work has been super dull. however, in the past 2 weeks i find this 'dullness' quite useful. since my task require only 25-40% of cognitive ability, the spare 60-75% have been used to listen to Robert Sapolsky's lectures on behavioural biology.
somewhere down the road it turned from behavioural biology to neurology and i swore i feel like i was burning 800 calories just sitting there listening, trying to absorb and process all the information. i was wondering if i'm that stupid or of neurology is indeed quite a difficult subject.
i got home from work and sometimes had 30 minutes time to call with my 11.000 km away boyfriend. i would told him some of the things i caught from the lectures.
i told him all the weird interesting things from the lectures, for example:
- animals masturbate too
- an entire generation of dutch people was born with high likeliness for diabetes due to being a last 2nd/3rd trisemester fetus during the dutch hunger winter
- some male primates kill baby primates so they could mate with the mother
then he told me praying mantis female eats her male partner after sex to provide nutrition for the upcoming offspring.
there are so many things in nature that are crazy according to 'civilised' humans. but the thing is nature evolve as it is, and what is in the nature, is nature. they are not right or wrong. there is no right or wrong in nature. it's a phenomenon, it is what it is.
looking back at my experience in college, there was a professor who leans toward naturalism. it's a branch of law that believes moral comes from nature. it's an inherent thing in human, e.g. naturally mothers nurture their children, hence it's moral, so child abandonment is against moral. second example, killing children is wrong, because 'naturally, we all know that killing is wrong'
well the truth is legal/social/common perception of nature is often wrong.
for example, in some primate species, motherhood is not natural. it's a learned behaviour. second example, some male primates kill baby primates who is the offspring of a dominant male, or they just simply kill the baby so the mother can ovulate again, so they can mate with the mother, so they can pass on copies of their genes.
even more disturbing, some people intermingle nature with societal values. for example, because the majority of men are sexually attracted to women, therefore men who are not attracted to women are 'unnatural', and therefore 'not normal', and therefore 'immoral', and therefore 'let's hang them on the town square so we can send a message to everybody that homosexuality is not accepted here'.
homosexuality is a recessive natural phenomenon, just like autism or bipolar or blue eyes and brown eyes. do nature put values in it? no. who put values in it? humans.
i find this whole thing with values and morals is very confusing. where should we seek values? how do we know that this value is right and we should uphold it, while other value is not necessary to uphold?
one prominent example of this 'confusion' is in the topic of love.
back in the past i made a post basically saying 'we are not polyamorous apes, we're monogamous civilised humans and we should be faithful to our partner'.
now i can see how stupid my post was. i disregarded nature and paid too much attention on values.
humans are the only pair-bonding, monogamous, till death do us part primate. other primates are either polyamorous, tournament species, or they just simply 'fuck whoever i want in this community'.
when did we become 'till death do us part' species? i dont know, i need to read more.
even more interesting, romance is a new idea. the notion that sex and marriage should be based on affections, and it should last forever until we die, and love/affection is everything, it's all that matters and stuff, only started less than 100 years ago.
jane austen you scam.
and all the distasteful things that happen with cheating husbands and wives asking divorce, why marriages don't work, why is everyone getting divorce, adoptions, blah blah, it all started to make sense when i listened to Sapolsky's lectures.
all these times i thought it was just about desire, boredom, ego, and some human psychological stuff. now i know, it's actually an evolutionary-driven, biologically-valid behaviour.
most of these 'partnership complication' probably derives from our confusion, are we a tournament species or pair-bonding species? just like me, as an individual, often get stuck in the ambivalence of 'do i want to eat sweet stuff' or 'do i want to eat savory stuff', the entire species of homo sapiens get stuck between 'do men want to fuck as much women as they can then leave' or 'do men want to fuck 1 woman and raise children and stay with her for the rest of his life'?
in tournament species, men would fuck as many women as possible because they're not going to stay anyway, so there's no responsibility following the fuckings. women gets to pick who she wants to fuck, and it has to be this jacked, tall, muscular, genes-from-heaven guy, because he's going to leave anyway, we don't need good personality, we need big d* and good genes so we can have awesome sex and beautiful children. then after you're done with 1 male and the children have grown up, you can always find another hot guy and start it all over again. this tournament scheme is awesome if you're a: (a) hot guy, or (b) female. if you're an average male, or below average male, it's not awesome at all. you're basically useless because you can't reproduce. if you're an ugly female, well, at least you're female, you're useful regardless of looks.
meanwhile in pair-bonding species, men can only pick 1 woman. they have sex, the female gave birth, they nurture the kids together. therefore you don't need stupid muscles and big d*, you want good personality. you want men that can provide a good living and can co-nurture the children well. because of this, pair-bonding species males often have unique courting ways, like male birds building nests to attract females, or male humans putting 'medical doctor' in their Tinder bio to attract female humans--since medical doctor profession is associated with good income and life qualities. also in pair-bonding scheme, females are more likely to cheat, because they know, the father will take care of the children if she left.
since we're kinda stuck inbetween those 2 schemes, we're confused. both men and women want faithful 'romantic-social' partner, but they also want hotter sexual partner. men get married, and they love the wife and the kids, but they also sleep with the hot secretary because there's something in their blood that is still 'tournament-y'. women can't stand living with unemployed, financially-incapable, non-providing husband because her pair-bonding instinct want the guy to provide well so she and the kids can live conveniently, she didn't mind if he isn't tall and handsome and muscular, she just want him to care and provide.
that's just 2 examples of the phenomenon which i think explainable by the theory of tournament vs pair bonding species. i don't know how much of this is true, but it makes so much more sense to me now.
i still don't believe in the conventional naturalism school of thought, but i think there's a potential, within that school of thought, to develop something new, on the basis of a foundation that:
everything is explainable in molecular level --> we can use natural sciences to answer 'moral questions' in favour of 'for the benefits of all species' --> the genesis of law can stand upon natural science instead of social dogma, but definitely NOT my college professor's idea of 'natural'.
natural phenomenon itself doesn't posses values (i mean, like 'if something exist then it exist), but it has explanations for stuff, therefore it can actually 'decide' something. this might not be a big thing now, but i kinda believe that in the future, lawmakers will pay more attention to these behaviour-neurology-molecular-biology stuff, since we're starting to realise that all ideologies are basically bullshits.
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