From:	Marc Renouf renouf@********.com
Subject:	Metahuman demographics
Date:	Thu, 18 Feb 1999 11:09:46 -0500 (EST)

On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Patrick Goodman wrote:

> So? They give birth to orks and trolls, too. The thing is, though, that
> there aren't enough of them. The numbers don't add up, though, unless a
> staggering percentage of humans had dwarf and elf children in 2011, and then
> stopped having that staggering percentage not long afterwards.

Actually, that's more or less the way it seems to have happened.
Make no mistake, UGE births were not rare. In fact they were common
enough to cause widespread panic all over the world.
After the first wave of UGE, and again after goblinization,
mention is made of phenotypes "stabilizing" to the point that dwarves tend
to beget dwarves, elves beget elves, trolls beget trolls and orks beget
orks. There are still exceptions, and there is still the occasional
painful transformation into an ork or troll at puberty, but by and large
the races are more or less separate now that the established mana level is
high enough.
So yes, there was a staggering percentage of human parents having
UGE children or children that would later goblinize, but it only takes one
generation before most of those genes that were going to express would
have done so. Given that the first wave of UGE births and goblinazation
took place in the late 2010's/early 2020's, that's in the neighborhood of
40+ years. Two generations have gone since the new genes began to express
themselves, giving the population more than enough time to "stabilize".
Afterwards, humans would no longer (or rarely) give birth
to elves; elves would give birth to elves. In the cases of mixed
parentage, the child is almost always the same phenotype as one of the
parents.
This is all described in the sections on metahumanity in the
various sourcebooks dating back to SR1.

Marc