browwiw wrote:

You wouldn't need to have a fertility cult in the world of EP. Just get some gene donors and devote the appropriate resources to banks upon banks of exowombs. When the infants decant after 9 months just place them with foster parents.

9 Months? An exowomb can grow a full-grown adult body within 3 years! If you plan to raise them from infancy, it would take little more than a month and a half to create a newborn infant (assuming a constant acceleration).

browwiw wrote:

Well, I'm assuming nobody wants a retread of the Lost fiasco. So, that means producing a generation of children gestated as normally as possible...well, as normal as you can in outer space with gene splicing and exowombs. But, not maturation acceleration or in vitro mental conditioning. Just bake them buns up for 9 months in safe, secure exowombs. I'm probably over thinking it, but a project like that would probably be done over a period of at least 20 years, producing a new 'crop' ever 3 to 5 years. That way you don't overburden the childcare and education systems at every stage of development. No "Baby Boom" scenario, as it were.

Yeah, but it was how the Lost were raised that was the problem, not how their bodies were grown (and even then, it really wasn't how they were raised anyways; it was the Exsurgent Virus). Gestating a baby to full term in 1½ months should be fine, after which you can raise the child normally. It's mainly about getting its body to full pacing than anything.

Extrasolar Angel wrote:

Technological capability is there for such a procedure, but I was thinking about more conservative scenarios. You could have situations like that beyond Jupiter, but I guess that some communities on Mars or Luna where they are original colonists would prefer more traditional ways of rising children.

Even in those locations, exowombs are likely to be the de-facto standard. They are safer, healthier, and allow for easier in-vitro gene modification. The only groups that will likely be using classical means of birth will be the bioconservatives.

browwiw wrote:

I'm hesitant on the idea of speeding up fetal development just because right now we don't know what that sort of effect that will have on neurological development. 9 months in the womb the womb may be vital for pre-natal psychological health. Who knows? I may just be borrowing trouble.

Actually, I'm under the impression that biological acceleration affects all aspects of the body evenly, meaning that 1½ months in an exowomb feels like and has the effects of 9 or so months in a normal womb. It's somewhat like time acceleration in VR.

Decivre wrote:

Sex will definitely have changed in concept by the time we reach the same level of technological development as those in Eclipse Phase. And I mean in virtually every way. VR and XP technology (and muses, for that matter) will allow single people to live sexually satisfying lives without the need for a partner. Even amongst couples or groups, the joys of sex will be amplified by such amazing technology. You could have sex with someone, while using XP technology to send every sensation you feel to them in real-time, while they do the same to you. This would essentially allow two or more people to feel the sexual gratification of every one of their partners at the same time, creating a whole new level of intimacy. To that end, what we deem socially acceptable today will likely become a much broader field as technology advances. The concept of "fetishes" will be less abhorrent to the common man. Things like masochism and sadism will become a normal part of society when people's bodies can be healed very easily, and even death is escapable. Foot fetishes and the like could be satisfied by XP vendors, who could sell recordings and such that would feel like the real thing. People who want to date catgirls can ask their girlfriends if they'd be up for a trip to the vats. Monogamous people can fulfill their partner's desires for groupsex without having to allow adultery through clever use of forking and extra bodies. And it doesn't end there! Imagine how many crimes we could cathartically remove from our society. Pedophiles could satisfy their sexual needs by dating/marrying mature people sleeved in neotenic morphs. Those we would call rapists today could purchase "rape AI" that is designed to act unwilling during sex, and companies could produce a number of them with different personalities to satisfy their needs; hell, they may even purchase scenario vidgames, where a specific location and person is created for the purpose of "raping". No one needs to be harmed for them to satisfy their id. This even could "cure" murderous desires. Imagine a sociopath opening a "murder dungeon", where people go in and pay a price to get sleeved into another morph and find out what it's like to be murdered! Those people get to have what would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience today, as many times as they may desire; and the sociopath doesn't have to be a burden on society. He can even make a profit in the process. As for reproduction, they already do give a good degree of info on how it is done. Some people create forks as a means of producing life. AGIs and programmers often code new AGIs for the sake of knowing what it is like to birth a new living being. This may have the double satisfaction of being a parent, and creating something amazing with your own two hands. Children can be grown to full term in exowombs, but I'd imagine that many (especially bioconservatives) would prefer the joys of raising a child from youth to adulthood physically. Many have grown up as infomorphs (such as the Lost Generation). Time acceleration even speeds up the process of maturation, allowing them to learn a lifetime of experience in a short while. Hell, the Lost are no older than 10 by the time the game's setting takes place, yet they have been full grown adults for nearly 7 years already! Reproduction would likely take on every form you've mentioned, and then some. Every other aspect is largely philosophical, and who are we to judge? Just imagine how bizarre, interesting this could become. Picture a husband and wife combo, where the husband is the pilot of the scum barge, and his wife is a cyberbrain attached to the barge itself! She could have a secondary biomorph body for their "matrimonial desires", and an exowomb attached to the ship so they could have children (which she would still be carrying "inside her"). Imagine just how unique every family could be, the idea of the nuclear family being shattered by the eccentric lives that most transhumans would live. Sounds awesome to me.

