Why are humans able to override their instinct to reproduce?

[Eran of Arcadia]

That seems to go against my understanding of natural selection - how would it benefit anyone's genes that an unrelated member of the same species can survive?

 

[Tomoyo]

Because you share some genes with members of your own species. It's like how if you can save your sibling with a better than 50% chance that you would die, the natural selection-ly correct move is to try to save your sibling.

 

[On Yer Flour]

Free will. We're not animals, after all.

Face it, Amadeus - you're a highly-evolved form of ape. So am I. One of these days, though, the technological singularity will come, and instead we'll be ape-computer hybrids.

 

[sourboy]

Why are humans able to override their instinct to reproduce?

Our brains have grown past the "pre-programmed" instinctual behavior, to allow for "free will" or optional behavior.... (like muscle movement vs involuntary muscle movement).

We have the choice. Some just need to excercise a little more thinking before making some choices

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Because you share some genes with members of your own species. It's like how if you can save your sibling with a better than 50% chance that you would die, the natural selection-ly correct move is to try to save your sibling.

Right, but the farther away you go the fewer genes. He was implying that an organism would sacrifice itself- and the ability to spread its own genes - in favor of another that shared very few.

 

[El_Machinae]

That seems to go against my understanding of natural selection - how would it benefit anyone's genes that an unrelated member of the same species can survive?

I think they're strategies which prefer the parent to the offspring, so that the parent can strive to reproduce elsewhere.

Except the monkeys. I betcha they just become homosexual to let off some steam.

 

[Photi]

I think they're strategies which prefer the parent to the offspring, so that the parent can strive to reproduce elsewhere.

i think this may be the answer to how natural selection could select for individuals that delay reproduction until a more viable time. the populations that went on reproducing when the environment could no longer sustain them exhausted their resources to where not even a few of them could survive. maybe this function in mice helps to create a steady-state in the absence of sufficient predation.

but then again, if all i smelled was urine like the described laboratory mice, i wouldn't want to be doing much of the wild thing either, as i would probably associate that smell with my would-be partner. and also, many animals in captivity do not automatically reproduce, often they have to be coaxed, and so maybe whatever biological mechanism is operating here in these larger zoo animals is also operating on these mice, the difference being the tolerance threshold to the mystery stimulus or stimuli being greater in mice than in other zoo animals, as mice typically reproduce in captivity.

 

[Thorbal]

Do those species really have built-in controls, or is it always external factors, like disease, starvation, and predation? I can't think of any examples.

I think this might be very interesting. But I don´t know if this can be applied to humans as well: r/K selection theory .

And I, being completely biased because of my social sciences background , tend to think that reproductive bahaviour is mainly culturally dependent, with a bit of economic thinking involved.