2013-04-03: [CT]Moving On...

[Graybeard]

One thing to consider is that at any given moment, the breeding group of Elves consists not only of the latest adult generation, but of all surviving members of all generations prior to that. Elves don't seem to make much out of how old someone is once everyone's adults, since they grow to a fixed adulthood stage of life and just stay there and never move on to some senior state. So Alice and Bob, call them Generation 1, have one kid; then Alice can fuck Bob's dad and Bob can fuck Alice's mom (call the parents Generation 0), and pop out another two kids, for three kids in Generation 2, all without any incest thus far or any more than one child per couple. Meanwhile Alice and Bob may have two half-siblings also in Generation 1 from where their parents used to be married to each other's parents (elves don't stay together forever remember), and those half-siblings can in turn pull the same trick of fucking unrelated members of the previous generation, adding another three kids each to Generation 2. So from an initial four Elves in Generation 0, with no incest and one child per couple, you can produce another four Elves in Generation 1, and then still with no incest and only one child per couple you can produce 12 Elves in Generation 2.

All correct, and one reason why I speculated on the concept of "generations" being different than we're used to, but it actually doesn't matter. More precisely, it doesn't matter who a given newborn elf's father is; all that matters is how many times a given female elf gives birth. Poe has stated on several occasions that siblings are "rare" among the elves. (in fact, on one occasion that I have been unable to find, he said something more along the lines of siblings being "almost unknown.") In a promiscuous society (no moral judgment implied here, just that multiple sex partners are the norm in elven culture), any reasonable definition of "sibling" focuses on "children of the same mother" without implying "children of the same father." If that is "rare" or "almost unknown" among the elves, there's simply no getting around the need for skadzillions of elf women giving birth to Misa's ancestors if there really were 426 generations before her.

Keep in mind that the elves weren't just good at wiping out other populations, they also did a fair bit of damage to their own in those first 4500 years. So while an explosive population growth at the start is extremely probable, it doesn't need to have been THAT explosive to still explain Misa being the only elf of her generation... nor is Misa necessarily the 427th generation, or so far as I know the last possible elf to be born (at least as of the start of Errant Story).

Your point about Misa not being the last possible elf is fair enough; back to that in a minute. However, let's proceed for the moment as though she is indeed the last one and see where it takes us. The problem isn't explosive growth in the early stages of elven civilization; it's exponential decline in the later (terminal) stages of that civilization. That's why I ran that 35-generation straw man out there: suppose the first 390 or so generations were devoted to growing the elven population to the maximum level from which the terminal decline set in. There would still have to be enough elves at the start of that 35-generation decline that the Errant World would look more like the Borg-infested Earth of "Star Trek: First Contact" -- "thirteen billion life forms, every one of them Borg" -- than the way it actually was.

A long time ago (1958), a pioneering science-fiction author by the name of Cyril M. Kornbluth explored some of the questions we're considering here, in a "novella" (half way between novel and short story in length) called "Shark Ship." I won't spoil the story with too many details -- it's well worth a read, for a number of reasons -- but he worked out the relevant math for a population in exponential decline, some of which is discussed in the story. The only real difference between the situation there and the one here is that elves live, on average, a lot longer than humans, which affects the time it takes for a population to disappear entirely. Obviously the elves haven't done that yet, but accidents, wars, return of Ianilis, etc., will eventually drive even an immortal race to extinction if they don't reproduce. If we concentrate on the decline in birth rate over time, rather than population, that doesn't really matter.

Now as for that question of the number of generations, how many generations could have passed since the creation of the elves? We can set a bound on that based on what Poe told us about elven biology a long time ago. Suppose elves reach physical maturity at age 150 as Poe says, and at that age, a female elf immediately has the one kid that she's going to have in her lifetime. Then obviously the length of a generation is 150 years plus the gestation period, which can be ignored in context. Divide that into the 8000 years that have passed since creation of the elves, per the timeline, and we find that 50 to 60 generations might have occurred, at the most. (Delays in having that one pregnancy would obviously increase the length of a generation, and reduce the number of generations that have occurred.) That brings the total number of Misa ancestors into much greater harmony with what we know of the elves, and solves some other problems as well. However, it pushes that 427th generation, when elven reproduction just stops, incredibly far into the future. There is evidence that that isn't the case, notably in the fact that the "generation" time for the "generation" following Misa's is already approaching 1500 years. Elven reproduction is already stopping. It doesn't have to wait for another 360 generations to ebb out entirely.

