infants of other species

[marycatelli]

Was pondering a matter after reading online someone maintaining at length that all, all, all infants regardless of species are helpless things that anyone can easily kill out of hand.

Hmmm. . . .

Well, in real life, there are altricial species, where the newborns (or newly hatched) are helpless and must be tended and fed and watched over by the parents to have any chance at survival at all.  But there are also precocial ones, that are born with their eyes open, and with the ability to move.  Ducklings, for instance, imprint on the mother duck exactly because she needs to lead them to water to chow down, rather than have them wander off -- and, of course, can imprint only because they can see.

At the extreme, there are superprecocial ones.  Birds that are hatched fully fledged and can often fly the same day as they hatch.

One wonders if you could have a precocial sapient race -- or even superprecocial.  There's the little detail that a precocial child has to have a lot of behaviors inbuilt rather than learnt; witness that a duckling can swim even if the farmer had the hen set the eggs (because she broods better than the duck), and will merrily swim off as the foster hen clucks madly at seeing her little hatchlings head off into the water.  On the other hand, dolphins and other cetaceans are precocial; they have to be, a cetacean that can't swim on its own is a cetacean that drowns.  Certainly, quite complex behaviors can be innate.  The first chipped stone tools show a remarkable lack of variety over all the continents and millennia they were made, and appear to have been as instinctive as a beaver's dam.  But by the same token, we note a major mental development when the stones start to develop.  Is a race preprogrammed to fly starships sapient, really?

Would explain a lot about selected fantasy and SF races, to be sure.  0:)

Comments

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

One wonders if you could have a precocial sapient race -- or even superprecocial.

I don't see why not. If by sapient you mean having a capacity for language and abstract thought, the brain developments necessary for those could happen independently of being able to fend for yourself at birth. I mean, our human race did go the route of basically being born premature and having extra-long childhoosd during which to develop neuronal connections at an explosive rate, but I can imagine other models where species with some hard-coded genetic behaviors nevertheless have large capacities for learned and transmitted behavior. Heck, we may be helpless at birth but we nevertheless come with a huge number of behaviors packaged in our genetic code.

[marycatelli]

The thing is -- can your abstract thought alter your innate behaviors?

Most of ours, after all, are influence, not actual acts.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

The period of infancy, of all times in the life of a human being, is when it's least influenced by abstract thought--no one teaches it to suck its thumb (beginning in the womb) in preparation for breastfeeding or to cry. I don't find it such a stretch to extrapolate from this set of behaviors into more self-sufficient ones. Why would, say, walking or swimming around interfere with the development of abstract thought when thumb-sucking doesn't? Heck, though not an original idea, you can imagine dolphin and whale calls as a full symbolic languages and voila, you get your precocial sapient species.

[marycatelli]

On the other hand, the baby is busy learning. Even prior to birth. Newborn humans for instance know the voices of people they've been around a lot (always Mom, of course), things that they've heard of, and even the languages they've heard spoken. As the kid is learning to focus and the like, the kid is busy mastering the art of learning things. It allows for more variation.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Precocial baby animals are similarly learning, too, if learning different things. It seems to me the difference is in brain wiring, not in the lack of mobility and self-sufficiency.

[marycatelli]

Not as much. It's been tested in labs and things; precocial creatures, being pre-wired for so much, are less adept at picking things up.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

I guess their hard drive comes preinstalled with too much stuff, lol. So has this lab testing compared altricial species like some birds and rodents with other non-sapient precocial species?

[marycatelli]

The one I've checked out was comparing altrical with precocial birds.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Awesome. As far as I know, though, "altrical" and "precocial" exist on a spectrum rather than being firm divides. So maybe there could be species that are less helpless at birth than our own, but nevertheless have the disk space to achieve sapience.

Or, here's another idea--infantile amnesia, not of episodic memory like in humans but of implicit memory in the form of skills and behavior. Maybe there are survival pressures that force a species to be precocial very early in life (like baby turtles having to leave the nest), but once that behavior serves its purpose (the infants arrive at a safe place, their space city or whatever) the neuron connections are decommissioned to make room for learned behaviors.

[marycatelli]

Oh, yes, it's a continuum.

The amnesia would also work. Though it would give entirely new meaning to the term "youth culture."

There wouldn't even have to be a real danger. If there's no evolutionary pressure on the kids to grow more atricocial, they could stay precocial even millennia after it was safe about them.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

"Youth culture," heh. If it's also accompanied by metamorphosis, they might seem like two different species depending on the stage in their life.