Call me a bioconservative, but that all sounds pretty disturbing to me. Maybe it's because I don't buy into all the tropes of transhumanism but I really can't see "rape AI" being an accepted thing.

Really interesting comment on here. I'm sorry I've had to scan read the last few posts because I wanted to post this before my lunch break finished, so if I'm repeating anything that's been said or if my point has been made irrelevant by a previous statement I'm sorry. I'm really interested in this topic because it's something that we're looking into currently in the game we're playing. For my two-pennies worth I think that in the Eclipse Phase setting genetic procreation is dead. When you can change your body your legacy is no longer genetic it's memetic. To counteract this we're looking into creating a programme that maps human consciousnesses and blends them to create a new person. This process can have as many 'parents' as requested and the blending could be as random or specific as the user wants. As part of this we're looking into childhood 2.0, a means of growing new consciousness as infolife in a kind of simulspace creche with other infolife acting as nannies for the developing consciousnesses. The hope is to be able to do this at an increased speed but obviously the goal is always to avoid what occurred with the Lost generation. If anyone has any comments on this as a concept I'd be really interested to hear them because obviously I'm looking for obstacles to the project's success. I'm not so sure that the difference between a programmed AGI mind and a biological mind would be that qualitatively different. I get that an AGI is structured differently (with a greater aptitude for mathematics and a lower aptitude for social interaction) but with the understanding of cognitive mapping available in Eclipse Phase creating an AGI that works similarly to a biological framework shouldn't be too difficult, it's more of an engineering issue. If you can map the biological mind then you could just create an AGI mind that replicates it. It's a software issue not a hardware issue, otherwise you wouldn't be able to run bio-minds on cyberbrains. I think the possible reason that this hasn't been looked into further is the general prejudice towards synthetic life and also the fact that biological consciousness is pretty inefficient in general so I think it's a bit of a research dead end. If you're saying that it's the fact of programming taking place anywhere in the creation of the consciousness that makes it different, well life-experience and genetics are pretty much just programming taking place in the design space of the environment the developing consciousness exists in. The only difference is that it's the environment doing the programming rather than a programmer, the effect is just the same.

Noble Pigeon wrote:

Call me a bioconservative, but that all sounds pretty disturbing to me. Maybe it's because I don't buy into all the tropes of transhumanism but I really can't see "rape AI" being an accepted thing.

I can see how some would see that as disturbing, but I have a more pragmatic view about it all. Sating those disturbing desires in a legal outlet is a far better option than waiting until they vent them in an illegal manner. It's the same mindset behind YMCAs in crime-ridden neighborhoods. It's better to give people a safe, controlled outlet for their aggressive tendencies than to leave them in a powder keg so they'll inevitably use those tendencies in the worst way possible. It's the least evil you can have with such a situation. Perhaps an evil, but still the least. Still, I am excited about the idea of a world where the nuclear family is not only unexpected of people, it's the exception rather than the rule. Imagine a child who is raised by a single parent... and their many forks. Imagine someone who grew up a child of their local habitat... I mean literally, in that the hab brain is one of their parents. Imagine someone who raises their beta fork as a son or daughter, creating the idea of mental immortality rather than genetic immortality. The "typical family" will become a mindset so alien to the average transhuman, that they might scoff that there ever was such a thing as the "typical family" to begin with.

kuato wrote:

Would you guys be interested in crowdsourcing an unofficial supplement on this topic? It comes up often enough that I think we could certainly use it. Folks who like it can use it as-is or update for their campaigns specifically. What do you think? I have a house rule document we could use as the base.

