Human Nature and Having Children

[rousseau]

This might sound like a bit of an odd question but I'm curious what kind of answers will come from it.

It seems intuitive that having and wanting children is, for the most part, an intrinsic part of our nature, but I wonder what makes it so. What exactly is it about our psychological make-up that causes people to want kids, even though they bear a huge energy cost in having them?

 

[Peez]

This might sound like a bit of an odd question but I'm curious what kind of answers will come from it.

It seems intuitive that having and wanting children is, for the most part, an intrinsic part of our nature, but I wonder what makes it so. What exactly is it about our psychological make-up that causes people to want kids, even though they bear a huge energy cost in having them?

Selection has favoured, over the past four billion years or so, organisms that reproduce themselves. This has resulted in the evolution of behaviours that tend to lead to reproduction.

Peez

 

[rousseau]

This might sound like a bit of an odd question but I'm curious what kind of answers will come from it.

It seems intuitive that having and wanting children is, for the most part, an intrinsic part of our nature, but I wonder what makes it so. What exactly is it about our psychological make-up that causes people to want kids, even though they bear a huge energy cost in having them?

Selection has favoured, over the past four billion years or so, organisms that reproduce themselves. This has resulted in the evolution of behaviours that tend to lead to reproduction.

Peez

Sure, that's a given, but doesn't answer the question. The question is which specific qualities evolved in us that cause the behavior?

 

[J842P]

This might sound like a bit of an odd question but I'm curious what kind of answers will come from it.

It seems intuitive that having and wanting children is, for the most part, an intrinsic part of our nature, but I wonder what makes it so. What exactly is it about our psychological make-up that causes people to want kids, even though they bear a huge energy cost in having them?

Selection has favoured, over the past four billion years or so, organisms that reproduce themselves. This has resulted in the evolution of behaviours that tend to lead to reproduction.

Peez

Sure, that's a given, but doesn't answer the question. The question is which specific qualities evolved in us that cause the behavior?

I'm not sure exactly the sort of answers you are looking for. But at least for some people, it manifests as a deep desire to have children. Have you heard the term "baby crazy" before? While it's mostly a bit of a joke - a woman hits 30 then all of the sudden they cannot stop talking about having kids, or wanting to stop and hold every baby they see. But it is quite common for young couples to marry in their late mid 20s with solid plans about how and when they are going to start a family, but then a couple of years into the marriage, the woman will abandon those plans and want to "wing it." At more extreme examples, you have straight up baby kidnapping, and even more pathological, fetal kidnapping.

My own sister never had kids, she's much older than me, in her early 40s. But definitely, when she turned 30, she was pretty nuts about kids. It was actually quite sad, because she really really desired the whole traditional marriage with kids sort of deal, but she ended up dating one asshole who just wasted her time. I guess to be fair to him, he was apparently always clear about not wanting kids. I think she just held out hope that eventually he would. There were at least a couple of guys she could have married in her mid-to-late 20s. At that point, though, I don't think the urgency of her biological clock had caught up to her. That changed around her late 20s and early 30s, when she became pretty damn obsessed.

I just turned 29 (and I'm a male). For the last year or so, I've noticed that seeing babies makes me a lot happier that it ever did. Before, it was more-or-less a mundane thing, but now, I want to hold them and find myself smiling uncontrollably when I make eye-contact with one.

 

[bilby]

The biggest driver by FAR is liking sex, which has only very recently become decoupled from having children - contraception is (in evolutionary terms) fairly new (perhaps as little as a few thousand years old), and effective contraception, under the control of women, is only about 50 years old.

Doubtless there is some drive towards having children in many people, as well as and/or separate to the sex drive; But as the reproductive rates in places where women have ready access to safe and effective birth control demonstrate, it's not enough to inspire population growth, or even reproduction at the replacement rate of a touch more than two children per woman.

