Can an r-selection alien build a civilization?

Question

Quick refresher ...

I'm considering the two basic strategies of child-rearing. R-selection, meaning you have lots of offspring and don't care for them much; and K-selection, meaning you have a few offspring and take very good care of them. Humans are the poster-species for K-selection, and most fish are a great example of R-selection -- they spew out zillions of eggs and then abandon them (either at laying time or hatching time, depending).

So...

Let's imagine we have some kind of clever land-octopus alien which casts its eggs to the wind. They want to evolve intelligence and build a civilization, but will have severe problems building any kind of continuity. Is there any hope for them?

Edit: Distinction from possible-duplicate question is this... I'm questioning whether they would even be able to group together. Aside from some (creepy, scary) insect tribes, most R-selecting land creatures are asocial and see the offspring as competition or -- heck! -- snacks. A possible pattern that might be interesting is fish schooling; the fish don't care for their young, but they clump together as they grow anyway. That might be a template for tolerance of one another's presence.

Another thought is that you might have these R-selecting parents herd their own offspring. Offspring are nimble enough to catch small prey that parents cannot, so parents keep them around, eating the biggest near-adults and gaining benefit from prey sources that they can't catch themselves.

Answer 1

Then, on a given day, an adult specimen has a brillant idea:

So much eggs and infants wasted and so many hard work to do here at my farm...
Why not farm those eggs and infants in order to make most of them reach adulthood? This will maximize my profit!

And subtly your R-selection begins to switch to K-selection. Then, the K-selection people would use technology to outnumber the R-selection ones driving them to extinction.

Except if something makes that be a really bad, impracticable, inefficient or impossible idea. There must be some important selective pressure that prevents a switch to K-selection and keeps R-selection favourable.

Some species uses R-selection here on Earth for many possible reasons like:

1) The adult can't really take care of its children without other dramatic adaptations to its body.

2) The adult can't even properly take care of itself or its sexual partner. No way to take care of offspring. It would be just easier to produce zillions of offspring and even if 99.9% of them don't reach adulthood, there would be enough for the next generation.

3) 99.9% of the offspring is sterile. Specimens able to reproduce are an elite. This happens with ants and bees, for example.

4) 99.9% of the offspring has disabilities and malformations that render them unable to survive childhood.

5) The adults dies shortly after the production of offspring and won't be able to ever see them. This happens with some insects that live for many years as eggs or infants and just a few days as adults.

6) Eggs and offspring are produced in the environment without the parents even being unable to acknowledge that they did that. This happens specially to plants and fungus, but may also happen with some fishes.

7) The eggs must be implanted in a place where the adults can't live. The infants and adults live on separate environments and would quickly die if one invades the environment of the other. This for example, happens to mosquitos, where larvas live in water and adults live in land and air.

8) In order to become an adult, the child must be able to encounter enough quantity of a rare resource or be able to develop a hard and costly skill.

9) The males and females are radically different and one of the sexes for some reason greatly outnumber the other. Only members of the elite sex are intelligent.

10) The males and females are radically different and one of the sexes for some reason greatly outnumber the other. Only members of the elite sex are not intelligent.

11) The males and females are radically different and one of the sexes for some reason greatly outnumber the other. Both sexes are intelligent.

12) Infants compete harshly and promptly kills each other until the last man standing.

13) Probably other reasons that I don't know or just forgot about.

Numbers 1, 2 and 5 are probably unable to ever evolve some appreciable form of intelligence at all.

In the case of 3, there would not even be the mentioned brillant idea because farming offspring is exactly what they are doing as a species, so they already somewhat care about their childs and this is not what you are looking for.

On number 4, they might farm offspring and select and care only for those that are able to reach adulthood, disposing the rest.

On number 7 and 8, once the species is able to gain superior intelligence, it will start farming their eggs and possibly either revert to K-selection or to some artificial form of number 4 - "Select the best one childs, kill the others. We know, this is sad and cruel, but we have no choice, we can't raise everybody."

