Monday Musing: Biological Imperative

It is one of the great strangenesses of humanity that we both crave what is new and different—yet at the same time refuse to acknowledge change because we’re very comfortable as we are, thank you.

Where’s the switch?  How can we exist in such a state of controversy?

To that end, I give you the Biological Imperative.  (clap clap clap clap)

I take you back now to the dawn of time.  Whether we just crawled out of a slime pit or God just placed two people in a Garden, or we were created from trees (by the way, Norse mythology has the coolest Armageddon ever.  Ragnarok Rules!—now I want a t-shirt), you can choose.  (It matters not what your views are on Macro-evolution, but micro-evolution is a documented fact.  Feel free to look up the difference).

So there are all these people running around on Earth and in order to survive they’ve got to have two things (technically three, but we’ll get to that): food and shelter.  Shelter will probably occur near a large deposit of foodstuffs, and it is easier to determine what makes a good shelter.  Does it keep out the elements?  Check.  Does it in some way protect me from creatures and other people?  Check.  Is it in a place that is unstable or will kill me?  Hopefully not Check.  So you see, shelter’s not so hard, and even to people of lower ‘intelligence’ like our ancestors possibly were, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

But food—there’s the problem.  How did they know what was good to eat?  Some people posit that by watching animals you can figure out what’s good to eat.  Not always true, as it turns out, since some animals can eat everything, and we can’t.  So what it really comes down to is trial and error.  And most errors ended in touching eulogies.  Possibly. 

This is where the Biological Imperative starts to come in.  I ask you this: if curiosity is a trait that is bred into your DNA, how long do you think it will take for all the curious people to die off because they don’t know how not to shove everything in their mouths?  It’s quite possible that some people back then were so curious they’d put our best minds to shame.  Although their curiosity likely put them to death because of their lack of common sense.  So if all the curious people are dying off, they’re likely dying off young, and therefore have no time to procreate and pass their fatal trait onto the next generation.

(and this kind of comes around to that third necessary thing for survival: members of the opposite sex.  Because in order so you all don’t die off before you find what’s good to eat, you’ve got to have progeny to keep going after you’re dead.  But the basic man/woman ratio isn’t usually that hard to keep going, so this is only sort of ‘necessary’)

And it would probably only take a few generations for the curiosity DNA to get severely pruned back in a family tree.  But the legacy of this harsh weeding out is that we are genetically predisposed to be wary of new things.  It was the thing you didn’t know that would most likely kill you.  New plant?  It’ll probably kill you.  New animal?  It’ll definitely kill you.  New person you haven’t met?  He’ll steal your food, rape your wife, and also kill you.  Only the cautious survived.

So it wasn’t the curious ones who were breeding, it was all the cautious ones who hung back and let their stupid brother try that berry first.  So now we’ve got two traits that are essential for survival: caution, and the ability to manipulate the actions of others.  This doesn’t mean that curiosity was wiped out, by any means.  Every invention we have is proof of that.  But these two traits are responsible for why every single one of us on this Earth will choose to travel the road they already know to get to that place—or why someone will only eat the same food they ate growing up—or why they’ll never listen to a different form of music—or even why so many people never travel or move away from their home town.  The human animal is most comfortable amongst that which is known—that which is safe. 

But we’re thousands of years away from the time when what was different could kill you.  Why aren’t we any different?

Well we are.  Sort of.

Curiosity is no longer a shunned trait.  We revel in our inventors (when they’re not in middle school.  They’re such geeks) we create new works of fiction by the hundreds, we change our fashions weekly, we are all about the new experiences. 

But what about the hikers who go into the woods completely unprepared because ‘they’ll be all right.’  Or the ones who provoke an animal because they don’t know any better.  Or hey look, there’s a cave.  Lets see what’s inside.  There are plenty of ways for our natural curiosity and lack of common sense to kill us, even now. 

All this is to say, there is nothing wrong with our biological imperative to be afraid of what is new and different.  That’s the little thing keeping us alive sometimes.  But there’s also nothing wrong in overriding it and telling it to be quiet when we want to do something we haven’t ever.  We’re human, which means both that we’re large bundles of chemical interpretations of instincts, but also that we have intelligent minds that can overrule what our bodies tell us.  We are the dichotomy of fear and curiosity, the juxtaposition between the new and the different.  We are curious cowards and reluctant explorers.  We are the uncomfortable middle.  We are human.  No more no less.

Also, I'd like to wish Richard Dean Anderson a Happy Birthday!  We love you MacGyver!