So to answer the OP, the qualities that evolved in us that cause us to have kids are (in order of importance):

1. Enjoying sex
2. Enjoying more sex
3. Really enjoying sex a lot
4. Having a strong urge to have sex
5. Enjoying sex
6. Maternal bonding with newborns
7. An ability to overcome the desire to kill the kids, despite discovering that the little shits have put a peanut butter sandwich in your new VCR
8. Social disincentives for infanticide due to it's being looked down upon by those who don't own a peanut-flavoured VCR

PS - Sorry about the VCR, Dad.

 

[untermensche]

Nobody is driven to have children.

The drive is to have sex.

People having sex already can decide to have children.

It is like getting a dog or a cat. Just something people know about and desire, not a drive.

 

[rousseau]

The biggest driver by FAR is liking sex, which has only very recently become decoupled from having children - contraception is (in evolutionary terms) fairly new (perhaps as little as a few thousand years old), and effective contraception, under the control of women, is only about 50 years old.

Doubtless there is some drive towards having children in many people, as well as and/or separate to the sex drive; But as the reproductive rates in places where women have ready access to safe and effective birth control demonstrate, it's not enough to inspire population growth, or even reproduction at the replacement rate of a touch more than two children per woman.

So to answer the OP, the qualities that evolved in us that cause us to have kids are (in order of importance):

1. Enjoying sex
2. Enjoying more sex
3. Really enjoying sex a lot
4. Having a strong urge to have sex
5. Enjoying sex
6. Maternal bonding with newborns
7. An ability to overcome the desire to kill the kids, despite discovering that the little shits have put a peanut butter sandwich in your new VCR
8. Social disincentives for infanticide due to it's being looked down upon by those who don't own a peanut-flavoured VCR

PS - Sorry about the VCR, Dad.

Yea I agree, sex is an overwhelming component of it. Especially in pre-history when many tribes weren't even aware that sex and child-birth were connected. Often-times fertility rituals culturally evolved which led to the production of children.

Now, I wonder what causes people who can see the connection between sex/child-birth and also control their reproductive rates to still have children. I wonder if it's as simple as a basic lack of awareness as in pre-historic times. For many people having children is just a normal thing to do and it doesn't dawn on them that they can not have children. I think this theory would account for the fact that many people have kids when they really don't have the financial means to support them.

It's kind of just a.. social pressure/social norm thing, like how people don't realize how weird it is to sing the national anthem before sporting events. They just, on average, don't really consider the possibility that one can live a life and not get married or have kids. Whereas smarter people are more likely to make that realization and go without.

 

[rousseau]

Selection has favoured, over the past four billion years or so, organisms that reproduce themselves. This has resulted in the evolution of behaviours that tend to lead to reproduction.

Peez

Sure, that's a given, but doesn't answer the question. The question is which specific qualities evolved in us that cause the behavior?

I'm not sure exactly the sort of answers you are looking for. But at least for some people, it manifests as a deep desire to have children. Have you heard the term "baby crazy" before? While it's mostly a bit of a joke - a woman hits 30 then all of the sudden they cannot stop talking about having kids, or wanting to stop and hold every baby they see. But it is quite common for young couples to marry in their late mid 20s with solid plans about how and when they are going to start a family, but then a couple of years into the marriage, the woman will abandon those plans and want to "wing it." At more extreme examples, you have straight up baby kidnapping, and even more pathological, fetal kidnapping.

My own sister never had kids, she's much older than me, in her early 40s. But definitely, when she turned 30, she was pretty nuts about kids. It was actually quite sad, because she really really desired the whole traditional marriage with kids sort of deal, but she ended up dating one asshole who just wasted her time. I guess to be fair to him, he was apparently always clear about not wanting kids. I think she just held out hope that eventually he would. There were at least a couple of guys she could have married in her mid-to-late 20s. At that point, though, I don't think the urgency of her biological clock had caught up to her. That changed around her late 20s and early 30s, when she became pretty damn obsessed.

I just turned 29 (and I'm a male). For the last year or so, I've noticed that seeing babies makes me a lot happier that it ever did. Before, it was more-or-less a mundane thing, but now, I want to hold them and find myself smiling uncontrollably when I make eye-contact with one.