I'd be interested if I could see any mechanical implications. I'm not sure there are any house rules to codify.

[quote]Still, I am excited about the idea of a world where the nuclear family is not only unexpected of people, it's the exception rather than the rule. Imagine a child who is raised by a single parent... and their many forks. Imagine someone who grew up a child of their local habitat... I mean literally, in that the hab brain is one of their parents. Imagine someone who raises their beta fork as a son or daughter, creating the idea of mental immortality rather than genetic immortality. The "typical family" will become a mindset so alien to the average transhuman, that they might scoff that there ever was such a thing as the "typical family" to begin with.[quote] I have a lot of feelings for a potential future like that, but "excited" is most certainly not one of them. (Also, this post is formatted weird, as in its in a quote box---I blame this bloody mobile phone and/or my inability to use it)

kuato wrote:

Would you guys be interested in crowdsourcing an unofficial supplement on this topic? It comes up often enough that I think we could certainly use it. Folks who like it can use it as-is or update for their campaigns specifically.

Sounds fun. I like setting documents more than extra house rules in any case. At the very least it would be useful to mine past threads for all the options and possibilities discussed, so GMs can decide what they want to use.

Awwww... that was great reading! I loved the sentence "Humans often prefer to end up in a tree, but for some reason old robots like becoming playground equipment."

I can see what you mean but I'm not sure I agree. The family bond is (arguably) generally based on the desire to see your own genetic material prosper. In EP that's become irrelevant, what's more important is that your memes persist. As a result I think the typical family is a bit of an anachronism and people will set up different familial bonds. I mean will a morph's brain still create Oxytocin at the sight of a child that doesn't have the same genetic material as it? I totally agree that people will still want companionship but I think it will become increasingly based on people who share the same ideas and beliefs rather than similar biological material.

That's a really good point but I think it's putting too much emphasis on genetic evolution whilst disregarding memetic evolution. We use contraception because we have a genetic drive to have sex but we understand (through memes that make up our conscious mind) that the outcome of children is not necessarily desirable also we can conceive of the idea that overpopulation is a bad thing. I agree that people will still want a familial bond but the family won't take the form of the genetic one anymore. The genetic drive to hold together with a group of people because you share genes won't be the same so we'll seek out those relationships with others, people who we share ideas with. The desire for kinship will be the same but the selection pressure to satisfy it will be different so it will express itself differently. Childless people adopting and loving their children is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. They can't see their genes continue but they can see their memes continue that's the perfect reason to adopt a child it's just different types of evolution. Also people who adopt children don't necessarily represent the 'typical family' (same sex couples etc.) this is one area where we can see the meaning of family is changing. Now fast forward x amount of years and it's possible to have children created from your ideas rather than your biology. Also you could have children with more than one other person and you can create a fork in a simulspace that can raise that child to adulthood. What family means is going to change and it won't represent what we perceive as the typical family of today. I'm not arguing that the desire for kinship will not exist I'm just saying the expression of that will change.

Union Jack wrote:

I agree that people will still want a familial bond but the family won't take the form of the genetic one anymore. The genetic drive to hold together with a group of people because you share genes won't be the same so we'll seek out those relationships with others, people who we share ideas with. The desire for kinship will be the same but the selection pressure to satisfy it will be different so it will express itself differently.

I don't think family has ever been about sharing genes. It's about emotional relations formed by nurturing or growing up among certain people. Unknown relatives coming home won't feel like family, but your adopted brother will. What sort of selection pressures do you see, and on what timescale? I don't understand what you mean.

Union Jack wrote:

Now fast forward x amount of years and it's possible to have children created from your ideas rather than your biology. Also you could have children with more than one other person and you can create a fork in a simulspace that can raise that child to adulthood.

Iirc the Lost project was an attempt to raise children in accelerated simulspace - it is not something that can actually be done safely in EP (yet). I also think it is very few parents who would actually want to skip experiencing the childhood years. Three- or fourway relationships, you think that will be common? Or what do you mean by children with more than one other person?

