Life mating

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Raiden

I never said that each pair would only make one child.
R-strategist organisms are organisms that have lots and lots of offspring and provide zero parental care, and K-strategists are organisms that have one or a few children and provide extensive care until adulthood or sub-adulthood.

Of course, this is a spectrum, and many organisms fall somewhere inbetween "absolute R" and "absolute K". Each side has a different evolutionary advantage; K's ensure that their offspring make it to adulthood (which will almost always have less predators than juveniles), while R's make it so that some offspring will almost surely make it to adulthood because of the sheer numbers of them.

Since humans (and presumably Na'vi) are mostly-K, or even entirely K*, then that means any given reproduction cycle produces few children. What I meant was that having males permanently bond to single females means less reproductive cycles, compared to one male having more than one partner on aveage. (e.g. a group of men reproduce with a group of women "all at once". If there are fewer men then women, this produces more children per male then the Na'vi model.)

*The pressure for R-type strategies that existed from disease before industrial medicine doesn't seem to exist for the Na'vi. That in turn might be an explanation for why Na'vi tribes so stay small enough to be sustainable on hunting-gathering alone.

The other thing is that "Eywa" (which is really just a massive super-organism with intelligence and lots of organic servers and hard disks to store things in) may have been able to manipulate the evolution of the species to be a certain way.

That would imply that Eywa is not only approximately as intelligent as a human, but also has "advanced" (compard to anything else bar humans) scientific knowledge. That's a scary idea.