Yea an answer sort of like that. I wonder what is the specific psychological driver that causes the behavior you mention? There must be something inherent in our wiring.

When I look at how my life has gone I also find myself leaning toward kids at the beginning of my thirties. To me, a big part of it now is that a) my fiance and I have the financial means to support them and still be well off and b) I once thought I could be happy without kids and now I'm not so sure. There was a time I thought I could read books, visit restaurants, watch sports, travel, and be endlessly fulfilled, then like running full speed into a brick wall I realized how empty all of these vacuous experiences were and I started really caring about my family. Now it feels like family is all I really have left. All of the friends I once had are drifting away, all of my hobbies are getting more tedious, and the only thing left that gives me any sense of joy is family. I wonder if that's a big part of it, and for people who have a lot of kids there is something like an inherent sense of joy and community in parents, relatives, kids and the like that they are more intuitively aware of than someone who thinks too much (like me).

Put another way, I once heard my female cousin of the same age as me (31) say something along the lines of 'life would be pretty long without kids'. Eventually you just get to a point where all of the kind of meaningless stuff that once excited you, like alcohol, partying, travel, casual sex, is just not enough and you crave something more.

 

[PyramidHead]

I don't know that there is any such thing as a biological drive to have offspring. Plenty of people have no interest in it. Everybody likes sex, though. That makes me suspect all of this baby-crazy stuff is cultural. Maybe quite ubiquitous culturally, but not necessarily biological.

When I look at how my life has gone I also find myself leaning toward kids at the beginning of my thirties. To me, a big part of it now is that a) my fiance and I have the financial means to support them and still be well off and b) I once thought I could be happy without kids and now I'm not so sure. There was a time I thought I could read books, visit restaurants, watch sports, travel, and be endlessly fulfilled, then like running full speed into a brick wall I realized how empty all of these vacuous experiences were and I started really caring about my family. Now it feels like family is all I really have left.

This stuff gets my goat real bad. These are all entirely self-serving justifications for starting a life that is not yours. Why do you think that you are entitled to configure matter in such a way that it becomes alive, and must then find its own way through life until death, just because you're bored with books and sports? This isn't taking up crocheting, it's putting another conscious being into the whole predicament of life, including the very crisis of fulfillment you are currently experiencing, which will probably lead to your offspring coming to the same conclusion and using the next generation as a way to gratify their disillusionment. It's like a pyramid scheme! If life runs out of entertainment by the time you hit your 30's even if you're comfortably well-off, maybe life isn't something to sign your unborn children up for without their say-so. The ups and downs of being a person in the world are not trivial, and nobody gets out of this alive. I wish you would put more thought into whether you are owed a certain degree of contentment, before you pass the buck by creating another locus of discontentment that will eventually deal with the same problem as you.

 

[rousseau]

I don't know that there is any such thing as a biological drive to have offspring. Plenty of people have no interest in it. Everybody likes sex, though. That makes me suspect all of this baby-crazy stuff is cultural. Maybe quite ubiquitous culturally, but not necessarily biological.

When I look at how my life has gone I also find myself leaning toward kids at the beginning of my thirties. To me, a big part of it now is that a) my fiance and I have the financial means to support them and still be well off and b) I once thought I could be happy without kids and now I'm not so sure. There was a time I thought I could read books, visit restaurants, watch sports, travel, and be endlessly fulfilled, then like running full speed into a brick wall I realized how empty all of these vacuous experiences were and I started really caring about my family. Now it feels like family is all I really have left.

This stuff gets my goat real bad. These are all entirely self-serving justifications for starting a life that is not yours. Why do you think that you are entitled to configure matter in such a way that it becomes alive, and must then find its own way through life until death, just because you're bored with books and sports? This isn't taking up crocheting, it's putting another conscious being into the whole predicament of life, including the very crisis of fulfillment you are currently experiencing, which will probably lead to your offspring coming to the same conclusion and using the next generation as a way to gratify their disillusionment. It's like a pyramid scheme! If life runs out of entertainment by the time you hit your 30's even if you're comfortably well-off, maybe life isn't something to sign your unborn children up for without their say-so. The ups and downs of being a person in the world are not trivial, and nobody gets out of this alive. I wish you would put more thought into whether you are owed a certain degree of contentment, before you pass the buck by creating another locus of discontentment that will eventually deal with the same problem as you.

