Reproduction - What's The Point?

I was reading a fascinating essay entitled ‘Being Alone – Rethinking the single life.’ It has made me examine my own feelings on the subject. Like the young lady who posted the essay, I too am at the peak of my marriageability and fertility according to society. I also am single. Lucia is right, the word attaches so many stigmas and stereotypes although I would say they are more often applied to women.
The whole point of life on Earth is to reproduce, to pass on your genes to the next generation. It is simple biology. 40,000 years ago a group of primates evolved much larger brains, language, intelligence and foresight. These gifts, for want of a better word, Mother Nature didn’t bestow on any other species on the planet. (By the way I know God doesn’t exist so nothing I am saying has anything to do with a deity, evolution isn’t planned it is completely random. They aren’t really gifts more than chance mutations.) These mutations enabled us to become the dominant species on Earth.

Rearing our young means we live on through them. Our big brains helped us to create farming, sophisticated society, culture, music, art and lots of brown and grey piles of bricks we call buildings that generally last much longer than any human lifetime. In addition we have created complex social networks and things we call jobs.

All this means that with or without children we live on through our contributions to culture, society and relationships. Rembrandt and Shakespeare have both been dead for hundreds of years but their respective art lives on at The Globe Theatre and The National Gallery, still affecting us, we still write and talk about them. Likewise the genius that invented plumbing in Roman times has been dead for about 2,000 years but his/her invention is used every day throughout most of the world., So while our genes may not survive our memes do. Memes are ideas that scientists believe reproduce like living things through social networking.

So great! Our memes survive so we don’t have to worry as much about dying. We live on through our work. Nature is not easy to ignore, especially considering the youth of our species and our selfish genes have transformed from dictating our behaviour at a primitive level to dictating our behaviour at a complex social level.

Every living thing apart from humans is not ‘intelligent.’ They are simply slaved to their DNA. Each animal does what it does, every day, every generation with no thought as to why they do it, their genes control their actions.
Humans have evolved a higher level of consciousness and we like to think that we are the exception to the rule, the one species on Earth that is not bound to the laws of genetics. We like to think that genes don’t control our actions. Everything we are is encoded in long strips of acid. These make millions of proteins called genes. Therefore, logically genes control our entire existence. No matter how much freedom we think we have, we are still slaves to our DNA.
Of course that argument isn’t entirely without fault and as we know our environment plays a big part in our development, specifically the development of our big brains – how we process information, how we communicate and how we learn. I won’t dwell on that now, suffice to say our genes are what make us who we care.
As Leonard Schlain states in his book Sex, Time and Power, we recognise the link between sex, pregnancy and childbirth. We have evolved the capacity to understand this and communicate our feelings on this to other members of the species. Also other members of our species are able to communicate their feelings about our sex, pregnancy and childbirth. They can tell us what they think.
Now as mammals we need to have sex to reproduce, therefore if we stop having sex, we stop reproducing. If we stop reproducing then all human life will cease. Our genes can’t allow this, so they give us certain desires so we keep reproducing. Our evolved complex social structure means every tribe member knows how important it is for us to bear children. Everyone we know encourages it. Childless animals are useless, worthless in an evolutionary and genetic point of view, so the genes give us weapons. They give us the power to shame childless people and make them outcasts. They are of no use to the community as they cannot give life.

This behaviour started in primitive cultures, over thousands of years as we developed as a species so did our methods of shaming. The stigma attached to childless people today is huge. In some societies if a wife does not bear children within the first two years of marriage she must have a note from the doctor giving a medical reason for her barren state. Thus our genes still dictate our behaviour.

Like I say obviously if every human stopped reproducing today all humans would cease in one hundred years. Needless to say all other forms of life would flourish. I digress however, we won’t stop reproducing today but there are 7 billion humans on Earth. That in biological terms is over 3 billion mating pairs. Ignoring our culture of homosexuality, surrogacy, IVF and all the rest of medical advances and taking heterosexual traditional reproduction as the norm that’s over 3 billion children going to be born. It’s probably going to be okay if a few of us don’t reproduce right?

My next point is that the human population has increased exponentially in the past century or so. As a species we have completely changed the face of the Earth. Instead of vast forests and grassland we have smothered the world in settlements. No longer trees and plants we have tarmac and concrete choking the planet. Since the development of humankind we have slaughtered billions of animals and mostly not for food. As carnivores we need to eat meet but we have destroyed thousands of percent more than we have every eaten. Not only animals but we willing slaughter millions of our own species for no real gain whatsoever. We have destroyed most of the natural world and tried to bring as much of the world under our control; from the life cycle of rivers to the life cycle of other animals. It follows that we have spent the life our species fighting Nature trying to tame it.

Is it possible we can extend the same argument to our own nature?
We have fought against everything else that has stood in our way and seem to have won most of the time, can’t we fight our own biological clock and win against our genetic masters?

Genes want to ensure they get passed on through healthy offspring, that way they will live on. In animals the method they use to test this is by displays and rituals. Females look for desirable physical traits in males such as mane length in lions, large antlers in reindeer and pretty song in robins. Males that have big antlers are thought to be genetically better and likely to bear healthy children, thus the survival of the fittest rule comes into play. This method has worked throughout evolution, females testing their compatibility with males, based on attractive physical features, before they decide to mate with them.

In humans we have taken it further, while we do still look for attractive physical features in both men and women we also select for attractive personality traits. We take these into account before we mate. We not only select for brown eyes, long straight brown hair and gorgeous smile; we select for sense of humour, liking Jane Austen novels, being interested in engineering for example. After we decide someone is compatible physically and personally then we agree to mate with them.

Despite our efforts in other areas of human society to ignore genetic predispositions, it seems we are unable to ignore that one basic instinct, but shouldn’t we? We have created capitalist societies with thousands of different job, different art forms to enjoy and more opportunities to discover how and why the world works the way it does. We are not just measured by the amount of viable offspring we produce but by our contributions to art and science as well. Shouldn’t we be able to choose?

(By the way this is Part One. You’ll notice I have attempted to explain why such stigmas exist from an evolutionary viewpoint and in Part Two I will examine my own thoughts of living in 2013, being single and happy.)