The bottom line, to me, is that there's simply an inescapable clash among the various things we know about elven creation and reproduction. It's not the end of the world, not even the Errant World, but for complete consistency as the story of the Errant World develops, it really should get looked at.

[Forrest]

I think I'm missing something about your concerns about Misa needing zillions of ancestors. My point with regards to the early population explosion was that there needn't have been that many Elves created ex nihlo, a sufficient number could breed naturally. However, I think there's another problem with what it sounds like you're saying, which is that a person doesn't need 2^n ancestors to have existed n generations ago unless we're taking "no incest" to ridiculous extremes. My girlfriend and I, for example, have many of the same ethnicities in our heritage, and so chances are we have a number of common ancestors and so are technically "related to each other", but not in any sense anybody cares about. Every person alive today shares at least one common ancestor with every other person, just given how evolution works. That doesn't mean that there needed to be a trillion (2^40) people on earth a thousand (25*40) years ago in order for me to exist now; clearly, because there weren't, yet here I am.

So there could have been a boom of population growth, and then a long stable period of linear birth rates (what we'd call "replacement rate", except the old generation doesn't die off for Elves so nobody's being replaced exactly), followed by declining birth rates until eventually there's only one fertile Elf woman in the world and Misa is her only child. The people breeding during all of that time could have been distantly related to each other and it wouldn't be a problem any more than it is with humans; there needn't have been a billion fertile Elves around 30 generations ago.

Also, and I think this may be related to the above, I don't think the every-Elf-woman-only-ever-has-one-kid thing is feasible at all, because that would make Elven population growth decay logarithmically: an initial population of n would have at most n/2 kids and then never breed again; those n/2 kids would have at most n/4 kids, and so on. This would have been noticeable immediately even to the Elves. The initial population would forever outnumber all subsequent populations combined because there literally couldn't ever be born enough new Elves to even equal the number of the initial population (n/2 + n/4 + n/8 ... converges to n and will never exceed it). The initial population would never even have so much as doubled. (And for there to be 1 Elf in the current generation, there must have been 2^n Elves n generations ago, since there would be no such thing as distant cousins to breed with, as with no siblings there would be no cousins at all, which I think is maybe where you're getting the "an absurd initial population is required" idea). So I think that there must be half-siblings at least allowable. This is why I talked about one child per couple, not per female Elf.

Granted, Elven population growth decreasing logarithmically would fit with them eventually becoming infertile, but it seems like it was something with a more sudden and more subtle onset around the time they started fucking Humans. Like, everything had been working fine for as long as anyone could remember, but then... huh, it seems to be getting harder for some people to have kids. One-child-per-woman would mean that the "normal" way of Elves would have always been for there to have been dramatically fewer children born to each generation; not for there to suddenly become slightly (but increasingly) fewer children born to new generations.


Unrelated: I wonder if anybody has tried fucking Misa? I mean, I know she's "the baby" and all, but I really think we should at least try. You know, for science, and posterity and shit.

[mindstalk]

Impy may have said 8000 BCE somewhere but I think Nookie said they'd been cooped up for tens of thousands of years.

We never did find out where the humans come from, did we?

Also have some dangling reference to Sara and Exitalis.

[Graybeard]

Impy may have said 8000 BCE somewhere but I think Nookie said they'd been cooped up for tens of thousands of years.

I thought I remembered that too, but all I've been able to find is that Nookie comments about Anilis deciding to sleep in for "the last fifty centuries," which exactly fits Impy's timeline. One really wonders about that distant past.

As for the business of reducing the size of Misa's family tree because of consanguinity, the problem with that is the same one that's been causing problems all along: the fact that the large majority of elven mothers have at most one child. Think about it: marriage between cousins, whether first, third or very distant (which are the things that prune the family trees), requires that somewhere along the way, the cousins had parents or great-grandparents or whatever who were siblings. But elven parents don't have siblings; that's the whole point. So while Forrest's explanation works just fine in the real world (where all of us are probably at least sixteenth cousins of each other, if I remember the genealogy article I read correctly), it's still running up against the sharply limited elven fertility in the Errant World.

[Forrest]

As for the business of reducing the size of Misa's family tree because of consanguinity, the problem with that is the same one that's been causing problems all along: the fact that the large majority of elven mothers have at most one child. Think about it: marriage between cousins, whether first, third or very distant (which are the things that prune the family trees), requires that somewhere along the way, the cousins had parents or great-grandparents or whatever who were siblings. But elven parents don't have siblings; that's the whole point. So while Forrest's explanation works just fine in the real world (where all of us are probably at least sixteenth cousins of each other, if I remember the genealogy article I read correctly), it's still running up against the sharply limited elven fertility in the Errant World.