This is actually something I've thought about pretty thoroughly, and at one point even justified not having kids because of.

These days I'm more inclined to believe that the positives out-weight the negatives, at least for the lives my own children would likely lead.

 

[PyramidHead]

I don't know that there is any such thing as a biological drive to have offspring. Plenty of people have no interest in it. Everybody likes sex, though. That makes me suspect all of this baby-crazy stuff is cultural. Maybe quite ubiquitous culturally, but not necessarily biological.

When I look at how my life has gone I also find myself leaning toward kids at the beginning of my thirties. To me, a big part of it now is that a) my fiance and I have the financial means to support them and still be well off and b) I once thought I could be happy without kids and now I'm not so sure. There was a time I thought I could read books, visit restaurants, watch sports, travel, and be endlessly fulfilled, then like running full speed into a brick wall I realized how empty all of these vacuous experiences were and I started really caring about my family. Now it feels like family is all I really have left.

This stuff gets my goat real bad. These are all entirely self-serving justifications for starting a life that is not yours. Why do you think that you are entitled to configure matter in such a way that it becomes alive, and must then find its own way through life until death, just because you're bored with books and sports? This isn't taking up crocheting, it's putting another conscious being into the whole predicament of life, including the very crisis of fulfillment you are currently experiencing, which will probably lead to your offspring coming to the same conclusion and using the next generation as a way to gratify their disillusionment. It's like a pyramid scheme! If life runs out of entertainment by the time you hit your 30's even if you're comfortably well-off, maybe life isn't something to sign your unborn children up for without their say-so. The ups and downs of being a person in the world are not trivial, and nobody gets out of this alive. I wish you would put more thought into whether you are owed a certain degree of contentment, before you pass the buck by creating another locus of discontentment that will eventually deal with the same problem as you.

This is actually something I've thought about pretty thoroughly, and at one point even justified not having kids because of.

These days I'm more inclined to believe that the positives out-weight the negatives, at least for the lives my own children would likely lead.

That's a fair assessment to make, but it's just your assessment on behalf of someone who might not agree with your appraisal of the good and the bad. In any case, I think the balance of the two isn't really relevant. Whether or not the scale tips one way or another, we can at least agree life is not an insignificant thing to endure, and there is a substantial degree of unpleasantness in even the most fortunate lives. That alone makes it manipulative to say: you have to contend with all of that (albeit with support and assistance) because the novelty in my life is fading. But the added dimension is that they also must contend with dying, which sucks for just about everybody. You know my overall stance on the topic by now.

 

[rousseau]

I don't know that there is any such thing as a biological drive to have offspring. Plenty of people have no interest in it. Everybody likes sex, though. That makes me suspect all of this baby-crazy stuff is cultural. Maybe quite ubiquitous culturally, but not necessarily biological.



This stuff gets my goat real bad. These are all entirely self-serving justifications for starting a life that is not yours. Why do you think that you are entitled to configure matter in such a way that it becomes alive, and must then find its own way through life until death, just because you're bored with books and sports? This isn't taking up crocheting, it's putting another conscious being into the whole predicament of life, including the very crisis of fulfillment you are currently experiencing, which will probably lead to your offspring coming to the same conclusion and using the next generation as a way to gratify their disillusionment. It's like a pyramid scheme! If life runs out of entertainment by the time you hit your 30's even if you're comfortably well-off, maybe life isn't something to sign your unborn children up for without their say-so. The ups and downs of being a person in the world are not trivial, and nobody gets out of this alive. I wish you would put more thought into whether you are owed a certain degree of contentment, before you pass the buck by creating another locus of discontentment that will eventually deal with the same problem as you.

