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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
Date: 2015-07-20 04:47 am (UTC)From: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
Date: 2015-07-20 05:54 am (UTC)From: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
Date: 2015-07-20 02:21 pm (UTC)From: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
Date: 2015-07-21 02:34 am (UTC)From: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!