beatrice_otter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beatrice_otter) wrote2015-07-19 08:17 pm
beatrice_otter) wrote2015-07-19 08:17 pm
The birds and the bees are not Vulcans, Captain
So, I have a question about Vulcan biology.
I have long been puzzled by the inherent illogic of a heat that can kill you. Heats are supposed to grow the species, not reduce it.
But the thing is, terrestrial animals that have a heat, usually it's one heat cycle per year or so. Because that gives you time for the babies to be born and grow a little bit before winter sets in and obviously you don't want to be pregnant during winter scarcity, and then by the time a year has gone by the babies are old enough/mature enough that they don't need Mama and another heat cycle begins in the spring.
Vulcan heats are seven years apart.
My first thought, as I began contemplating this, was ... how long are Vulcan pregnancies?!? Because Vulcan children seem to grow at about the same rate as Human children (7 year old Spock in the animated series episode Yesteryear looked and acted about like one would expect a 7 year old to, and there was never any hint that he was developmentally advanced or delayed for a Vulcan), and so if you think time between heats=pregnancy+time for baby to no longer be an infant, well, you start to wonder if Vulcan pregnancies are like three years long or something.
But then I realized that I was overlooking part of the nature of a terrestrial heat cycle. Part of it is also to time things such that no one is pregnant during winter, the time when resources are scarcest.
Which leads me to wonder: does the planet have a year that is seven Earth-years long? It seems like that would be pretty far from Vulcan's sun--Mars has a year that's two of our years long, Jupiter's years are 12 years long, would a planet even be habitable in that range? (And if this is the case, does that mean that all Vulcans go into Pon Farr at about the same time every seven years? Eeep! Talk about a disruption to the society! Of course, if this is the case, how do they keep it secret? Just kick every non-Vulcan offplanet for six months every seven years?)
Is there some other reason for a seven year cycle that I'm not thinking about?
But this brings me back to the first question, that’s bugged me for years. And perhaps provides an answer. If resources are (or were, when the species was evolving) so scarce that they can only afford to have a kid once every seven years, maybe it is designed to clear out deadwood. Maybe part of the reason for such a deadly heat is to reduce competition for resources which the species can’t afford to waste on non-reproducing members.
I wish fic spent less time on teh sex and more time on the biological, social, and cultural aspects of it.
I have long been puzzled by the inherent illogic of a heat that can kill you. Heats are supposed to grow the species, not reduce it.
But the thing is, terrestrial animals that have a heat, usually it's one heat cycle per year or so. Because that gives you time for the babies to be born and grow a little bit before winter sets in and obviously you don't want to be pregnant during winter scarcity, and then by the time a year has gone by the babies are old enough/mature enough that they don't need Mama and another heat cycle begins in the spring.
Vulcan heats are seven years apart.
My first thought, as I began contemplating this, was ... how long are Vulcan pregnancies?!? Because Vulcan children seem to grow at about the same rate as Human children (7 year old Spock in the animated series episode Yesteryear looked and acted about like one would expect a 7 year old to, and there was never any hint that he was developmentally advanced or delayed for a Vulcan), and so if you think time between heats=pregnancy+time for baby to no longer be an infant, well, you start to wonder if Vulcan pregnancies are like three years long or something.
But then I realized that I was overlooking part of the nature of a terrestrial heat cycle. Part of it is also to time things such that no one is pregnant during winter, the time when resources are scarcest.
Which leads me to wonder: does the planet have a year that is seven Earth-years long? It seems like that would be pretty far from Vulcan's sun--Mars has a year that's two of our years long, Jupiter's years are 12 years long, would a planet even be habitable in that range? (And if this is the case, does that mean that all Vulcans go into Pon Farr at about the same time every seven years? Eeep! Talk about a disruption to the society! Of course, if this is the case, how do they keep it secret? Just kick every non-Vulcan offplanet for six months every seven years?)
Is there some other reason for a seven year cycle that I'm not thinking about?
But this brings me back to the first question, that’s bugged me for years. And perhaps provides an answer. If resources are (or were, when the species was evolving) so scarce that they can only afford to have a kid once every seven years, maybe it is designed to clear out deadwood. Maybe part of the reason for such a deadly heat is to reduce competition for resources which the species can’t afford to waste on non-reproducing members.
I wish fic spent less time on teh sex and more time on the biological, social, and cultural aspects of it.
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The best series dealing with the cultural/social/biological ramifications of everything that I've ever read is Pat Foley's Holography series.
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Pon farr is a biological accident. The same set of genes that handed out telepathy also included a little "bonus" of pon farr. A heat cycle that wasn't fatal became a heat cycle that was in people who also had the telepathy genes. Because telepathy, even low-level telepathy, provided a huge boost to survival chances, pon farr managed to stick around, the genes spread to the entire population, and then they got stuck with it.
