Quote:
Originally Posted by StudentoReptile
Personally, I think the brooding aspect is a stretch. It's just a mechanism the female uses to help increase the chances of her eggs surviving = successful passing of genetic material. Its millions of years of instinctual behavior; the female snake does it because her body/hormones tell her its what she is supposed to do. She is not making any conscious decision or choice to be near the eggs. In some cases, the eggs may turn bad and her body will tell her this, and she will move on.
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Well, yes, but you could make the exact same argument for mammalian mothering behavior - and note that mammal mothers of many species will instinctively eat their babies if there is a severe food shortage or ongoing threat-stress, and move on without, as far as we can tell, ever looking back.
Ultimately, one could argue that *all* parental-care behaviour is a mechanism used to increase the chances of genetic material surviving, with the capacity for what we most usually call "parental love" (in its ultimate form, the parent's willingness to sacrifice themself for a child - which is very much culturally determined; the closer to the edge a human population is, the more likely it is for cultural norms to include various forms of sacrificing the infant, non-contributive for years and with the lowest chance of survival, in order to preserve the healthy adult who can help keep the tribe alive and may produce more children in better times) increasing with increased time-binding ability and social character of the species.
I am by no means suggesting that mama python feels the same way about her eggs that mama human, or even mama rabbit, does about the child or litter in her womb - it is fairly certain that she doesn't, and I think extremely certain that, unlike just about any mammalian species, mama python is very highly unlikely ever to transfer any aspect of those rudimentary family instincts to anything other than her eggs. But the presence of instinctive parental behaviour is the first necessary step in developing the wider complex of hormonally-supported instinctive behaviour that we think of as "love" - the big difference with us being that humans can and constantly do transfer the initial instinctive emotion to all sorts of non-reproduction-related beings, objects, and even abstract ideals! Are snakes ever going to take another step in that direction? I doubt it, unless the world changes in ways rather more severe than gently shifting back towards another period of climactic optimum.
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