You're right, the evolutionary pressure may have disappeared long ago. Unless a mutation for altriciality showed up and conferred particular benefits under the changed circumstances, the species would merrily go on being precocial.

[marycatelli]

Yeah, but a technically precocial intelligent race is somewhat less impresive that an actually precocial one where the precociality and the intelligence obviously manifest in the same being. . . . one hopes the species' precocial traits do not include violence or the adults can contain them, because otherwise people might accidentally wipe out the species through slaughtering its young.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of District 9, where alien eggs could be freely burned but the children were protected. And you've outlined some lovely conflict situations there. For instance, human colonists could be plagued by violent vermin that turn out to be the young of a sapient native species. Or it could be a cultural conflict where humans are horrified to realize their highly advanced and intelligent neighbors are casually killing their young as a form of pest control because they hatch far more offspring than their society or resources could possibly support. (Somehow I think I've seen this story, though.) A third scenario could involve parents of this species anguished at the culling, and trying to hide or protect their young only to incur punishment.

[marycatelli]

I read a story once where the colonists knowingly wiped out the rampaging unintelligent young. It was supposed to be a threat to humanity's very existence that forced it. Which was not convincing, and why I ended up writing "Among the Wastes of Time." (If you read it -- and it's available in Warrior Wisewoman -- you will see that humanity's very existence is not at stake. Ah, the charms of the muse's changeability.)

[marycatelli]

At that -- what if the adults thought that altricial children were hopelessly handicapped and practiced infanticide?

Come to think of it, that might happen anyway without intention. A duckling that can't scamper quacking after the mother duck to the pond would shortly die of hunger. Even an intelligent race might regard it as humanity would regard a baby with a malformed throat who can not swallow, in the days before surgery was feasible: tragic but nothing to get worried about.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

At that -- what if the adults thought that altricial children were hopelessly handicapped and practiced infanticide?

In that case it confers no survival benefits, lol. I will use a sad icon to compensate for the fact that I just laughed at the thought of infanticide.

Your story has gotten very positive reviews from what I have seen. My usual sources--Kobo and the school library--don't carry the collection, but I'll keep an eye out for it.

[marycatelli]

Hope you enjoy it!

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

all infants regardless of species are helpless things that anyone can easily kill out of hand.

I wonder if they ever heard of spotted hyenas, where the newborns sometimes kill each other in dominance fights; or some species of shark where the young eat each other before they're even born. And heck, those are just the species I know about.

And am I wrong or can horse foals run within an hour of birth?

[marycatelli]

You're right. Most prey species are precocial.

[alivion.livejournal.com]

I just had a thought. Since prey species are running around an hour after birth (I've seen this first hand in goats, it's pretty amazing, actually) and predators like cats are blind and hairless blobs of helplessness for a few weeks at least, perhaps whether or not a species is precocial could be used in a sci fi work as an indicator that a species is dominant. So the peace-loving tree-worshiping squishies would be born able to scramble away from the fire-breathing war-mongering space orcs.

[marycatelli]

OTOH, if you have precocial orcs, you have an iron-clad reason for them to be that old stand-by: the always-evil race. Code in the horrible behavior.

Philosophic debate about whether they can be evil if they have no choice is possible, but the practical effect is the same.

[alivion.livejournal.com]

That's actually a very elegant solution. I think we're on to something here.

[marycatelli]

Playing with the spotted hyenas above -- D&D gnolls could easily be always evil. Their dominance games could dominate everything they do.

[marycatelli]

Hey, this explains why orcs and goblins and all live in more primitive conditions than the other races. They can't adapt to newness as well.

[ford-prefect42.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily relevant, but dogs, for example are capable of discriminating infants from adults. My dog, for instance, will cheerfully kill an adult sheep, but will attempt to mother a newborn lamb.

All conversations relating to sapience drop quickly back to the question of definition.

[marycatelli]

Oh yes, definitions. But consider this:

There's a kind of wasp that builds a nest and goes out and finds a caterpillar for its young to feed on. It stings it, drags it back, leaves it just outside, and goes in to check that nothing moved in in its absence.

If, when it comes out, the not quite paralyzed caterpillar wriggled away, it will drag it -- back to the location where it left it before. And then go and check again. No matter how fractional the distance that the caterpillar wriggled. And it will do it again and again and again. Scientists managed to produce dozens of such inspection by tweaking the caterpillar without the wasp once thinking, "Hey, it's not any farther away, so the danger's no greater" or "Man, this ain't worth it. I'm going to go get myself a less wriggly caterpillar."

It is exactly such divergence from pattern that we would call intelligence.