ACT I
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Evolutionary psychology is zoology applied to us.
We, like all other animal species, have two basic instincts and three basic mental abilities. Our instincts are for survival and reproduction. Our mental abilities are memory, imagination, and communication. Evolutionary psychology uses those five mental traits as the source of all of our thoughts and feelings.
There are two main arguments people usually make against that line of reasoning.
How does our survival instinct explain people committing suicide, or sacrificing their lives for some reason?
And how does our reproductive instinct explain homosexuality, or people who don’t want to have children forany other reason?
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These are mysteries that people all over the world have puzzled over for thousands of years.
They’re caused by some of our most primal mental traits coming into conflict with each other. They don’t disprove evolutionary psychology. Instead they’re the best examples of how people have complicated feelings and how they decide on the best way to act on them.
Were aren’t robots. Insects basically are robots, because their brains are so simplistic that they act very directly on their instincts.
For us, with the complicated brains we have to live the complicated lives we live, survival and reproduction are goals we feel we should work toward. But sometimes our perceptions overpower our instincts. They make us feel like we’re succeeding at our goals, even though we aren’t really.
Most people don’t kill themselves, and most people do want to have children. But everyone always makes what they feel are
the best decisions they
can make
in the situations
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
Chorus
Survival
reproduction.
Memory,
imagination,
communication
ACT II
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People commit suicide when they’re suffering, either physically or emotionally. If you’re suffering in a way that makes you feel like you’re dying slowly and you can’t imagine any way to make it stop so you can get back to living, suicide is the choice to die quickly so you can stop suffering.
Life or death is one choice about your survival instinct. But pain or freedom from pain is also a choice about your survival instinct.
Pain is a warning that something is wrong, which is a threat to your health. Most of the time, doing whatever it takes to make the pain stop saves you from the threat. That makes you stop hitting yourself in the head with a rock, or stop trying to put your hand in a fire. Then it makes you rest and be careful not to re-injure yourself so you can heal, instead of you trying to walk around on a sprained ankle or a broken foot.
But terminal diseases don’t work that way. The threat, and the pain, are there, and they’re never going to go away.
So you have to make a choice.
Do you want to live longer and hurt all the time?
Or do you want to die and stop hurting all the time?
Most people aren’t faced with that choice. But some people are.
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Emotional pain works the much the same way. If you feel like something is seriously wrong with your life all the time, and you can’t imagine that feeling ever going away, again, you feel like you’re dying slowly.
The big difference between physical pain and emotional pain is that emotional pain is something you can change your mind about. It might be hard, it might take a long time, you might need a lot of professional help, and you might need medication, but it’s not AIDS or terminal cancer.
It’s a maze you can find your way out of if you can find the right path and stay on it long enough.
ACT III
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When people sacrifice their lives, they sacrifice them for a reason.
One way or another, it’s the perception of maximizing the survival rate of their genes. The easiest way to understand the decision they made is to look at what they sacrificed their life for, and why they would’ve felt it was worth the price, and then work backward to see how their perception of maximizing the survival rate of their genes fit into that.
Your reproduction instinct is the instinct to keep copies of your genes alive in other people. Your blood relatives all have copies of your genes. Your parents, your siblings, and your children all have half of your genes. Your younger siblings and especially your children have more of their lifespans ahead of them.
So if you sacrifice yourself to save one of their lives, you’re sacrificing the genes in your body to save copies of them in the other person’s body. Not that you think about it that way consciously. But that is what made us evolve to feel that sometimes the lives of our family members could be worth more than our own.
Evolution works by the differential survival rates of genes. If some people felt it was better to save themselves and let their family members die, but other people felt it was better to sacrifice themselves to save their family members, the people who sacrificed themselves to save their families would keep more of their genes alive in the long run. That includes the genes that create our brains.
That means that by keeping more of their genes alive by sacrificing themselves, they kept alive more of the genes that made them feel that they should sacrifice themselves to save their families.
When people who feel it’s better to save themselves and let their family members die do that, they’re also letting the genes they share with their family members that make them feel that way, die. If you’re too selfish to sacrifice your life to save your three selfish children, you don’t increase the survival rates of the genes that make you so selfish.
We’ve evolved to take risks and make sacrifices to help our family members because the genes that make people feel they should do that have a higher survival rate overall than genes that make people feel they shouldn’t do that.
If you sacrifice your life to save a friend who feels like a sister or brother, you feel like you’re doing the same thing. There isn’t always a perfect match between feeling like you should sacrifice yourself and how many of your genes you’re saving. But there is enough of a correspondence that we’ve evolved to feel that way.
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Your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever you want to call a romantic partner, doesn’t share your genes, and doesn’t feel like a brother or sister— at least, I hope not, anyway. So why would people sacrifice their lives to save their romantic partners?
The obvious reason is that if the two of you have children together, your children do have your genes, and they have your partner’s genes also. So you’re protecting the genes in your children by saving the one other person in the world who cares about your children as much as you do. Because the same amount of his or her genes are also in your children.