That could also be why they can't seem to get rid of it even with all of their technology and mental disciplines. The only way to eliminate the pon farr is to start messing with the brain structures which are linked to higher brain function, including telepathy.
As for the timing, Vulcan pregnancies are IIRC, 11 months long (I believe I got that from one of the novels, though, so it's not strictly canon). Vulcan is also closer to its sun than Earth. (Okay, that's totally not canon, and based on the fact that 40 Eridani A's habitable zone only extends out to 0.6 AU, but this is all headcanon.)
There are a few possibilities. We could be talking about 7 Vulcan years, which may only equate to 3-5 Earth years, which would allow for a female to give birth and then recover and put some resources into the child before having another.
It could be that Vulcan children need several years of focused attention for the best chance of survivability, again maybe because of telepathy.
It could be that there's a solar or other non-orbital cycle that runs about every 7 years, meaning that every 7th year is cooler and wetter, lending it to better survival chances for the offspring. In this case, though, most Vulcans would go into pon farr around the same time, which as you've said would be massively disruptive to society and also really doesn't fit what we've seen. (Though, it's possible that they used to go into heat around the same time, but civilization diminished the direct connection between the 7th year being cooler and the the year preceding it being the year that everyone conceives their babies, so while the 7 year length stuck around, the timing of the individual cycles were de-synchronized.)
ETA: Also, given a 200+ year lifespan, assuming, say, 100 years of fertile life, a 7 year gap between babies isn't as bad as it would be in humans, that only have 25 or so years to make babies. (Less, when women's fertility tended to wane earlier due to poor health and malnutrition.)
I wish fic spent less time on teh sex and more time on the biological, social, and cultural aspects of it.
*agrees so hard*
I have a huge pon farr kink, and it's maybe 15% about the sex and the rest of it is about okay, but how would it all work?
Also ETA: What fascinates me the most about it is that it is presented as a male cycle, not a female one. That's the part that really makes things interested.
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As to the gene thing, I would think that both telepathy and pon farr are, from a genetic standpoint, highly compicated gene complexes with lots of factors. To give a little comparison, autism spectrum disorders are linked to about 500 genes that they know about, and they're finding more every year--there may be as many as 1000 individual genes that work together to form autism, not all of which need be active in every person on the spectrum, and the variation is what makes autism spectrum disorders manifest differently. Autism spectrum disorders include major differences in the structure of the brain, which telepathy would also have to do, and I can't imagine that something as complex as telepathy would require fewer genes to create and regulate it. At which point, surely there would have to be enough complexity there that scientists as advanced as Vulcan ones could cut out/redesign any linkage to pon farr that might have existed.
If it really is a planetary cycle, I sure hope things have desynchronized! Gah, that would be terrible.
As for the maleness of it in the way it's presented, I wonder how much of that is an artifact of the characters we're seeing it in. There have been three major Vulcan regular characters, and two of them (Spock and Tuvok) are male. Most of the secondary Vulcan characters that we've seen were also male. But we saw on Enterprise that T'Pol had a fake Pon Farr induced by something or other, so it obviously affects females too, at least a little bit. But the preponderance of male characters means we can't really judge how it affects female Vulcans.
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Yes, but one thing about the Star Trek future is that the Federation is strongly opposed to genetic engineering - while the stated reason is based on Earth history, we've seen characters like T'Pol and Worf be horrified at genetic engineering as well. So they might be able to cut out Pon Farr, but they won't. Also, if the telepathy and Pon Farr genes are connected, they might not be able to do so without a greater likelihood of non-telepathic offspring. This linkage would work well for the Romulan/Vulcan divide - Romulans don't have telepathy but they also don't seem to have Pon Farr, AFAIK.
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Also, please remember that the Vulcan society of T'Pol's day is just weird--and oppressed by the Science Directorate, whom I can totally see outlawing genetic manipulation of people solely because it wasn't under their control.
And also please remember that Vulcan is a very old planet that's been technologically advanced for a long time--they could probably have done the genetic manipulation back in Surak's day, if not earlier, and could definitely have done it later. The Federation era--and even the Science Directorate era before it--are only a drop in the bucket.
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And yes, Vulcan is a very old and advanced culture, but at the same time they *haven't* genetically engineered Pon Farr out of the species, so there must be some reason for that. Being against genetic engineering is one possibility, but there's lots of others - I'm just trying to think of in-show reasons along with the other possibilities mentioned in this very interesting thread!
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ETA: and actually, another random idea, maybe the Vulcans deliberately engineered pon farr INTO themselves precisely because they weren't reproducing enough?
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As for engineering pon farr into themselves, that doesn't make sense to me for pon farr as we see it. First, surely it would be far easier to pass a law requiring a minimum of children per person/couple (perhaps with laws encouraging marraige, too) than to genetically redesign your entire series. And second, if you were going to engineer a heat cycle into your people, and the goal is to increase reproduction, having it kill people would be counterproductive. (Because even if they don't marry/have kids now, they may in a future heat cycle, and in any case the goal is to increase the population not decrease it.)
