The Selfish Hindbrain (with apologies to Richard Dawkins)

Or - Wolfgang Explains Love, Sex, and the Hindbrain.

Note - a version of this article was originally posted by me on July 2011 on the original QuantumThoughts web site

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When I was single again back in 2009 I spent a lot of time thinking about love, sex, and dating.  I'm no Romeo, but I've had my share of relationships - long term, short term, relationships that I ended, relationships that the other person ended.  And it seems like I inevitably find myself asking “why do we do these things to ourselves?”

The best answer was given by the Bard (William Shakespeare) - “tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”.  Damn Straight, Bill! You haven’t truly lived until you’ve experienced the intensity of emotion of falling in love - and you can’t truly have anything without having its opposite (I know - it’s a philosophical tautology but bear with me).  So the intense unbearable sweetness of falling for someone, being in love with someone, is equally matched by the unbearable pain of losing that someone.

Both experiences are part of what make us human, and while I must admit I’d prefer to not experience the pain of a broken heart, it never stopped me from falling in love again.  And while it doesn’t happen every day, it happens frequently enough - I’m 44 and I’ve Fallen (if you've experienced it you know what I mean) all of four times in my life (and I remember each and every one of you, some more fondly than others).

But that doesn’t explain the WHY of the thing.  Poets and songwriters have their opinions; they are easy to find.  I’m going to try to give you a molecular evolutionary perspective of what drives this.  Feel free to pick it apart; god knows I’d like to think that the Basic Premise is wrong - but it just feels right to the inner scientist.

In any case - the Basic Premise is that there is no such thing as free will - the Biological Imperative controls all of our actions.

So what does that mean?

The Biological Imperative is nature’s driving force, the instinct for us to pass on our genes - to reproduce, to have children, to take care of those children and to ensure their survival.

I firmly believe that all of our actions, our thoughts, and our feelings, are driven by this biological need - evolution has shaped us into organisms that think and feel whatever is necessary to maximize our reproductive success and to pass on those genes.

And that, my dear readers, means love as well.

When are we most vulnerable to falling in love?   We see someone we find attractive.  We talk to them.  Smell them.  Stare into their eyes, fall into their arms and their beds - the next thing we know, we’re hopelessly head over heels in love with them.  Why?  What makes them attractive to us in the first place?

Because our hindbrain recognizes - by site, smell, feel, taste - that the person we are looking at is a good genetic match. That the two of us would “make good babies”.  My girlfriend, Christine, is madly in love with me - but show her a picture of Jason Momoa and she swoons.  Why?  The answer is Hybrid Vigor!  You see, Jason is a classic case of two different geographically separated phenotypes (German and Hawaiian) that have come together in a particularly pleasing combination.  Typically when you take two individuals of very different phenotypes/appearance and put them together (outbreeding, the opposite of inbreeding), you end up with a very attractive and compelling result.  Another way to look at it - we're often attracted to the "exotic" for exactly the same basic reason - your hindbrain wants you to breed outside of your genepool and "mix it up" genetically.  Inbreeding sooner or later leads to serious genetic problems, which is why the hindbrain has evolved to encourage outbreeding (and yes, Christine, that's why you think Jason is so hot - and why I'm letting my hair grow out and hitting the gym more).

So the Biological Imperative - that part of the hindbrain that wants us to pass on our genes - does two things.  One, it makes sure we are attracted to someone who is a good genetic fit for us.  Not so bad, is it, especially if you're Jason Momoa.

The second is the more insidious.

The second thing the hindbrain does is to make sure that we stick around and make those babies.  It makes us fall in love.

We all know it at heart, too.  Will McIntosh, in his book "Soft Apocalypse", wrote that there are two kinds of women - those who know that having an orgasm will make them fall in love, and those that deny it.  He's right, and it's not just women - men are like that too (we're just better at the whole denial thing).  How often has a casual encounter ended up in obsessive thoughts (at least for a few days)?  How many "friends with benefits" end up with more than just a touch of emotional attachment?

And now some of you are saying “but I’m not like that - everyone isn’t like that - surely you must be wrong”.  But keep in mind that we are all the genetic offspring of people who did not resist that biological imperative. The only people on the planet today are those whose parents had children, after all. Evolution selects against those who resist the urge to breed.

