DNA Rules!

Often, I find the root of understand to a difficult social conundrum lies with the exclamatiuon "DNA Rules". I usually get strange looks, but it makes such basic sense.

We have inherited our bodies from a time less than 600 generations ago, when the rules of survival and reproduction were not so obscured by abundance, as they are today.

For example, today I was listening to Dave and Sheila's afternoon dialogs on Kink.fm, and was entertained by Dave's pummeling after expressing that a 19 year old female is, well, hot (in the context of a pop-news story). In the full consideration of a person, age often adds huge values, so what is it that makes a culturally immature young woman be described as "hot".....? [DNA Rules] = For millions of years, human males that were attracted to young females HAD MORE OFFSPRING, simply because young females have greater child bearing probabilities than older females. This trait, how ever faint its effect on reproductive success, is amplified over more time than we can imagine.

I compare this example to the reaction I have when I see a rodent out of the corner of my eye - a strong defensive response, inherited from the Survivors within the structure of my limbic wiring.

Another good example is the difference in the ability to multi-task between men and women. (Recognizing of course that embryonic brain formation has strong environmental influences), I sometimes wonder at a woman's ability to handle several steams of conversation. Why is it a common joke that men don't multi-task...? [DNA Rules] = Because the males that were multi-tasking were just that much more likely to get KILLED BY THE BEAR, compared to the intensely focused minds of the hunters who took the fur and meat home and fed the offspring. Again, a small effect amplified over so many generations.

"DNA Rules" is not meant as an abdication social and moral structures to the wilderness of some kind of survival-of-the-fittest apology for destructive behavior. Rather I mean to understand the deep, deep currents upon which we float. The waves on the surface of the ocean to the cold dark deep are as we and our civilization are to the mass of life.

So, when you are faced with behaviors you just can't make sense of, imagine the simplest aspects of the behavior set in a clan of characters extracted from the first chapter of "2001 - A Space Odyssey", and see if it doesn't resulting in a subtle advantage to reproduction.