[lotsofpulp]

It is possible for genes to influence the desire to birth more children, but it seems apparent to me that humans are capable of sufficiently complex cause and effect analysis that genetic influence would be insufficient to drive this specific decision making process, since it’s not a snap decision and there’s so many opportunities to reverse course.

Human beings are the only animal (that I am aware of) that can short circuit the process of reproduction by completely de-linking sex and pregnancy.

It is possible that evolution resulted a trait (cognitive plus physical ability to manipulate nature) that ultimately is not conducive to procreation.

And it is possible that in a million years, perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, or humans don’t exist but some other species exists with a different mechanism of reproduction, or humans figure out how to make babies in artificial wombs, or humans start living a lot longer, etc etc.

[kelipso]

More likely social evolution will take care of it long before biological evolution. Muslims have fertility rate of 3.1, for example.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, that is what I meant with

> perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant

I guess technically it should be “because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, be financially independent, and physically independent/secure”

[kelipso]

Well more typical would be something like the tribe that survives into the future has always removed women's ability to not get pregnant while the other tribe dies off.

I guess there are two types of social evolution, or evolution in general... One is where one tribe changes its customs over time, so evolves through intra tribe competition. Another is where you have multiple tribes with different customs, so evolves through inter tribe competition. Reality would be a mix of these two models.