One could imagine an entirely secular version, perhaps sponsored by the PC: transhumanity needs children! Natalism doesn't have to reduce women to brood mares, given exowombs: the real bottleneck is getting people to form families. Natalist policies might include tax breaks, higher resource allocations, subsidized morphs, housing and school, shortened indenture contracts and other nudges to get people to raise more children. Natalists argue that a higher population is needed to create the necessary diversity for a successful transhuman species; just having lots of cloned bodies and minds will not work. They are natural allies with the culture experimentation people.

Decivre wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

The odds are that there are persistent human desires for partnership and having children that will ensure something like the "typical family" will continue to be very common. We have families because people want them, not because they're necessary.

I'm not in disagreement with this statement, but what constitutes a family today is defined by culture traditions and biological limitations. The technological scale of Eclipse Phase threatens to tear apart these aspects in ways that destroy the modern concept of "typical" family, while mostly just allowing an expansion or potential redefinition of the term "family" itself. Here's a quick list of things that will change: [list][*]A person's birth gender will not determine whether they will be the father or mother of their children. Someone biologically born a man could carry his children in his genegineered womb. Someone biologically born a woman could impregnate their spouse with sperm. With forking, you can be both at the same time. You may also do neither thanks to cloning, and still have a child. [*]A person's genetics will not necessarily determine who that person defines as "family". This is especially true for the instantiated; they may have very well lost access to their original genetics, so their children are guaranteed to not be blood-related to their original bodies. Furthermore, it's very possible through exowombs and genefixing that your children may not even be blood-related to your current body. [*]What constitutes "birth" and "children" will change. A person can create an AGI or an uplift, or prune their own fork down to infancy (we shall call these "nu forks"), and raise these as their own.[/list] There are other ways the paradigm might change. Today, there is a quiet stigma about adoption that keeps many orphans in orphanages. Many people value genetic lineage to such a high regard that they often couldn't even imagine taking in a child that isn't blood-related to them. But in a society where genetic information becomes a triviality, these stigmas will completely disappear (or at least become negligible). And these are just the changes that come off the top of my head. It's a brave new world.

I don't see any real difference between a family with old-fashioned "genetically related" kids, a family with adopted kids, or a family that started with baby minds sleeved into bought infant morphs. A family where mom and dad trade sexes sometimes, that's still a standard family unit to. What I call a standard family and I think will remain the most common choice is a couple with kids. The details of bodies and such are likely to change, but it just seems to me that we have emotions and drives that leads us to love and partner up, and have children, and we'll still want that. I don't see EP offering much really new here - sure people can choose no kids, or have kids on their own, but people can do that today already, and it isn't the common choice. I'm 35 and I've seen practically all my friends and acquintances end up in a partnership with children or desperatedly wanting that, even though many had very different ideas about what they wanted in life when they were younger. For most people, those hardwired drives just kick in at some point. So I'm not really sure if we disagree on anything but the definition of a "standard family".

Arenamontanus wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

I don't see any real difference between a family with old-fashioned "genetically related" kids, a family with adopted kids, or a family that started with baby minds sleeved into bought infant morphs. A family where mom and dad trade sexes sometimes, that's still a standard family unit to. ... So I'm not really sure if we disagree on anything but the definition of a "standard family".

So what about experiments in changing the emotions? For example, my writeup of the Conquest of Bread where, based on some dodgy sociological theories, the population have engineered themselves into a big extended same-sex family where emotional bonds presumably follow at least somewhat different pathways. (just consider the bizarre hacks of the Westermarck effect they must have included - incest is the rule, but there are wrong kinds and right kinds of incest.)

If the majority underwent psychosurgery that changed the drives and emotions that leads so many people to establish themselves in standard families, then that would of course be a deathblow to families. Hey, what about virtual wifes, children, families? Why deal with the hassle of marital discussions and unruly children when an AI and AR overlay can satisfy your needs? Tamagochi on steroids

Anarchitect wrote:

When is baby's first backup? When does baby get their cortical stack?

I'd say as soon as possible. If they just get a brain scan from an ego bridge every week or actually a cortical stack installed I can't say, but as a parent in an extremely safe modern western environment where I really don't have much to worry about, the safety of my children is something that is very important and that I think about pretty much on a daily basis.

Anarchitect wrote:

What is puberty like for a growing kid? Especially because it's pretty much optional?

Puberty might actually be something that everyone would just agree on fast forwarding over :) If it is possible to do so safely. There might be some important socialization going on in that period - remember the Lost.

