system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is wanting a child really a basic human instinct? If so, how are there people who don't want kids?
gpt
What does life do? It perpetuates itself in whatever form it has managed to take. Genes, whatever organism they belong to, increase in the population if they manage to make more copies of themselves. How this gets done doesn't really matter.

There hasn't been a conscious mind for much of evolutionary history for "child desiring" to come about. Certainly there are some psychological tendencies for liking the little ones such as cooing over infants (or really anything small and cute that resembles "infantness").

What mechanism would work well for getting two individuals of the same species to mate if they don't have complex brains? How about providing intense pleasure and reward in the brain for copulation?

If there is any "basic instinct" to want children, it's just the basic instinct to procreate coupled with an automatic affection for small humans.

Paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, our minds have learned to short circuit our inborn evolutionary tendencies. This happens every time we masturbate or use birth control. The main driving mechanism for perpetuating a species relied on a pleasure-reward system which we can easily circumvent.