This is actually something I've thought about pretty thoroughly, and at one point even justified not having kids because of.

These days I'm more inclined to believe that the positives out-weight the negatives, at least for the lives my own children would likely lead.

That's a fair assessment to make, but it's just your assessment on behalf of someone who might not agree with your appraisal of the good and the bad. In any case, I think the balance of the two isn't really relevant. Whether or not the scale tips one way or another, we can at least agree life is not an insignificant thing to endure, and there is a substantial degree of unpleasantness in even the most fortunate lives. That alone makes it manipulative to say: you have to contend with all of that (albeit with support and assistance) because the novelty in my life is fading. But the added dimension is that they also must contend with dying, which sucks for just about everybody. You know my overall stance on the topic by now.

Philosophically there's no real way around the issue, but hey, at least I'm thinking about it, and have consistently made decisions that will ensure a high quality of life for my potential children, rather than just forgetting to wear a condom.

It's really a catch 22, if they're not brought into existence they don't get to decide whether they want to live, if they are brought into existence they're forced to decide. I don't know that either of these options is morally superior until you start injecting material arguments into the equation. And that's the real decision that parents should be making, morally. Can I actually support my children? At least, that's what any sane, non-philosopher would ask.

edit: I should also add that I'm not justifying having children because I'm bored, but rather because I've recognized the value of family. I do think there is a lot of value to being alive, and I think it would be a net win. Mostly, though, I'm trying to understand why people, on average, have children, which is not at all a moral question. People are not moral, and the things they do are not always done for moral reasons.

I'm curious, though. Under what circumstances would you consider it justified for a person to have children?

 

[Treedbear]

I think it starts when teenagers begin to think about their lives as having some purpose, especially regarding how one becomes a member of society. Typically that entails following the example of their parents by raising a family. Add to that the sex drive. Young girls start to notice that everything about their bodies has something to do with having children. Young boys have to substitute some means of making a living in order to provide support for their wife and kids. Doing all that makes it easier to relate to other people at dinner parties. Or you can follow sports.

 

[beero1000]

For most of history, people had kids because they didn't have a choice due to lack of birth control. Even if birth control had been available, they would still have had no choice but to have children because they needed the extra hands just to survive. Children were put to work as soon as they were physically able in order to help support their family. It's only been very recently that people have had the option to make it a real choice at all.

It seems to me that the desire to have kids that I see in the modern world is mostly cultural. Personally, I don't really get it.

 

[Valjean]

Selfish genes, sex drive, social pressure.
For most of history there was no choice. Give in to your sex drive and children were the result.

For most of history, and in many current societies, children were useful. People weren't independent individuals, but part of a team. Children bolstered the team, they increased resource acquisition and safety. They were an insurance policy. Naturally, society developed strong, pro-children value, which persist, to varying extents, even today, in societies where kids have become economic liabilities.
In developed countries, child raising has become a hobby; an expensive one, both individually and ecologically.

 

[fromderinside]

So to answer the OP, the qualities that evolved in us that cause us to have kids are (in order of importance):

1. Enjoying sex
2. Enjoying more sex
3. Really enjoying sex a lot
4. Having a strong urge to have sex
5. Enjoying sex
6. Maternal bonding with newborns
7. An ability to overcome the desire to kill the kids, despite discovering that the little shits have put a peanut butter sandwich in your new VCR
8. Social disincentives for infanticide due to it's being looked down upon by those who don't own a peanut-flavoured VCR.

PS - Sorry about the VCR, Dad.

So sex drive and having sexual organs are really all about lust and pleasure?

On further analysis if sex gives us pleasure and we have sex organs it's the pleasure that lead to sex organs?

Naw, you don't mean that.

 

[bilby]

So to answer the OP, the qualities that evolved in us that cause us to have kids are (in order of importance):

1. Enjoying sex
2. Enjoying more sex
3. Really enjoying sex a lot
4. Having a strong urge to have sex
5. Enjoying sex
6. Maternal bonding with newborns
7. An ability to overcome the desire to kill the kids, despite discovering that the little shits have put a peanut butter sandwich in your new VCR
8. Social disincentives for infanticide due to it's being looked down upon by those who don't own a peanut-flavoured VCR.

