(n.b.: some parts of this essay have appeared before.  I am
undertaking a series of essays derived from related but dispersed
previous posts on a subjects I consider important, for a forthcoming
Web site).  

                The Procreation Instinct Myth
                Copyright (c) 1994 by Nick Szabo
        permission to redistribute without alteration hereby
        granted    

There is a popular myth that evolution gives us "an instinct for
survival", and along with that the implication that we have a
genetically derived instinct for procreation.  But evolution
has given us only those instincts which can be encoded in DNA,
translated into protein, and were useful for genetic propagation
in past environments, typically hunter-gatherer cultures.  The evidence
from psychology, anthropology, and demographics overwhelmingly
shows that we have no significant, specific genetically-derived 
motivation to have children, none that stands any chance of keeping up 
with the evolution of memes like birth control.  Rather we have a 
strong instinct for sex, and non-behavioral mechanisms have taken 
care of the rest.  Effective birth control, firmly in the 
service of memes, utterly trumps any genetic "procreation instinct".

Unlike the pessimistic population control advocates, I do not 
not find this fact to be good news.  Rather I am profoundly 
disturbed by this phenomenon; I find it a threat to extropian 
goals fully rivalling statism and deathism.  Until reliable 
birth control in the developed cultures of the 20th century, 
the extropian value of boundless expansion emerged 
automatically from a billion years of fiercely competitive genetic 
evolution.  In the space of a few decades we have short-circuited 
what those billions years built up, and no effective meme of 
boundless expansion has sprung up to take the genetic motivation's 
place.  Instead the dominant memes are evangelical, parasitical,  
infecting hosts while slowly destroying them.  Extropianism, 
Hutterism, and Mormonism are potentially memes that can restore 
the motivation for boundless expansion; the latter two have 
demonstrated the ability to maintain high intrinsic expansion 
rates but at the cost of memetic isolation and withdrawal from rational 
discourse; the former is rationally based but lacks motivation and any 
actual track record of intrinsic expansion (as opposed to evangelsim, 
which is ultimately parasitical but often a good short-term memetic strategy).

I want to have children, but I recognize that I obtained 
this desire by developing a strong case of the "boundless expansion"
meme, not genetically.  There are plenty of men who don't want to have 
children, and most probably don't care much until faced with a fait d' 
accompli.  I can't speak for women, except to note the demographic 
fact that where birth control is readily convenient & available, the 
fertility rate is nearly an order of magnitude below the level of 
resources available to support it at the historical human level, ie 
well below that predicted by straight genetic Darwinian theory.  
Clearly genetic motivations have been short-circuited very recently 
in history by memetic motivations and capabilities, with a 
spectacular demographic impact.

I don't go around with images of cute babies dancing across my mind, or
any other sort of emotion that remotely approaches the motivating
power of sexual attraction.  The various tasks needed to get to
to get to the point of having & raising children in a reasonable
environment, without compromising other goals like life 
extension, etc., are difficult to motivate. It's much easier to
chase after women, party, and study (I get some sort of "hunger
for knowledge" motivation from somewhere, which is on balance
a good thing but time-consuming).  There are also the various
expectations society and potential partners (who have to do
more of the work than I, at least initially) bring to the
ballgame, like "I want to send my kids through college", etc.
Then there's the tradeoff between college money for the kids & life
insurance policy for cryonic suspension (not to mention a life insurance
policy for the kids).  If it weren't for birth control there
wouldn't be any motivational problem; the decision to expand
to the bounds of the environment would already have been made for me. 

I've discussed in previous posts about how this problem doesn't go away 
with uploading; but on the other hand with uploading I get a chance
to explictly redesign my motivations, so that I can in fact
have "wet dreams" about, and orgasms induced by, making copies (either 
cloned or merged), manufacturing computational resources to run myself 
in, and similar forms of boundless expansion, rather than spending
my resources pursuing an act that used to be the main motivator of 
boundless expansion, but now is merely a (very enjoyable and 
motivating) form of entertainment.  Cf. my previous post,
"Uploading and Sexual Engineering".

Uploading may not be practical before we genocide ourselves, alas.  
A near term use of such speculation is that some of the 
imaginative uploading solutions may in fact be feasible in 
some form as memetic engineering for wetware.

Do I sound too much like a Catholic here?  A Mormon, a Hutterite?
"Sex is for procreation, not recreation?"  Utter heresy for many
extropians!  I've expressed rather forcefully my rejection of the 
superstitions behind those beliefs, but demographics aren't 
supersitions.  A small number of special populations in the 
developed world are expanding, most populations in the developed 
world are declining, and most extropians (including me) are in the 
latter group despite all our rational talk about "boundless 
expansion".   Nor do the memes of eugenics come to our aid --
not only are they vulnerable to statist abuse, but they are
memetically sterile besides.  Datum -- Franics Galton, genius
and founder of eugenics, died without issue.

And who says Hutterites don't have fun with sex? The fundamental 
tenent of my sexual engineering may well be, there is 
no reason sex cannot be both procreation _and_ recreation!  But
the separation of these two aspects may be disastrous, and a main
goal of sexual engineering is to rejoin them together somehow.
I have no expectation that the birth control genie will be put
back in the bottle; I seek a way to leapfrog it just as it has
leapfrogged the genes.

Herein also lies my take on Tim May's complaint about extropian
tolerance towards religion.  Here's my challenge to Tim: let's see 
science solve the problem of boundless expansion.  Not just the surface 
technology part of it -- tech can make birth control much cheaper than 
it can boost fertility and education -- but the basic problem of 
motivation.  If science can do that, I will have no problem dumping 
the last remnants of religion overboard.

Nor do I hold much hope for neopaganism, since the so-called "fertility 
rites" do not seem to actually motivate fertility.  Furthermore, 
neopaganism is strongly linked with the genocidal memes of "deep 
ecology".  Datum: over half the male members of Earth First! have had 
vastectomies.  But perhaps there is an opposite extreme to neopaganism 
that I haven't encountered; I'd love to here comments on this and 
see some statistics on neopagan fertility.

Until science can come up with a strong set of pro-expansion 
motivations, a very tiny set of memes, all of them quite irrational 
but very motivational, are the only successful non-parasitical 
implementations of the extropian value of boundless expansion.  
Thus I'll keep studying religious memes for wisdom, a situation not
pleasing to me at all, since as far as truth is concerned my
belief in the scientific method is every bit as strong as Tim
May's, and I cannot bring myself to believe in Veils of the Souls,
etc. to a degree remotely sufficient to inspire their motivational
impact.

Nick Szabo                              szabo@netcom.com