In the case of 9, 10 and 11, once the species becomes intelligent, the members of the elite sex receive great care and attention of the offspring while the members of the opposite sex are artificially selected with all the rest being discarded (like 4). Don't expect that they will even think about closed marriage, genre-equality of sexual freedom, this would be really absurd ideas for them.

In the case of 12, through the use of the brillant idea, intelligent parents would separate all or most of the offspring and raise them separated. This will make them tend to switch to K-selection after some millenia of widespread offspring artificial selection (like 4).

Number 6 is the best:

A male is selling some items in the market. A female customer just comes in. After some seconds of a friendly talk, she gives him the cash and gets the item she just bought. He thanks her and she answers with a smile and leaves. They have no idea that they just had sex and their fecunded eggs are now being carried away by the wind, but won't be surprised if someone tells them.

Answer 2

An example in fantasy: the Grik

In Taylor Anderson's series Destroyermen, the Grik are an r-selected species of reptiles which have an impressive (and mighty powerful) civilization; the trick is that in their lifecycle they have two phases: an eusocial non-sentient phase when young, sometimes followed by a fully sentient and sapient phase when older. The eusocial young make brave and obendient soldiers or tireless if unskilled workers, while the actual civilization is built and maintained by those relatively few fully sapient adults.

(For completeness, Destroyermen is an entertaining parallel-world adventure series of novels, following the crew of an American Wickes-class destroyer which is displaced to a parallel timeline during the Second Battle of the Java Sea (March 1942); in that parallel timeline Earth is inhabited by two native sentient species, the above-mentioned warlike reptilian Grik and the relatively peaceful Lemurians, plus the humans brought there by several timeline-displacement events. Besides the expected military fantasy, it includes at least two cute cross-species romances.)

Answer 3

You seem to be focusing on continuity as in having parents to transmit things to their offspring. I don’t think this is the best angle for this.

Ants are a good example of r-selection, and seem to be doing pretty well without teaching anything. But they are unlikely to develop a civilization because of their limits.

r-selection is based on creating a large amount of offspring, which requires the offspring to cost as few resources as possible.

Humans reproduce usually one offspring at a time because human babies are costly to make. That’s why we care so much about each of them. Human brains are in fact so big that human babies are born before they are able to sustain themselves and finish their development outside the womb, or else their head would end up being too big to fit.

Unless you find a way to have your species develop a civilization — which implies culture, technology, etc. — without a big brain — decentralized brains, for example — you will have a big problem.

Answer 4

Negligible senescence (or natural biological immortality) might do the trick. Our huge K-selection bias has led us to civilization and technological development, as you intuit, at least partly because we desire survival/persistence and good lives for our heirs. But if there's no strict requirement that you'll ever personally die, personal survival and prosperity might provide all the motivation one needs to build a civilization. Of course, immortal in this context doesn't mean unable to die, it just means means no degenerative aging and inevitable death from old age.

It may seem at first blush that a biologically immortal r-selectionist would have little reason to organize socially. However, readers of Thomas Hobbes will recognize that one of the strongest motivations to form civilizations is to keep people from bonking you on the head in your sleep and taking your resources. So, so long as the species experiences necessary periods of dormancy which remain occasionally necessary throughout an individual's life, there's more than enough reason to organize socially. (On the other hand, if you're done with dormancy after metamorphosing into the adult form, that provides no civilizing motivation for an r-selectionist at all.) For a biologically-immortal r-selectionist, friendship is the single-greatest survival-oriented innovation I can imagine.

Answer 5

I would suggest something close to how gargoyles in the animated series by the same name approached child rearing. Gargoyles laid eggs but an entire clan would raise the child and traditionally never acknowledged genetic parental relationships... all children of the newest generation were raised by the collective clan. How punishments and the like was handled was never specified or whether grouping was encourged. The relationship of parents and child was mostly put into a generational gap disagreement where the lead character's daughter turned up. Having been raised from hatching by humans, she wanted parental attention, which was difficult for the father to accept. According to series creator, there was a father/son pair in the core cast, but it was never discussed in series and you could easily miss it. Also, according to the series creator, incestual relationships among siblings or parents was discouraged by a "scent" marker that was only unpleasent to those of the same genetic lines.

