Scarred for life

The first time I read Richard Dawkins' assertion (in "The Selfish Gene") that physical scars help their (male) bearers attract potential mates because they indicate survival skills, I felt quite pleased, because I have lots of scars. At the time, I did not stop to think whether this was a valid conclusion; I just accepted it as unexpected good news. This morning under the shower, however, I realized that almost none of my scars count in the way Dawkins meant.

For one thing, most of them are not very visible, either because they have faded with time (the ones on my chin, from an accident when I was four and the one across my eyebrow, from when my face collided with a toilet door during student party) or because they are usually covered (I have several on my scalp and behind my ear and one on my knee from a car accident, one on my stomach from an operation when I was one) or both (the scratches on my back - long story, better left untold). I even have one that was hidden on purpose, by a well-intentioned surgeon who had obviously not read or believed the scar theory.

For another, my scars do not indicate the type of survival skills Dawkins meant (he was referring to the animal kingdom). There is of course nothing wrong with surviving accidents and operations (as I say in my song "Unfair", the alternative is worse),



but you could also argue that it would be better not to have accidents (who knows, I might be a Bermuda triangle on legs) or need operations. And of course, accidents and illness can leave you worse off (Nietsche's idea that "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" might be true collectively, on the level of the species, but does not necessarily apply to the individual), if only in the sense that they may also leave mental scars. No, the scars that really count in this context are battle scars.

In the world I live in, however, male survival depends on more than just physical prowess. People might still be impressed by muscles and Heidelberg duelling scars (which apparently are still quite popular!), but that really only counts in the initial stages of a relationship. Very soon after that, most males will have to prove they also have provider skills (either directly - a steady job, or indirectly - the qualities necessary to make money).

Luckily, I no longer need my scars for anything (I have built my nest already, and a very nice nest it is). But it is still a bit sad to have to trash yet another illusion ... as a general rule, I am all for truth and demystification. But sometimes it is nicer not to peek behind the curtain.

Migration problems

Yesterday, I was talking to another friend, and we got on the subject of migration. (The way we got there is a story in itself: we started talking about bands - we share an interest in music-, and how the show must go on, and how the band on the Titanic kept playing while the ship was sinking, and how his great-grandfather was on the ship that rescued some of the survivors, who were then brought to America, and how his great-grandfather, a Swabic Hungarian, returned to his home country, which had seen massive migration some centuries ago, when the Turks left). 

This prompted me to think about mass migrations, and about the many problems they cause. Human history is full of stories of local inhabitants being displaced (or worse) by newcomers, on all kinds of scales, and all over the world. On the level of continents, we have North America, South America and Australia; at the country level, we have Northern Ireland and Israel, to name just a few examples of where the situation has gone spectacularly wrong, but you can find similar examples at regional level, and even at the level of neighbourhoods. When I was young, the phrase "there goes the neighbourhood" was quite common: people were very concerned about who lived in their immediate vicinity. 

Which is only natural. Not because I have any objection per se to any particular culture (they are all equally valid within their own context, and there are usually good reasons for the differences), but simply because mixing them can cause problems that didn't exist before. Slight differences in values within a culture (between individual and social groups) already cause problems, and there is good chance that they will get worse when differences increase.

Of course, cultural differences are not the same as racial differences, which is something I have always dismissed as so irrelevant as not even to warrant much thought. In that sense, I am a bit like the white daughter of very well-to-do liberal parents in the film "Guess who's coming to dinner" who has fallen in love with a (highly educated) black man, wants her parents to approve the marriage, and can't really see what the problem is. The film focusses most on the father's struggle with something that he would definitely have defended in principle, but had never even considered might actually become an issue for him personally.




On the whole, the film was well done, but I was a bit disappointed that virtually no attention was paid to why exactly interracial marriage was a problem. Of course I understand that people are more likely to "defend their kin", and I can also see how this can be extended to larger groups that are somehow genetically related, but that is a very theoretical bond. Sometimes, it really is better to have a good neighbour (of whatever color) that a distant friend. 

In fact, from the point of view of the species, mixing genes is good, or at very least, not bad, because it increases our chances of surviving. Which makes me wonder whether mixing cultures - however unpleasant the consequences might be for certain individuals or groups - might perhaps not also a good thing in the long run, for the species as a whole. Certainly contact between different groups of humans can be linked to all kinds of important developments, including language itself. And were it not for language, I would not be writing this. 

Hmm. 

Taboos and evolution

For a long time now, I have been trying to find out why things are the way they are. And for the most part, I look towards the theory of evolution for explanations. To me, virtually everything we do, want, aspire to can be explained as a survival mechanism, which I will define here as a genetic response to circumstances that existed in the past. Countless articles and books must have been written on this subject, but I have yet to find one that deals with the totality of human existence in this way. This little blog will not be the exception - it would probably require hundreds or even thousands of pages to cover everything that I would want to cover, but what I can do is offer some piecemeal observations, on isolated issues that have caught my attention, in the hope that this will inspire others to make a more concerted effort. And the reason I think this is worth doing is that I think that understanding the causes of our own behavior goes a long way towards solving some of the problems that we deal with every day. 

(For those of you who are wondering why our survival mechanisms - which are by definition solutions - can be problems, the answer is that circumstances change more quickly than and our genes or our behavior. Behavior that is completely appropriate in one situation may be completely inappropriate in another). 

For today, I want to offer some thoughts on taboos. Of late, it seems to me, taboos are being seen more and more as unwanted obstructions to our freedom, as throwbacks from more primitive, less civilized times. I do not disagree with this, but I am not in favor of simply jettisoning all taboos in favor of "rational behavior", for two reasons. Taboos, to me, are nature's system of "keep out" signs, and they were put there for a reason. We should think carefully before pulling them up and throwing them on the bonfire. And secondly, just because we would like to act differently doesn't mean that we can (see also a previous blog entry on life and death). Nonetheless, I do have problems with the "reptile brain" aspect of taboos, that is, the fact that our reactions are hard-wired, and I am quite content to try to dismantle that part. 

One taboo I am thinking about specifically is the one on ending life (murder, suicide, abortus). The gut reaction to this is rejection, which is perfectly logical if we accept the maxim that the main purpose of life is to "go forth and multiply". But of course overpopulation has made it necessary to rethink our attitudes on that. Even rationality itself could be seen as a survival mechanism, because it allows us to survive conditions that did not exist in the past, and notably the ones created by overpopulation.