Anarchitect wrote:

Do children get corrective psychosurgery? How soon? Can parents perform elective psychosurgery on their children to ensure the kid has the mental traits they want?

There's certainly going to be a demand for it. Look at how much effort is put into raising children, and getting them diagnosises and therapy and drugs, like the whole ADHD and Ritalin craze. I would SOOOO much like to be able to use psychosurgery on my kids ;)

Anarchitect wrote:

Do parents have full rights of ownership and determination over their children's egos, or are their rights limited? In what way? When does the PC CPS take away your kid?

Probably much like today they have full ownership and determination, up to the limits of child abuse - though what constitues child abuse will be very different from place to place of course. If some people start doing strange stuff to their childrens' egos that becomes problematic for society, some places might discourage that, along the same lines that most countries require that you school your children.

Decivre wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

I don't see any real difference between a family with old-fashioned "genetically related" kids, a family with adopted kids, or a family that started with baby minds sleeved into bought infant morphs. A family where mom and dad trade sexes sometimes, that's still a standard family unit to. What I call a standard family and I think will remain the most common choice is a couple with kids. The details of bodies and such are likely to change, but it just seems to me that we have emotions and drives that leads us to love and partner up, and have children, and we'll still want that. I don't see EP offering much really new here - sure people can choose no kids, or have kids on their own, but people can do that today already, and it isn't the common choice. I'm 35 and I've seen practically all my friends and acquintances end up in a partnership with children or desperatedly wanting that, even though many had very different ideas about what they wanted in life when they were younger. For most people, those hardwired drives just kick in at some point. So I'm not really sure if we disagree on anything but the definition of a "standard family".

What about children raised by forks of a single person? What about children raised by a group of people (village raising children, so to speak), as opposed to a specific romantically bonded couple? What about children raised by two (or more) people who aren't married, aren't sexually or romantically attracted to each other, and come together solely to aide one another in the raising of children? What about someone who takes care of and raises children not of their species (perhaps a crazy cat-lady, whose cats happen to speak fluent Mandarin and do chores around the house; or maybe the crazy cat-lady is in fact a cat-lady raising human kids)? The modern idea of kids being raised by a couple is a pretty new concept. Kids used to be raised by their parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and any other elders in their family tree as a unified whole. It used to be that people didn't leave their families and move elsewhere... you lived together with your clan until the day you died. The nuclear family was birthed within the past hundred years or so, as travel became dirt-cheap and fast. So I highly doubt it should be heralded as a standard by which all future families are likely to hold to, especially in a world where so many paradigms risk being toppled.

I think you're missing the point. Within extended families living under one roof, you still had the basic unit of couples and their children. Sure a lot of family members pitched in with all sorts of stuff, but the basic unit with the strongest bond was still the "standard family" of a couple with their children. When society changed and extended families broke up, it was this unit that remained. And in the western world we're free to live pretty much as we want, and most seek this family unit. I think that basically the desire to bond with a partner and have your own children is too strong to be overridden to any significant idea by culture (though psychosurgery and such could do the trick). The only real exception to it that has been common in some societies that I can see is where men had many wives, but I think that will only happen in highly patriarchal societies or where there are women in deep poverty. Where women have their freedom I don't think many will stand for that.

Decivre wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

I think you're missing the point. Within extended families living under one roof, you still had the basic unit of couples and their children. Sure a lot of family members pitched in with all sorts of stuff, but the basic unit with the strongest bond was still the "standard family" of a couple with their children.

And again, this is a complete fabrication. Much like marriage for love, nuclear families are a completely newfound concept. If you want to talk a real basic unit, it would be a single parent with children... a second parent is an expansion to this, not a requirement. I have yet to see any evidence to show that two-parent families are somehow superior to both single-parent and poly-parent households. It sounds like the same sort of propaganda material that stipulates heterosexual couples produce healthier children than same-sex couples.

I don't really buy the whole "romantic love is a social construction" idea. There's plenty of research into romantic love - the brain is wired for, the hormonal basis for it is described, etc. If you try to tell a psychologist that love doesn't have a physical and genetic basis they'll likely laugh at you. It is pervasive across all cultures and times as far as I know. Artwork have spoken of it from ancient greece through Shakespeare to modern times. Even among homosexuals (which I think we'll agree is a rather new social group that has been largely free to make up their own norms) you see people partnering up. I'd argue that romantic love is a basic human emotion and when we are free to love as we please most of us will form relationships based on that. And who cares about it being "superior"? Humans often want to and therefore do things that aren't superior or rational. I'm not making some moral judgment either.