Not sure this counts, as it has aspects of both (the R-K hybrid is further mixed by a difficult gestation period (and only one idividual at a time, with a very rare identical twin) and long childhood. That said, this could be easier if the society had community child-rearing and less qualms about childhood death (vacinations would probably be administered in early maturity rather than early childhood, Spartan Parenting is the norm (either be smart or starve)). As a result, the society would likely be seen as barbaric by human standards in some regards, though nepotism and marriage might be unknown to them (no knowledge of who's my kid and no reason to stay with my mate for the sake of the children. This doesn't rule out any favoritism from an elder authority to a younger though... but they would see something in the younger they value and want to foster). They would also probably have a quasi-democratic government as no one is special beyond they lasted longer than their siblings and "weak" bodies would be discriminated against. Parents certainly wouldn't be adverse to letting the brood play with lawn darts and toys certainly would be much more dangerous.

Answer 6

You can still build a civilization with this kind of reproductive system. You just have to gather individuals in group where they can share their knowledge, specially to younger individuals.

So in this scenario, the octopus hatch alone in the wild, with a high infant mortality rate, but the survivor will integrate a group of older octopus, allowing to pursuit civilization.

Answer 7

In Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land the civilized Martians produce many offspring who live outside of civilization for some time and most of them die, the survivors are then adopted into civilization.

In Futurama: Kif's species produces a bunch of tadpoles, and gives minimal assistance to get them to water, but then lets them grow on their own (presumably with many dieing) for years until they grow legs and come back on land. Zoidburg's species has a mass spawning the precludes parents caring for their offspring.

The main point is intelligence. If your species has enough of it for adults to have civilization it doesn't really matter how you get new adults so long as there can be a continuity of adults, or they can at least pass ideas and infrastructure to the new generation.

Answer 8

Not unless they were natural readers.

The march of progress only marches if people, as a whole, get smarter over time. In order for an R-Selection species to grow in average intelligence would be if every generation read what the generation before had written.

We take care of our elderly, and have done for a long time. By doing this, they can pass on their knowledge to people who are young enough to use it. They make less mistakes, ergo better survival rates overall.

Without the ability to pass on knowledge, we don't get smarter. You'd need your species to instinctively know how to read and there's no science I know of to suggest something that intricate could be passed on genetically. However, language is definitely "in our DNA" in that we know instinctively how to learn a language and the language we learn is just whatever we're exposed to. So your aliens COULD, theoretically, only communicate in visual cues allowing a writing system to be similar enough to their "vocal" communication that they could instinctively pick it up easier.

It all depends how much "Suspension of Disbelief" you're going for.

Answer 9

Another possibility in which r-selection aliens build a society is if the aliens passed down knowledge through hereditary means, or other automatic means. Passing down knowledge through genetic means doesn't seem possible, but what might be a possibility is if the aliens reproduced in some way that would have them begin life neurally connected to their parents. If their nervous systems were connected at the start of life they could carry forward some knowledge from birth, and then be completely antisocial while still developing to some point. They would again pass on the knowledge when reproducing, so it would not die with them, and technology could develop, though not necessarily a very civilized society.

If the offspring developed inside the parent to a degree they could also have a connection to their parent's nervous system, similar to how the umbilical cord forms a connection to the parents circulatory system. However longer pregnancy generally is linked to k-selection, though I see no reason the adult couldn't abandon the offspring at birth.

One possibility that could have k-selection pregnancies is if the adult died in, shortly before, or shortly after childbirth. This would mean the aliens remained r-selection. In this scenario I assume the children would absorb large portions of the adult as they developed. This would also mean knowledge would likely only be passed down by which ever gender had the pregnancy.