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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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!
no subject
ETA: and actually, another random idea, maybe the Vulcans deliberately engineered pon farr INTO themselves precisely because they weren't reproducing enough?
no subject
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.)