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- the whole thing is set off by the woman's biological readiness to have a child, including resource availability, her health, etc.
- reaction in the man is triggered via mental link
- unbonded adults can set off other unbonded adults so it's much safer for everyone if everyone is bonded beforehand
- if the man dies, whatever, there are other dudes
Then of course VOY and ENT shot holes in that.
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I tend to ignore Enterprise, canon-wise, whenever I can get away with it.
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Which then begs the question of how much they've diverged in so short a time, and where the various associated disorders come in: the seven year Pon Farr period, how does Kolinahr fit into it, and then the various times they've show the Vulcan elders to be over emotive. It's definitely an intersection of biology and culture that makes Pon Farr so very shocking to the individual Vulcan, and the fact that excessive violence can shock a male out of the blood fever is... interesting.
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Is it violence that shocks Spock out of it? He was quite happy to fight. It was the killing--the moral shock of it--I always thought.
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Very shocking to the Vulcan, but not so to the Romulans. Or maybe they only see blood-fever in their pacifists... which is why they don't have any? Ah, socio-biological interchanges...
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To get out of actually dealing with someone having sex, ritual combat is suddenly a cure for pon farr, and Vorik and Torres are able to get over it by tossing each other about in a fight that mostly just looks like a glorified sparring match. cf. Amok Time when everyone clearly expected someone to die in that arena, and...yeah.
Body and Soul is actually worse. It's like the writers realized that it was the 7th season of the show, they had to deal with Tuvok and pon farr at some point, so they shoehorned it in as a B-plot in what is largely a comedy episode. Long story short, Tuvok resolves his pon farr in the holodeck with a fake T'Pel. The holodeck is basically glorified masturbation, and the whole concept of pon farr really only makes sense if the sex aspect of it requires two biological people to be involved. My eyes rolled quite a bit.
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I have to figure that the Vulcan population is rotating so only one seventh of the adults are stupid in a given year.
either a)Pon Farr wasn't as stark before Vulcans followed Surak (because they were so short fused.) b) repression makes it worse.
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"I'd hoped I would be spared this, but the ancient drives are too strong. Eventually, they catch up with us, and we are driven by forces we cannot control to return home and take a wife. Or die."
So homing is also a part of it--Spock talks specifically about salmon coming back to the river they were spawned in to spawn in their turn.
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Two: the fact that they did try to put all emotional ties aside, and were subject to the three factors above, biology had to find a way to force everyone to attempt to breed, or you possibly would have had a vast number of aesthetes choosing not to, leading to a dwindling population. This factor is built around that messy bit where sex = emotional attachment, even though it's very logical to be procreative without messy emotions. (The logic of having some emotional attachment between partners for the healthy development and guidance of offspring is a part of the argument for WHY they still bond at all.)
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I always figured that bonding (the telepathic part of it) was largely an instinctive thing, that it's a psychological need for Vulcans, and part of how pon farr works by transferring from one partner to the other. That's how B'Elanna gets Vorik's symptoms, after all.
I highly doubt it's about the emotional attachment between partners. After all, even in most human cultures, marriage was not traditionally about emotional attachment between the two getting married, it was about familial alliances and economics. Which always seemed to me to be things Vulcans would think important in marriages.
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Technically, a human woman can have about one baby per year but in reality, that rarely happens because breastfeeding works as a contraceptive unless you have enough good-quality food to both feed one infant and grow another, which is historically rare on a population-wide level. Beyond that, there's natural genetic variation like PCOS - women with PCOS find it easy to gain weight and difficult to conceive, but when they lose weight (current studies are saying 10% of their bodyweight or more, but this varies) the condition often recedes and conception is more likely. When does this happen? During famines, when most women are at a low bodyweight and unable to conceive. So even when most women can't conceive, a sub-group are having babies to carry on the species; while when conditions are good, that sub-group isn't conceiving. So maybe Vulcan went through something so catastrophic, or cycles that are so catastrophic, that children younger than seven and children without at least two intensely dedicated parents die, so over time the slow reproducers beat out the fast reproducers, and the closely-bonded pairs were more successful than the more widely procreating individuals.
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and i can't recall any mention of multiple vulcan births. although there's a fan theory that taurik (from TNG's lower decks) & vorik were twins because they were played by the same actor.
(And if this is the case, does that mean that all Vulcans go into Pon Farr at about the same time every seven years? Eeep! Talk about a disruption to the society! Of course, if this is the case, how do they keep it secret? Just kick every non-Vulcan offplanet for six months every seven years?)
not every adult it the same age. so assuming one's first pon farr is at 21 & it's every seven years after that. so only a part of the adult population is "indisposed" at one time.