The Biological Imperative.  It impels us together, staring into each other’s eyes so deeply that we’re in bed before we know it. And that ultimate moment of sexual climax, when we let all of our walls down and all we can see/feel/touch/taste/smell is our partner, that is when the hindbrain does it’s magic, and before we know it we are lost in a biologically-controlled emotional response called love.

One of my partners once said that we spend more time shopping for major appliances than we do picking out a mate, and in many cases she was right - we'll scour the internet and store flyers and advertisements trying to find exactly the right televion or washer/dryer, we'll shop for weeks to get exactly the right price.  But a chance encounter at a party or a bar leads to a date leads to sex leads to love leads to marriage....

So what exactly is the gist of this?  Is this a cautionary tale?  Maybe.  But more importantly, my point is that we should be conscious of just how unconscious many of our actions are.  We aren't as in control of our choices as we think!  Try this - keep track as you go through your day or your week - how many of your choices, how many of your decisions, are based on a "whim", or something you didn't actually consciously think out?  That's your unconscious, or your subconscious, or your hindbrain deciding for you!

Full Circle

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies

Note - a version of this article was originally posted by me on July 2011 on the original QuantumThoughts web site


It’s funny how things work out sometimes.

Take Isaac Newton.  One of the seminal figures of Science and the Age of Reason, and few people today know that he was really, at heart, an alchemist.  And why not?  Alchemy was the hot thing back in the 1690's, as popular to the nerds of the day as IT is to us today.

Alchemy was really all about affecting the world around you, and to learn to be an alchemist you had to learn what made the world tick, often by trial and error (which we now call the “empirical method”).  It was this sort of “experimentation” that ultimately led to the abandonment of "alchemy" and the adoption of the true scientific method – recognizing that simple trial and error was madness, the nascent members of the scientific elite decided to systematize their approach – in short, to formulate a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and if it didn’t work out quite right the first time, change one variable at a time and repeat.  Science.

That approach works well enough to be applied to everything, and led to the industrial revolution – which continues today, with advancements happening at an ever increasing rate.  So much so, that many so-called “futurists” and visionaries are predicting a “technological singularity”, a point at which things become, well, fuzzy.  We won't be able to predict the "next big thing" because the advancements will simply be coming at us too quickly.  And most of the real adherents to the idea of the technological singularity (cross-reference Vernor Vinge if you like, lots of great Sci-Fi there) expect that we'll finally (finally!) have real AI (artificial intelligence), and once *that* happens, the machines will take over, at least in terms  of advancing science and technology.  We'll be left behind, simply the vehicle which was required to lead to the "true" pinnacle of life on earth.

But I digress - let's get back to the alchemy/science bit.  The empirical method, trying something, testing the results, tweaking the hypothesis - three hundred years of advancement and It’s all still alchemy, really.  What were the alchemists trying to do?  Turn lead into gold.  One of Newton’s obsessions was searching for the “Philosopher’s Stone” that would facilitate that reaction.  This was the holy grail of many alchemists, and their search was taken seriously enough that such “research” was banned by the British Government, which feared economic catastrophe if the alchemists should succeed! 

Newton never really gave up on it, and while he never found the Philosopher's Stone, he did at least get to work with gold (did you know he was hired by the British Government to run the Royal Mint?  Standardizing coin sizes, shapes, content, and minting all in order to prevent counterfeiting). 

Now fast forward 300 years -  turns out that we actually did discover the Philosopher's Stone; it's called nuclear bombardment transmutation, and it's an (albeit expensive) way of turning lead into gold.  Basically you crank up the power on a particle accelerator or nuclear reactor, expose some lead to the stream of particles, and wait.  It's hardly practical, since building the machine and powering it costs much more than the value of the gold you can produce - but still!

Alchemy to Science.  Science to Alchemy.  Lead to Gold.  It really feels like magic, and the best thing of it is that it's OUR magic - we make it through science, there's nothing mystical about it - just plain human ingenuity coming Full Circle.

Welcome to Nucleogenesis!

Welcome to Nucleogenesis, my all-purpose Science blog.  Although I'm a Ph.D. Molecular Biologist/Computational Biologist, my interest in science ranges far beyond "just" biology - so you never know what you might find here!

Nucleogenesis is a work in progress - I'll be importing over my previous science blog posts over the next few days; after that you can expect updates, well, as inspiration strikes.  So stay tuned!