Quote:

Smokeskin wrote:

When society changed and extended families broke up, it was this unit that remained. And in the western world we're free to live pretty much as we want, and most seek this family unit. I think that basically the desire to bond with a partner and have your own children is too strong to be overridden to any significant idea by culture (though psychosurgery and such could do the trick).

The reason you saw the prevalence of the nuclear family after the extended family fell out of popularity is because of the strong institution of marriage that existed in the dawn of the industrial revolution. You had an environment where people were legally unable to adopt without marrying, and where premarital sex could get you banished from your family. Marriage was effectively forced on people who wanted children. We don't live in that culture today, and the concept of the nuclear family is already dissolving to a massive degree.

Honestly I don't see it dissolving to any large degree. Sure people fall out of loveand get divorced, but typically they then seek to fidn someone new to partner up with.

Quote:

Smokeskin wrote:

The only real exception to it that has been common in some societies that I can see is where men had many wives, but I think that will only happen in highly patriarchal societies or where there are women in deep poverty. Where women have their freedom I don't think many will stand for that.

Perhaps. You might not see the ancient institutions of polygamy return, but I can see families coalescing into polyamorous open marriages, or polyfidelist closed marriages.

Polyfidelist closed marriages (which I understand as standard partnership but still having sex with others) is surely possible and is imo mostly related to sexual morals and norms. Polyamorous relationships tend to be very unstable and stressful for those involved, with jealousy and fear of your partners leaving. I don't think stuff like that works for most people when they're free.

Your social constructivist ideas seem to fly in the face of scientific findings on the subject, so I'll just leave it at that. When you're using oppressive arranged marriage practices in India as an argument for human emotions and how we choose to arrange oueselves when free, I don't think we'll ever reach a common understanding.

Decivre wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

Your social constructivist ideas seem to fly in the face of scientific findings on the subject, so I'll just leave it at that. When you're using oppressive arranged marriage practices in India as an argument for human emotions and how we choose to arrange oueselves when free, I don't think we'll ever reach a common understanding.

You don't think it unusual that despite the rapid spread of unarranged love-based marriages, arranged marriages not only remain common but are often entered into willingly? I mean there's an entire money-making industry of Japan in which people go into arranged dates to find people that they, and their families, find suitable as a mate. They often don't date until they determine any degree of love... it's all to find compatible wealth, views, looks and status.

I myself found my wife on an online dating site where I looked for women with looks, weight and personality that I liked, and she did the same I guess. We wrote together daily for 14 days before meeting up. That is to me an excellent way of finding someone to fall in love with and with a good chance that it will last. It's not like you have to fall in love with some random person (in fact I try to avoid that, I had a bad tendency to fall in love with beautiful girls with little regard to actual compatibility, so I made a point out of avoiding contact with that dreaded combination of looks and unintelligence from my early 20s). And these are also still standard family units.

Quote:

Are you really under the ludicrous delusion that people today don't arrange for marriages for reasons other than love even in the West? Never heard of immigration marriages? Marriages for the sake of child-rearing? If these things exist today, why do you believe they wouldn't exist in any theoretical future?

I have never said that ALL partnerships will be based on love. I have said that MOST will be, in response to claims that standard families will become the rarity. Of course there will still be people who find that marriages of reason are the right thing to do, or find themselves pressured into it, or drop their beloved anarchist and marry some boring Martian wife because that's a career necessity. But let us not pretend such things are fun or easy, or that those people do it for trivial reasons, or that the majority is likely to find themselves in such a situation.

