How can I alter the human reproductive cycle in order to compete on a hostile planet?

Question

This is a follow up question to one that I made earlier. Basically, after God wiped out all life after the flood, earth has changed into a lush but dangerous environment. Every living thing, from plants to animals, has evolved to be hostile and prey on each other. This forces species to constantly adapt and change in order to survive, speeding up the process of evolution from millions of years to generations.

Humanity has lost a many advantages due to their prey evolving to become better at killing them. In order for them to survive as a species, they must change faster than we do today. One way to do this is to change the way we reproduce in certain ways to allow us to compete. Some of the goals that I think should be met are:

1. Every allow of copulation mist be met with success.

2. Multiple births must be the norm (twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc)

3. Pregnancies must be shorter.

4. Humans must grow up and become self-sufficient much faster.

How can I alter the reproductive cycle in order to meet these parameters?

Answer 1

You don't

One of the definitive aspects of humanity is that we're obligate tool users. Without tools we're useless, blunt teeth and no claws, with the right tools we can kill anything. There is no creature our size or larger against which humans can go head to head and come off better without our tools. We'd have serious trouble with a lot of creatures considerably smaller.

It's not teeth and claws, it's tools, no physical evolution of the species should ever be required, just better tools.

Humanity are the great steamrollers of evolution, we don't change to fit the environment, we change the environment to fit us.

Answer 2

Genetic engineering to support a social dogma.

The thing about humans is that we're really good at altering the environment around us using our tools. As a result, even if some mysterious force made every other living thing more dangerous to humans, we'd just respond by domesticating the ones we can and killing off the ones we can't. Bulldozers are amazingly useful things when you just want to clear all the trees off a piece of property, and guns can kill basically any animal dead.

So, if humans were to be altered in the method you suggested, it would require us to do so willingly - there'd have to be a social ideology that supported people getting the changes done, either volunarilly (because they believed in the agenda of that dogma), or through coercion (typically government intervention). Most likely, it'd involve some sort of pro-natalist doctrine akin to the modern-day Quiverfull movement.

Once that doctrine is sufficiently dominant, and genetic engineering technology is sufficiently advanced, engineering the changes to human reproduction would most likely be entirely possible, though it would likely have knock-on effects in other areas. For instance, increasing the number of multiple births while simultaneously decreasing the time required for pregnancy would likely result in the children being much smaller and weaker at the time of birth, requiring additional time spent as a helpless infant before they're able to reach the "toddler" stage.

Answer 3

By allowing men to breed. Much more babies, and different pregnancies.

You also have to take into consideration the natural selection. Without even changing the reproductive cycle, you'll get supernatural human made for wild life after a thousand year (may be you can't wait that long).

You could also say that modifications in the genome are happening faster after the apocalypse for some reasons - thus allowing humans to evolve and adapt quicker when reproducing. Or may be humans figured out a way to reproduce in order to maximize the capacities of the babies based on their parents'.