I think you must have skimmed too much over my criticism of this one-child-per-mother idea. That simply cannot be the case; the consequences would be completely absurd. Aside from the problem of requiring 2^n ancestors n generations ago for every person in the latest generation (e.g. requiring absurd bajillions of ancestors of Misa), it would leave Elven population growth plummeting dramatically from the very outset (to the point that even doubling the initial population would be mathematically impossible, and in all likelyhood most Elves alive at any given time would be the original Elves), rather than a gradual (albeit accelerating) decline starting at some point halfway through their history that has been recounted in the story.

The only way I can see to interpret that "no siblings" thing without these absurd consequences is one-child-per-couple, not one-child-per-mother. E.g. Sarine may have a half-sibling she never even knew because they had grown up and estranged from their common parent (as we're told Elves do) centuries before Sarine was even conceived. They'd not think of each other as siblings at all (any more than, say, my mom's early boyfriends years before I was born are in any way father-like to me), but technically they'd share half their DNA.

[BloodHenge]

Maybe Elves have a lower tolerance for inbreeding than humans, so that matings between sixteenth cousins (just for example) are likely to introduce congenital defects that seriously impact reproduction. It's the sort of problem I can imagine arising in an artificial species but not a naturally occurring one.

[Graybeard]

I think you must have skimmed too much over my criticism of this one-child-per-mother idea. That simply cannot be the case; the consequences would be completely absurd.

Of course they would; that's the whole point. There's a fundamental absurdity to the whole elven population dynamics, given the constraints that we know have been placed on it. The question is where to install the "Then The Miracle Happens" phlebotinum to reduce the absurdity. You have picked one place to do so. It is not an unreasonable place, at least on the surface, but it does fly in the face of a lot of what we know (or think we know) about the elves.

Aside from the problem of requiring 2^n ancestors n generations ago for every person in the latest generation (e.g. requiring absurd bajillions of ancestors of Misa), it would leave Elven population growth plummeting dramatically from the very outset (to the point that even doubling the initial population would be mathematically impossible, and in all likelyhood most Elves alive at any given time would be the original Elves), rather than a gradual (albeit accelerating) decline starting at some point halfway through their history that has been recounted in the story.

And there's every chance that that "plummeting dramatically" is exactly what occurred, without any doubling of the original population at all except via the creation of new elves by Anilis and Senilis -- which seems to have occurred, as it was implied somewhere that they made elves one at a time. We have strong hints to that effect. Sarine said that one of the strongest drivers for human/half-elf sex was that elves just couldn't produce elven babies despite literally centuries of trying. (Gads, just thinking about that, and relating it to family and friends who have had fertility problems, gives me cold chills.) The reproductive rate was plummeting, and was never very high to begin with -- another Sarine statement. And as for the point that "most Elves alive at any given time would be the original Elves", sure, why not? We never see "most" elves in Errant Story, precisely because, as Sarna says, "[none of] their ancient asses have bothered to leave Praenubilus Astu in the last thousand years." We do know, however, that there are elves around, in all likelihood plenty of them, who saw the Paedagogusi; the current elven high council is populated with elves who saw the reports of that, even if they weren't yet on the council themselves. Finally, there is the point that the Errant War was going to be an age filter for elves. It is not necessarily the case that at the time of Errant Story, "most" elves are originals, even if the population remained original in the main until then. Younger elves wouldn't have been in most of the fighting, because of the extended elven "post-adolescence" when they weren't really accepted into elven society. Sarine, although a potent fighter by then, was on the sidelines because of pregnancy, and she probably wasn't the only parent or parent-to-be of a half elf whose participation was restricted. From the point of view of the elves, the burden of fighting the Errant War would fall primarily on the fathers, not the sons -- how's that for an inversion of the way the real world works? And the effect on the demographics would be obvious.

Absurd? Yeah, it's all absurd, that's a good word. However, it's a condition that we are forced into by what we know of Errant Story. We're not disagreeing on that, merely on where we can escape the absurdity by tweaking the starting positions. You think we can do so by discarding the one-child constraint. I don't.

[mindstalk]

I thought I remembered that too, but all I've been able to find is that Nookie comments about Anilis deciding to sleep in for "the last fifty centuries," which exactly fits Impy's timeline. One really wonders about that distant past.

Revisionism!

