(The second in a series about how either elves are the dominant humanoid species, or are somehow screwed up, the first of which is here.)
Possibility 1: Evolutionary Misfires
Elves are heavily K-selected.
Elves haven’t conquered the world because there are just too damn few of them, there are too few because they reproduce too slowly, and because they reproduce so slowly they are exceedingly risk-averse.
Roughed out for the gaming crowd, in ecological theory, r/K selection is the idea that organisms will converge on one of two reproductive strategies. An r-selected organism emphasizes speedy growth, early onset of maturity, production of many offspring, low parental involvement in the raising of those offspring, comparatively and correspondingly low survival rates of those offspring, along with smaller body size and shorter lifespans. Think rats, or goblins.1
Alternately, K-selection is a strategy typified by slower growth and later onset of maturity; production of fewer, but better cared-for, offspring; extensive parental involvement with those offspring leading to better survival rates; larger body size and longer lifespans. Think elephants . . . or elves.2
We know elves have a relatively large body-size for a humanoid.3 We know that they live a tremendously long time and undergo a childhood and adolescence the length of a long human lifetime; we can easily presume a parental involvement and investment in a single offspring that is orders of magnitude greater than that provided by other humanoids. Elves are quintessential K-strategists. From what we know we can infer that elven children have superb survival rates and elven adults, exceedingly low reproductive rates. If an elven child requires a century of rearing, we can assume that each elven family—not just mothers, as that level of resource-investment likely requires the fathers, as well, or the community as a whole—spaces births in increments of scores of years.
When you have so much resource investment in each and every child, each of those children becomes tremendously precious. So many resources, in fact, that we could plausibly assume that any settled elven society has the majority of its resources invested in its people rather than anything material. Why would it then send those resources off—in the form of young men and women—to war for any reason short of an existential threat? Any elven society will consequently become incredibly risk-averse, perhaps to a self-defeating degree.
Even if elves overcome this risk aversion, their extremely slow reproduction rate means that there just aren’t that many elves. Sure, an exquisitely trained elven swordsman may defeat a dozen orcs, but there are a dozen dozen more standing behind them.4 Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.5
Maybe elves haven’t conquered the world for no other reason than that there are too few of them, each is worth too much, and the elves are paralyzed thereby.
To be continued in part 3, “The Price of Purity.”
Actually, think of litters of rats under your floorboards. Or litters of goblins under your floorboards. Actually actually, don’t.
In unstable environments r-strategists tend to dominate, as survival becomes a numbers game where there is no clear superior adaptation to the changing circumstances. Conversely, in a stable environment, there is time for evolution to produce smaller and smaller incremental improvements suited to that specific environment, intensive—slow!—nurturing pays bigger dividends, and K-strategists emerge.
Your elves are taller than humans, right? Right?
It’s just numbers. In the time an elf has grown from an infant to a competent young adult, almost seven generations of orcs have reached sexual maturity . . . . Exponents are a motherfucker.
It’s a trap! It is more than possible to create military assets too valuable to actually risk in combat. Just ask Gerald Ford.