PS - Sorry about the VCR, Dad.

So sex drive and having sexual organs are really all about lust and pleasure?

The question is not well formed. Nothing is 'all about' anything in biology; It's doubtful that anything is even 'about' anything in the context of your question.

On further analysis if sex gives us pleasure and we have sex organs it's the pleasure that lead to sex organs?

It is evolution that lead to both; Clearly they are closely coupled.

Naw, you don't mean that.

Judging by your inability to form a coherent question in response to my post, it seems to me extremely implausible that you have the slightest clue what I mean.

'Lust' (insofar as it is not synonymous with 'sex drive') is fictional - it's a subset of the (equally fictional) concept of 'sin'; Both require a supreme moral law-giver as a fundamental assumption, and it is logically impossible for any such lawgiver to exist, as shown by the Euthyphro dilemma.

Pleasure is a mechanism by which evolution encourages behaviours that lead to reproductive success in a population; it's counterpart, pain, is the mechanism by which evolution discourages behaviours likely to be inimical to reproductive success. As such, the concept of pleasure and pain is inherent in reproduction - sex is pleasurable, and physical trauma to the gonads is painful, both for much the same reasons. A person who is not inclined to avoid blows to the testicles, or a person who is not inclined to engage in sexual intercourse, significantly reduces his personal chances of reproduction, and (under the conditions extant in the ecological niche in which humans evolved), that is likely to be detrimental to the reproductive success of the population of which he is a part.

 

[rousseau]

For most of history, people had kids because they didn't have a choice due to lack of birth control. Even if birth control had been available, they would still have had no choice but to have children because they needed the extra hands just to survive. Children were put to work as soon as they were physically able in order to help support their family. It's only been very recently that people have had the option to make it a real choice at all.

It seems to me that the desire to have kids that I see in the modern world is mostly cultural. Personally, I don't really get it.

I do find it hard to reconcile the possibility of it being mostly cultural with the fact that for billions of years living things have been instinctually propagating themselves with no need for culture, and not only that, but in many cases deliberately caring for and raising their offspring.

Just throwing out ideas, but I do think it's possible that the mental acuity of people makes it possible, but not certain, for us to rise above the need to have kids. So subsets of our population (like those at Talk Freethought) have the ability to override the instinctual drive to pro-create, whereas other subsets feel an inherent need and desire to have kids. Almost like a neurological goldilocks zone that makes one more likely to like the idea of child-rearing. This theory would be supported by the fact that women group together on the bell curve in one area, and it's usually women pushing the species forward.

So with this in mind I might argue that having kids is maybe partly cultural, but also instinctual, just something that our genetic make-up usually causes us to do for whatever reason. And it trends this way because those who psychologically do not want kids will always fall out of the population.

 

[bilby]

For most of history, people had kids because they didn't have a choice due to lack of birth control. Even if birth control had been available, they would still have had no choice but to have children because they needed the extra hands just to survive. Children were put to work as soon as they were physically able in order to help support their family. It's only been very recently that people have had the option to make it a real choice at all.

It seems to me that the desire to have kids that I see in the modern world is mostly cultural. Personally, I don't really get it.

I do find it hard to reconcile the possibility of it being mostly cultural with the fact that for billions of years living things have been instinctually propagating themselves with no need for culture, and not only that, but in many cases deliberately caring for and raising their offspring.

Just throwing out ideas, but I do think it's possible that the mental acuity of people makes it possible, but not certain, for us to rise above the need to have kids. So subsets of our population (like those at Talk Freethought) have the ability to override the instinctual drive to pro-create, whereas other subsets feel an inherent need and desire to have kids. Almost like a neurological goldilocks zone that makes one more likely to like the idea of child-rearing. This theory would be supported by the fact that women group together on the bell curve in one area, and it's usually women pushing the species forward.