Romantic love and its link to family structures is actually an area I have read up on for my research on the ethics of love-modifying drugs. My resulting view is that: (1) romantic love is a human universal - it can be found in all human societies. (2) the *role* and *expression* of romantic love varies a lot. In some societies it is the end-all reason for being together, in others a virtue of good matches, and in some it is seen as a kind of madness. (3) Pair-bonding evolved because human children need strong investment to survive: in hunter-gatherer societies the mortality of single-parent children is horrendous. (4) Pair-bonding is *part* of what we call romantic love. It is the long-term oxytocin-linked relationship that is sustained after the initial flames of attraction/infatuation (more dopaminergic) and lust are reduced to a manageable level. (5) Pair-bonding systems in humans likely evolved from mother-child bonding systems, producing caring behavior for the partner. It is not implausible that such systems have also been exapted in a weaker form for friendships. (6) Humans are fairly but not completely monogamous. Different cultures handle this differently, but doesn't seem to strongly affect the rate of extra-relation affairs. (7) Children can be reared in a lot of different ways; the important part for growing up emotionally healthy is getting strong emotional contact with reciprocally loving adults, not their genetic relatedness. (8) There is a great deal of individual variation in strength of emotional bonds to partners or children, the weights placed on different aspects of love, and level of jealousy. (9) The nuclear family *as a family unit* is a pretty new invention. There are plenty of alternative kinship and rearing systems, which have historically been the majority. Arranged marriages for example often fulfill more of an economic or social function than a romantic one, but romance does develop in a surprising (to westerners) number of them. Pair-bonding can be really complex, and might indeed create bonding with more than one person - but this is currently not common. Polyamorous constellations can be just as stable as dyad relations, but it all depends on having the right people and logistics. Conversely, the stability of dyads is affected by a lot of things that have little to do with emotions, such as economics, but is expressed emotionally (nobody states 'economic inefficiency' as a reason for divorce, despite statistics showing that this is a pretty strong predictor). All this said, I think the most common behavior of humans would be to form dyads, some of which want children. Whether the child is related, whether the dyad sticks together for rearing, and whether others get involved in the rearing (and emotional bonding to the dyad) can vary quite a bit. In rich and open societies it is easier to afford and tolerate variants on this. But note that the deep evolved systems probably will cause us to gravitate towards the "parent(s) bonding with children" attractor - how many parents and what their emotional links are might be quite arbitrary. I would be surprised if *unmodified* or *uncoerced* humans could sustain non-bonding with children. Of course, a few psychosurgical edits in the hypothalamus ought to be able to fix that...

Arenamontanus wrote:

Polyamorous constellations can be just as stable as dyad relations, but it all depends on having the right people and logistics.

But having the right people and logistics is quite difficult, isn't it? I have a hard time seeing this as something that could see widespread use unless there's some factor that effectively coerce people into accepting it (and/or secure people's position in the relationship as jealousy, competion and insecurity with the new wife could be minimized if the old wife was sure she wasn't getting kicked out at some point).

Smokeskin wrote:

It is ironic that you're justifying obviously oppressive practices on a basis of "cultural differences" here and "defending" feminism in another thread. Do you seriously think it is fine that the family head decides who his children are supposed to marry and spend their entire lives with? Do you seriously think that the children always agree? Have you never heard of the sort of shit they do to the women who don't take well to say an abusive husband - which ranges from incarceration and beatings to getting burned alive. That is indeed a despicable point of view you have there. Oh wait, you intend no malice, you are just a cultural relativist with the best intentions. How you politically correct types manage to juggle your sensibilities is beyond me.

I find it interesting that from your point of view, modern arranged marriage structures like Japan's [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miai]Miais[/url], China's marriage markets, or India's marriage brokering industries are viewed as oppressive due to familial investment in one's choice of mate or spouse. Perhaps you try to conflate it with the sort of arranged marriages that still exist in the Middle East (which I explicitly avoided mentioning), or because you yourself have a specific mandatory view on what a positive marriage is defined by, and all other marriage structures are aberrant in your mind? Or maybe your definition of free will is so vast, that any and every decision that a parent makes for their child is tantamount to a form of slavery, and you feel that proper parenting means complete abandonment of one's kin to all the chaos of the modern world, good or bad. Perhaps if you actually looked into modern arranged marriage customs of either India, Japan, and nowadays China, you'd know that the child has final say in who they marry. Maybe if you actually did a little research instead of judging the concept based on the word "arranged", you might know a bit more about how cultures other than yours handle social bondings such as marriage. But nay, let us judge all other races and nations as savages bereft of morality and humanity, because they do not conform to your personal determinations on how relationships should be formed. Because this seems to be how you judge the world, Smokeskin. You look for key phrases which denote things you dislike, take any person who ascribes to or practices them, and assume that they are one-dimensional cartoon villains. Because to assume that people are deeper than that is far too hard, and it's so much easier to just simplify and hate.