Tag Archives: Gene Preservation

Family and Relationships

On the mystery of Love

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Translated from Russian original by Joanna Dobson

Of all the questions posed in the prologue there is just one question to which The Last Faith is unable to provide an answer, or to which it has only provided 50% of an answer. This question concerns the mystery of Love. For clarity’s sake, here we are talking only about the natural form of love that occurs between a man and a woman. The Gene Preservation instinct undoubtedly lies at the root of this kind of love. In a sense this fact might serve as an appropriate answer to the question and yet, it still only goes halfway towards a full answer because Gene Preservation instinct cannot explain why love is so supremely selective. Why does a man or woman in love, long to preserve their genes exclusively with one sole representative of the entire second half of humanity? Even if we cannot provide a rational answer to this question, we can at least look at it more closely.

At the outset, I deliberately avoid attempting to define love in the context of strange, sublime, mystical speculation, leaving that rather to poets and preachers because such definitions cannot be subjected to experimental verification. Neither can I adopt the definition of Love offered by materialists based on medical research such as the biochemical meeting of perfectly opposite pheromones. After all, sometimes people fall in love at first sight, even in the winter when they are wearing thick clothes impervious to pheromones! People can even fall in love through a movie screen! Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor or Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vlady are prime examples of this. And how are we to understand one-sided, unrequited love? For that too is love, oh and what love it is! This type of love occurs more frequently than mutual love, it is just that we hear of it less often and sadly, only when there is a tragic outcome.

Attempts to explain the concept of love based solely on the striving to protect and pass on one’s genes hold no water at all.  The ideal solution and best means of protecting and passing on one’s genes is found in the classical form of monogamous marriage based on mutual attraction and shared interests and views on life. As we know, marriages which are not based on passionate love are fragile and undermined by the hyper-critical attitude of the lovers to each other, the virulent need to squash their partner’s Freedom of Choice and desire to have possession of the soul of the object of their love. Marriages of this kind will only last if over the years passionate love is transformed into mutual affection.

Neither can love be explained exclusively by Freedom of Choice. Has anyone really ever chosen with whom they will fall in love? In many languages the Russian word ‘vlyubitsa’ is literally expressed as ‘falling and tumbling into love’. For example, in English the equivalent expression is ‘fall in love’ and in French ‘tomber amoureux’.  How on earth can one speak of choice, moreover of free choice. I had a friend who lived to the age of forty something and all his short life he saw no meaning to life without love. He was always ‘tumbling into love’, spending the night in the entrance hall to the flat of his beloved so that in the morning he could meet his ‘goddess’ with a bunch of flowers. When he came into easy money he would hire restaurants and the orchestra would sing and play especially for his love. I have to say, that very few objects of his passion were able to resist such an onslaught of attention, even in the case of married women from respectable families who had wealthy, influential husbands. In contrast I have known both men and women who have loved no-one but themselves their entire lives. There is nothing interesting I can say about them.

With that, we may have excluded various erroneous attempts to explain what love is but have made no progress in our own search for an answer to this question. Perhaps this is why we have lyrics of love to feed poetry, music, paintings, literature, film and theatre which make up such a large and important part of human life. Any form of art related to amorous poetry represents the conscious or unconscious striving to answer to the question: “Why does love exist?” And the day that a rational explanation of love is found, lyrics of love will breathe their last. Something tells me though, that we will not be seeing this day for a long time to come.

History, Nature

Cuckoos, dragonflies, Bonobo monkeys and the Law of Gene Preservation

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Translated from Russian original by Joanna Dobson

Question from reader N:

Dear Author,

Your theory on the Law of Gene Preservation is totally indefensible! Take for example the cuckoo. As soon as the cuckoo has laid its egg it puts it into the nest of another bird and forgets about it forever. The other bird sits on the egg until the chick hatches and sometimes even nurses it.  Is the Law of Gene Preservation working here?

Author’s reply:

Dear Reader N,

Here the maternal instinct may be absent in the cuckoo, but in no way is the Law of Gene Preservation absent! If the Law of Gene Preservation did not work among cuckoos they would throw their eggs away, or even worse, eat them. On the contrary, cuckoos only put their eggs in the nests of birds when they are certain that the other bird will sit on their eggs until they hatch and then feed their chicks. In this way, the cuckoo gene is preserved.  All living beings in nature are subject to the Law of Gene Preservation, otherwise they would not survive.

Reader X:

I would like to add one more example to illustrate the working of the Law of Gene Preservation and its precedence over the Basic Instinct. From Wikipedia: Dragonflies mate on the fly. The secondary copulative apparatus in males is highly specialised and has no analogy among other insects. The male dragonfly removes any sperm left by a previous male before inseminating the female with his own. The females of some species (dragonflies) mimic the colouring of the males to reduce the amount of attention they receive so that they can move more quickly to the egg-laying stage.

Author:

That’s a wonderful example. Thank you!

 

Reader A.K.:

Dear Author,

You claim that animals do not have Freedom of Choice. Allow me to contradict you there. The female Bonobo monkey often gives herself to the male, who brings her a large ripe banana. In other words, does she not make a choice to reject the other males? Could you say that there is a kind of prostitution among bonobos?

Author:

Dear A.K.,

This is quite different to the kind of Choice that people are capable of making. The female bonobo operates exclusively according to her innate programming to choose the best genes to cross with her own. It is not as if she can take precautions! Here there can be no great surprises and so there is no real free choice, or for that matter, prostitution. The whole process is totally determined. A female bonobo will never choose a sick, weakling male who can’t get for her a large ripe banana. Despite the genetic similarity between the bonobo and human beings that make them our close relatives in the animal kingdom, we cannot claim that we are identical.  Surely you must have heard of cases when the beautiful, clever sportswoman marries the ugly, weakling, unattractive youth of little promise shocking all her friends and family and vice versa? The predictability of individual human Choice is only probabilistic, although public choices, as the totality of large numbers of individual choices, can be predicted with great accuracy.