So with this in mind I might argue that having kids is maybe partly cultural, but also instinctual, just something that our genetic make-up usually causes us to do for whatever reason. And it trends this way because those who psychologically do not want kids will always fall out of the population.

Living things (with only the novel exception of post-contraception humans) require no distinction between 'instinctually propagating themselves' and 'propagating themselves due to choices influenced by culture' - from an evolutionary perspective, these amount to the same thing.

Only in the last tiny blink of an eye - at most a few hundred years, and more realistically a few decades - has the question of culture arisen; and then only in humans. Evolutionary history is therefore irrelevant to the question, because culture coupled with the ability to make it a significant influence on actual reproductive rates is a new trait that has simply not had time to be strongly selected for or against.

Humans have few offspring - typically no more than a dozen, and often as few as single digits - and historically even fewer than that survived to reproductive age. Until recently, a woman who chose abstinence due to a desire not to have children only had to fail to observe her choice a handful of times, and she could easily end up with much the same sized family as a woman who chose to have as much sex as she possibly could. The cultural choices were simply (almost) irrelevant to reproductive rates. Family planning is a new phenomenon, and it is the result of technology; Women in the 16th Century could no more choose not to have children, than they could choose to travel across the Atlantic - it was just not a technically available option for the vast majority.

 

[rousseau]

For most of history, people had kids because they didn't have a choice due to lack of birth control. Even if birth control had been available, they would still have had no choice but to have children because they needed the extra hands just to survive. Children were put to work as soon as they were physically able in order to help support their family. It's only been very recently that people have had the option to make it a real choice at all.

It seems to me that the desire to have kids that I see in the modern world is mostly cultural. Personally, I don't really get it.

I do find it hard to reconcile the possibility of it being mostly cultural with the fact that for billions of years living things have been instinctually propagating themselves with no need for culture, and not only that, but in many cases deliberately caring for and raising their offspring.

Just throwing out ideas, but I do think it's possible that the mental acuity of people makes it possible, but not certain, for us to rise above the need to have kids. So subsets of our population (like those at Talk Freethought) have the ability to override the instinctual drive to pro-create, whereas other subsets feel an inherent need and desire to have kids. Almost like a neurological goldilocks zone that makes one more likely to like the idea of child-rearing. This theory would be supported by the fact that women group together on the bell curve in one area, and it's usually women pushing the species forward.

So with this in mind I might argue that having kids is maybe partly cultural, but also instinctual, just something that our genetic make-up usually causes us to do for whatever reason. And it trends this way because those who psychologically do not want kids will always fall out of the population.

Living things (with only the novel exception of post-contraception humans) require no distinction between 'instinctually propagating themselves' and 'propagating themselves due to choices influenced by culture' - from an evolutionary perspective, these amount to the same thing.

Only in the last tiny blink of an eye - at most a few hundred years, and more realistically a few decades - has the question of culture arisen; and then only in humans. Evolutionary history is therefore irrelevant to the question, because culture coupled with the ability to make it a significant influence on actual reproductive rates is a new trait that has simply not had time to be strongly selected for or against.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.

I'd argue that culture isn't a relatively new thing, by a long shot. The difference between modern times and pre-modern times are primarily a) knowledge and b) reproductive technologies. Culture has been a big part of propagation for all of recorded (human) history, and probably human pre-history too. However, for the species to propagate people must a) have kids and b) successfully raise their kids.

So my argument is basically that reproduction has a significant genetic component, because that's intrinsic to propagation. Consider someone that genetically cannot raise their kids to adulthood, they'll fall out of the population. Only those that want to and can propagate do so, and so only their genes are passed on. This means that irrespective of cultural changes, culture will always be oriented toward propagation, and so will genetics.

Long story short this throws us back to an inherent psychological orientation toward wanting to have and raise kids, it's quite literally in our DNA. I want to understand the nature of that DNA.

What's changed in modern times is only our ability to control how many kids we have. So people who don't want them can have sex and not pro-create, and people who only want one or two can do that too.