Now think about what a serious relationship with someone would mean before birth control was invented. If you’ve been in a serious relationship with someone for a year, you’ve probably had a child together by now. If you’re a woman, having that child was a lot of work. If you’re a man, your girlfriend could be pregnant again already.
You know how in a good relationship when the two of you are together it’s easy to lose track of time? But also that you feel like you’ve known each other a lot longer than you really have? That’s the feeling that there’s a really strong connection between you and you’re going to be together a long time.
You don’t have to be with someone for a year to feel like you’ve been together a year. And if you feel like you’ve been with someone for a year, that’s all you need to feel like you could have kids with them already.
The more you love someone, the sooner you go from thinking of them as just a friend to feeling like you’ve known each other a long time. The better your relationship is, the more you’re willing to sacrifice for the other person. Because the more you love someone, the more you’re willing to risk to keep what you have with them.
Scene 3
If you sacrifice your life to defend your country, you feel thatyour family and friends are going gain something from it that’s going to be worth more to them than anything else you could do for them if you didn’t sacrifice yourself.
Would you sacrifice your life to save Dr. Fauci? I’m sure many Americans would. Because if they saved his life, he’d be able to save a lot more people’s lives.
ACT IV
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Homosexuality is essentially birth control that’s 100% effective.
A lot of homosexuals disagree when I say that, but that’s because they underestimate what I’m saying.
Species evolve because members of the species survive and reproduce. But that doesn’t mean that all the members of the species reproduce. In fact, ordinarily some members of a species don’t reproduce.
Ask anyone who doesn’t want to have children why they feel that way, and they’ll tell you some version of, “It’s just not what I want to do with my life.”
Scene 2
We all have reproductive instincts, which is why we all have strong feelings about sex and families. If you get married, have sex, adopt a kid, and live happily ever after, you’re doing all the parts of reproduction except for the part where someone gets pregnant with a baby who has your genes.
We all create things. We all try to create lives for ourselves that we’re happy with. Most people create children somewhere in the process. For some people, their reproductive instinct combined with their imagination leads them to create something that they care about even more than children. A lot of people who have children don’t notice this, but people who don’t have children have a lot of time and energy and money to do things in life that they couldn’t do if they did have children.
Meanwhile, some homosexuals do want to have children, and they find ways to work around the fact that they aren’t sexually attracted to people they can have children with.
Scene 3
Humans have two basic body types, male and female. Most people are attracted to the opposite one. But some people are attracted to their own body type. It’s hardly surprising that some people would be. Your own body type is the one you’re most familiar with, because you’ve had it all your life.
You know how men and women have different personalities too? For some things in life it’s easy to say, “That’s masculine,” or, “That’s feminine.” That’s why elementary school teachers are mostly women and construction workers are mostly men.
Those kinds of differences in personalities are the result of men and women thinking and feeling very differently about some things. Those differences in personalities can also lead to men and women getting into arguments that never really seem to end. Because they can’t even agree on what they were arguing about. That’s a real problem for their marriages.
Most people take their chances on those kinds of relationships. Most of those people have children because of it. But some people avoid those arguments to a great degree.
If what you care about most in a relationship is the other person’s personality, people of your own gender will have personalities that are more compatible with yours in a lot of ways.
Scene 4
Gay relationships are different from heterosexual relationships in some ways.
Lesbian relationships are different from heterosexual relationships in some ways.
But it’s not really gayness or lesbianism that makes that happen.
A good heterosexual relationship is a meeting of a man’s personality with a woman’s personality. A gay relationship is a meeting of a man’s personality with another man’s personality. A lesbian relationship is a meeting of woman’s personality with another woman’s personality.
Scene 5
What is the best way to feel like you’re reproducing?
Is it for you to have sex with someone and for one of you to get pregnant with a baby with both of your genes?
Or is it to live a life that you’re happy with, with good relationships with other people that make you feel like you’re part of a family?
Heterosexuals and homosexuals both can adopt children and feel like they’re carrying on their family lines, even though they aren’t carrying on their genes. People who don’t want children at all can feel like they’re carrying on their family lines by living good lives and being good role models for younger people.
ACT V
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Usually I like to recommend books you can read to learn more. But if you understand evolutionary psychology to this point, that you can understand people’s behavior by understanding why they perceive themselves to be maximizing the survival rates of their genes with the decisions they make, you’re ready to move on from books.
A good education prepares you for real life, which includes meeting diverse people. This part of the story was inspired mostly by my homosexual friends, and other friends with various family styles, military veteran friends who take big risks for their buddies and their country, and people who have attempted suicide or gone through self destructive parts of their lives and lived to tell about it— and other people I’ve known of who didn’t live to tell about it.
That’s the whole point of this story. And that’s the ultimate test that it’s real. Everyone can tell the story of their lives by talking about why they felt that the decisions they’ve made were
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situations
they were in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
No matter how different their life has been from yours.
