-Rigger wrote: »

I didn't mention selfish.

Being driven by your genes/instincts is understandable however nowadays many of us are far more aware of our biological drives and influences than our ancestors were.

The relationship between evolution and psychology is quite interesting.
I often wonder how absolutely pre-determined psychology is by genetics.
Humans like to think they are in control of course but i'd imagine an awful lot of psychology (from basic instinctual drives up to cognition/attitudes etc) is coloured in some way by genes.
I'd imagine that the desire to have kids is one of those aspects of psychology that is strongly genetically mediated and there is always probably a constant enough fraction of the population with a desire/ability to have kids.

tech77 wrote: »

But (all the above basic desires being equal as it were) i think the OP is talking more specifically nowadays about the logic/sense behind the desire to have a family.
What is the logic of the psychology behind that.

Interesting question. I suspect there are a number of reasons in the modern context, and instinct aside. Here's a few:

Peer pressure. As people go from their twenties to thirties and onwards, their social circle grows smaller. Friends who once went out with you on the town settle down and start families and unless you socialize with groups that are progressively younger than you, you will find you will have little in common with your peers. Additionally, at twenty-five you can party for days in a row - by thirty-five you progressively feel like going home from a night on the town by 1am.

Having children brings you back into your social sphere; gives you common interests with those you have known for years.

Pension. Children have been used as pension plans for millennia, with the only period of human history where the majority could realistically have an independent pension having started after WW2 and even that is increasingly unlikely as any recession could wipe out our private pensions, leaving us dependant on state pension plans that may not even be around by the time we reach our sixties.

I've read that to raise a child costs about €200,000. To build up a decent pension fund costs €400,000. Do the math.

Alternative Career. Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut or becomes a millionaire by thirty. A frightening number of people live pay-check to pay-check in jobs they hate or don't even know what they want to do when they grow up long after they actually have. Others will never get beyond minimum wage, because they lack talent, education or were just plain unlucky.

Changing career in mid life is increasingly common, and parenthood has become such a career change - especially when it is full time and paid for by the state or a more successful partner. For some, they have very few career options to begin with and so makes sense even when young. If you include the aforementioned pension logic, some people are simply economically better off as parents.

Immortality. Practically speaking this is as close as we get unless you manage to become the next Shakespeare, Napoleon, Michelangelo or Mozart. When you hit your mid thirties in particular, this hits people as this is when parents begin to retire or die, and the terrible reality hits you that in a century it will be as if you never existed.

Sure, there may be a footnote in some obscure book about you, but that's it. Even your grave will have been recycled twenty-five years after your death. Genetically, and in memory, children keep part of us alive a little longer (there is no guarantee that they will have kids after all).

Added to this parents transfer their ambition to their children. We had our time and didn't become millionaires or fly to the moon. We're not getting that time back - thank you for playing. However, if we teach our children what we learned along the way, maybe they will succeed where we failed - thus making our own failure less important.

I'm sure there is other logic there, but these are a few that come to mind.

Sleepy wrote: »

I'm not sure you can discuss this without discussing contraception tbh. Given that we've only lived with effective contraception for less than a century, reproduction being a logical choice is rather an alien concept to humanity.

I thought that this discussion was about the modern context though. Why people chose to have children prior to this or in a hundred years time is another, if related, discussion.

Even in this context, is doing something to satiate a desire to do it illogical?

Evolutionary theory would hold that many of our desires, or instincts, have become prevalent because they were ultimately logical. Even if evolutionary traits are random, those that turn out to give an advantage will thrive, while those that are not will become extinct.

If you answer a multi-choice test randomly, you're bound to get some of the answers right. They are logical in themselves, even if they were not arrived at logically and the logic was only realized afterwords.

I think that is the logic often used - I never said it was good or even altruistic.

Realization of one's mortality is a pretty scary thing. Makes us do all sorts of dumb things. I suspect you'll realize that in a few years.