Creatures and family ties

One question I’ve never heard a clear answer on is whether norns know who their family is. My assumption had been that they know what a norn is and consider them all family in a way. I have never paid very clear attention to it but I have noticed norns breed with direct family. I know some 3rd party genomes like the kai norns apparently know the difference and try not to inbreed, but whether they can only tell parent/child relations or also sibling and further remained unclear.

Of course, now I’m writing this article I had to put some effort into finding an answer which turned out to be easier than I thought;

https://naturingnurturing.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-creaturely-inbreeding.html?m=1

There in amaicoconuts blog article the answer was presented clearly: Yes, for parents, children and siblings the relations can be determined.

This comes with some limits, in that any further family members cannot be recognized: it is simply not included in the engine. Another limit is that all gen 1 creatures are considered siblings, apparently. It seems caos scripting could also influence the brains of individual creatures, which, purely hypothetically could also determine further family relations, whether creatures share some looks at least.

The next question before one would do all that scripting would be to ask for a practical use, obviously. As it turns out, the simple genes of creatures experience no adverse effect from inbreeding. And tribe oriented behavior would be limited to ingroup breeding preference and out-group animosity. Something which leads to stable genomes and less food competition in nature.

Of course from a simulation point of view this is brilliant, from a breeders perspective a source of frustration and a hampering to the average players goals, which generally is getting varied breeding results.

Another very important part of in-group preference, or tribal behavior, is altruism. By helping family survive you help your own genes survive in a way. Altruism usually requires multiple steps though, and that generally means it is too complex behavior for creatures to consistently do it.

I still enjoyed including some tribalism in my most recent story, and the discussion is obviously interesting. Perhaps the issue is too complex to fix via scripts, perhaps with the small populations possible in creatures, tribal behavior beyond the ettin, norn, grendel distinction is senseless. Admittedly, even that barrier and the barrier of gender can be crossed by scripts in breeding. 

Strange as it may be, I am fine with the inbreeding in creatures, considering mostly the small populations. What do you think? I enjoy hearing reader’s thoughts so comments are always welcome!