[Forrest]

And there's every chance that that "plummeting dramatically" is exactly what occurred, without any doubling of the original population at all except via the creation of new elves by Anilis and Senilis -- which seems to have occurred, as it was implied somewhere that they made elves one at a time. We have strong hints to that effect. Sarine said that one of the strongest drivers for human/half-elf sex was that elves just couldn't produce elven babies despite literally centuries of trying. (Gads, just thinking about that, and relating it to family and friends who have had fertility problems, gives me cold chills.) The reproductive rate was plummeting, and was never very high to begin with -- another Sarine statement.

Yes, but by Sarine's account that change came on suddenly halfway through their history. The Elven birth rate had never been been especially high, but then around the time they started fucking humans, something changed, which the traditionalist Elves called divine punishment for the sin of human-fucking. If there was only ever one child per mother, then there wouldn't have been that change: it would have just been a fact of Elven biology that had always existed, and there would be nothing to blame on the human-fuckers.

Absurd? Yeah, it's all absurd, that's a good word. However, it's a condition that we are forced into by what we know of Errant Story. We're not disagreeing on that, merely on where we can escape the absurdity by tweaking the starting positions. You think we can do so by discarding the one-child constraint. I don't.

I'm not discarding the one-child constraint, just interpreting it differently. One child per couple vs one child per woman. I'm saying that the interpretation of "one child" as meaning "per woman" leads to absurdities and so cannot be correct; and the only other interpretation I see is "per couple".

[Graybeard]

And there's every chance that that "plummeting dramatically" is exactly what occurred, without any doubling of the original population at all except via the creation of new elves by Anilis and Senilis -- which seems to have occurred, as it was implied somewhere that they made elves one at a time. We have strong hints to that effect. Sarine said that one of the strongest drivers for human/half-elf sex was that elves just couldn't produce elven babies despite literally centuries of trying. (Gads, just thinking about that, and relating it to family and friends who have had fertility problems, gives me cold chills.) The reproductive rate was plummeting, and was never very high to begin with -- another Sarine statement.

Yes, but by Sarine's account that change came on suddenly halfway through their history. The Elven birth rate had never been been especially high, but then around the time they started fucking humans, something changed, which the traditionalist Elves called divine punishment for the sin of human-fucking. If there was only ever one child per mother, then there wouldn't have been that change: it would have just been a fact of Elven biology that had always existed, and there would be nothing to blame on the human-fuckers.

No, she said it was discovered at that time. Not the same thing, not at all. At the risk of venturing into murky contemporary political waters, consider anthropogenic climate change, or just the ozone-hole subcomponent of the overall climate-change issue. It's been going on ever since mankind has been both numerous enough and technological enough to be pumping greenhouse gases (or, less controversially and more recently, chlorofluorocarbons) into the atmosphere. But the fact that it didn't get noticed until recently had more to do with the development of means of diagnosing it than with a sudden worsening of the problem. Lamentably (IMO), the overall climate-change picture is going to have to get a lot worse -- which it will -- before some elements of society get their heads out of their asses and realize it had better be dealt with. Ozone destruction by chlorofluorocarbons, by contrast, didn't have to accelerate at all post-discovery for scientists to rapidly reach the conclusion "hey, we'd better do something about this." Something was done, and the ozone layer has healed somewhat. (The "healing" of anthropogenic climate change as a whole ... well, that's a subject probably better moved to the "Errant Rambling" forum, but in the not-so-humble opinion of this recently retired scientist who did a lot of stuff at the end of his career connected with climate change, our grandchildren are screwed. Anyway:)

What Sarine reported was the discovery of this mysterious "it" that she never elaborated on, which we have been presuming to be the elven fertility crash. "It" need not have had an onset at the time of the rise of Errants for "its" consequences to have become apparent then. The whole point of making half-elf kids, if you were an elf, was in response to the basic biological reproductive drive coupled with the fact that "the birth of an elven child was a rare, once in a century event." Having the elf-specific fertility problem drummed into the elves by the fact that they could still make half-elven kids could have come from a ramping-up of the problem a la global warming, but it could also have just been the sudden discovery that it was going on, as in the ozone-hole analogy. We don't know how it was viewed at the time; by the time the complete absence of elven births in the centuries before Misa's was obvious, "it" was well understood, but that was long after the problem got severe.

I don't think we're ever going to agree fully on this one, and the truth (to the extent that that matters in a fictional universe...) is going to be elusive until we start seeing the sequels that Poe still plans to write. But I'm still seeing enough problems making it all fit that the answers are going to be doubly interesting once we do start to get them.