She's fairly sure they like children the same amount as women - which is less than Amentans seem to like children - but humans are extremely sensitive to cultural effects overall. Which means they can evolve faster behaviorally than most other species she's familiar with, but then quirks that are probably deleterious but hook onto something beneficial will propagate faster. She actually can't name a complex instinct of theirs that isn't highly sensitive to culture...

"Most of our instincts are informed by culture too but not liking babies. We were really expecting everyone to be like that!"

She laughs. "Liking sex and not having birth control seems to have been the evolutionary strategy humans hit on. They'll usually get attached to a baby once it's made - sometimes, extreme stress or depression can mess with that - but it's not something they orient themselves around."

"I guess just liking sex and not having birth control would do it as long as they usually manage to get the baby raised to adulthood, but wow. Oh, did they evolve away sideways folks?"

"Sideways?"

"Some people hit their spring and they prefer to have sex with the same gender. Some people like both, but those usually just wind up with procreation-compatible relationships, since, well, babies; people who are outright sideways have to be more elaborate, but it's not heavily selected against, since they'll go to the trouble of being more elaborate."

"Humans have sideways people, then, as well as people who outright don't like sex. They're discriminated against and pressured into male-female marriages, in many cultures. There are any human-specialized anthropologists who also think in pre-agrarian human societies - which were for a long time also when the planet was only on-and-off strongly habitable - having a non-procreative sibling dramatically increased your own children's survival chances, but I wasn't alive back then to do a study, and there were very few human cultural anthropologists for that time frame, so I don't know how well it's supported."

"Huh, they - alloparented nieces and nephews? There's enough scarcity of childcare labor around that that was a factor?"

"Collecting food was a problem in many areas - this is a historic problem, to be clear, though humans do often partake in... Alloparenting? Still, usually in the form of neighbors or hired help."

"Huh, I'm trying to work out in my head how having your family feed a nonprocreative sibling for your whole childhood would turn out better by enough because of their own food-gathering labor..."

"I think it was more mitigating than contributing - humans are far from half or even a fourth sideways."

"- I mean, do they typically have children in their pressured male-female marriages, sometimes sideways folks will do companionate opposite-sex marriages for the kids but these days I think they usually artificially inseminate, and if they didn't want kids that much to begin with..."

"They typically have children in their pressured male-female marriages, which explains the last one thousand years, but humans haven't always had marriages as an institution - or pressure to procreate - but have always had sideways people."

"Is it correlated with something else that's useful?"

"Don't know. We don't observe humans that closely, and only have a few scattered guesses that aren't well supported."

"Fair enough. Oh, I think we've been assuming shoggoths don't have distinct sexes, is that right?"

"We don't. There's some level of personal preference when we're hiding among species with those, but I wouldn't say we actually have anything like gender or sex natively."

"Makes sense!"

"I had some very interesting conversations with Bright when I was explaining she had to stay not only as one form, but one sex, while we were interacting with humans. She thought it was very silly that they were always boys or girls."

"There are some animals on Amenta that can change sex over the course of their lives! But generally not suddenly."

"Earth has those too! They're mostly fish."

"Once Bright notices Amentans don't care if she's always one shape she'll likely end up playing around more."

"Nobody'll bat an eye! Might confuse any admirers she's picked up when she's an adult, but that's years off."

"If she's dating outside of shoggoths, she should probably find someone with more flexible desires anyways. And it'll be a long time before she's old enough to consider kids."

"Naturally."

"I - would hope I can help build a kinder universe, by then."