But that's not the way it feels
In his book Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson wrote that no one says "I want to maximize my fitness." I have to agree. Ultimately, in evolutionary terms, that might be every living organism's goal, but that's not what we humans feel like we want.
I was reading awhile back about the differing reasons that males and females have for extramarital sex; evolutionarily speaking, the reasons have to do with offspring, having them and raising them. But as anyone who's ever been in that situation, or talked with someone who has, or even read a novel about an adulterous couple knows, the woman is probably not thinking about using her dependable husband's resources to raise the child of a genetically more promising lover, and the man is probably not intent on fathering more children (often quite the contrary). Stories of cheating tend to be about emotional and sexual needs that aren't being met at home, or about true love mattering more than the rules, or about finding someone who really understands, or grabbing for experience while you can. By all reports, the experience generally doesn't seem to feel much like the evolutionary explanation, even though both realities might be true.
A different Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, described this disconnect beautifully in his book On Human Nature. He talks about the Mundurucú headhunters of Brazil and their method of sneaking up on neighboring villages, raiding them and beheading the occupants, and fleeing. Social scientists examined three possibilities for explaining how this behavior arose: that it was purely cultural and unrelated to a survival or reproductive advantage; that it was adaptive for individuals and their close kin; or that it was adaptive for the group. They concluded that the second hypothesis best fit the facts: that the head-hunters were fighting when they and their close relatives were in a position to gain reproductive success from their triumphs, both over other tribes and over others within their own tribe. But this is not how the headhunters themselves saw the situation. In Wilson's words, "Their justification for warlike behavior was richly overlaid by the powerful but opaque sanctions of custom and religion." I believe it is exactly the same for us in many situations.
Consider the differing reproductive roles and investments for men and women. Women always know who their children are, but a man must trust a woman when she tells him that he is the father of a particular child. A response to this down through the centuries has been the strict regulation of female chastity, to prevent them having affairs and obliging men to support children that the men thought carried their own genetic material when in fact they did not. (Not that I think this behavior is justified by its evolutionary roots, by the way, but that's a separate topic. For an excellent discussion of how our sexual behavior might have evolved and what it means for us today, see Matt Ridley's The Red Queen.)
With the increasing emphasis on religious fundamentalism in this country, it's probably not unreasonable to wonder if we might see more attempts at regulation of women's sexuality, although I certainly hope we do not. I was wondering about this recently and thinking that if it ever did happen, surely people who can no longer have children, like me, would not be affected. But I realized that whether or not I could have children would be beside the point. Whatever the biological reason for attempts to control female sexuality, it's become overgrown with such a thorny tangle of emotional and social factors that the biological reason is no longer necessary. The other things are an end in themselves. The idea of good girls or good women, who wear white wedding dresses and are faithful, loving, pure, and so forth, has long ago left behind its evolutionary roots and lives on as a desirable thing in and of itself, in certain circles anyway.
But the desire for sex becomes a psychological end in itself, whether or not we want to or are able to produce babies.
In Darwin's Cathedral, D.S. Wilson makes a distinction that I think explains this kind of disconnect: the distinction between proximate and ultimate reasons for behavior or traits. The ultimate reason for something—a behavior or a trait—is the survival or reproductive purpose that the behavior or trait serves. It's connected to what Wilson describes as the hard reasoning of costs and benefits to the organism. Proximate reasons, on the other hand, have to do with the variety of ways that organisms can reach the goal of adaptive behavior. The proximate causes for behavior are the psychological mechanisms that evolved to produce the behavior that enhances our survival or reproduction. The psychological mechanisms themselves are one step back from the adaptive behavior, and for humans they sometimes become ends in themselves.
D.S. Wilson gives a couple of examples. For instance, a liking for sex is obviously adaptive in the sense that those who like sex tend to leave more offspring than those who don't, and from nature's point of view, sex is about making babies. But the desire for sex becomes a psychological end in itself, whether or not we want to or are able to produce babies. Whether or not you were a respected member of a group had life or death consequences early in humankind's history, and although it does not today, we still tend to crave belonging and respect.
This idea of ultimate versus proximate causes clarified some things for me. It also got me to thinking about other situations—weddings, for example. Perhaps they are ultimately a display of power and resources, but they feel like something else entirely to the people involved. I've heard of women who start dreaming of their daughters' weddings on the day their daughters are born. These women aren't thinking about proving their family's Darwinian fitness; they just want to give their little girls a beautiful dream come true. And the couple themselves are thinking of their relationship and their love. All the trappings have become so emotionally charged that whatever economic or biological reason there was behind them originally is lost in most people's minds.
In E.M. Forster's novel A Room With a View, there's a scene where a newly engaged couple is making dutiful visits to the old ladies of their acquaintance, and the man is objecting to what he sees as the intrusive custom of sharing something so personal as their engagement with all and sundry. And yet, writes Forster, "...the smirking old women, however wrong individually, were racially correct. The spirit of the generations had smiled through them, rejoicing in the engagement of Cecil and Lucy because it promised the continuance of life on earth. To Cecil and Lucy it promised something quite different—personal love."
So we don't always think in terms of the ultimate cause behind what we do, because the proximate causes are so interesting and so absorbing to us, and become ends in and of themselves. It can be disconcerting to trace our loves and hates and struggles back to survival or reproduction or to the biochemical mechanisms that guide those behaviors. What goes on between our ears is so complex and so dramatic that we are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the bedrock of evolutionary history and biochemical urges that underlies our rich emotional lives. Of course we are far more than just the hard-wired or biochemically mediated behaviors that come to us from a distant past. I think, though, that it's useful to understand these legacies, discomfiting though it might sometimes be.
Although we talk about chemistry between people, we don't usually mean it quite so literally.
In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Barash writes of a young female student who was reluctant to believe that she and her sweetheart were drawn together partly by the actions of vasopressin and oxytocin. She wanted them to love each other for who they really were, not for the hormones circulating in their bloodstreams. However, the hormones are part of who they really are. Barash and his daughter have recently written a book, Madame Bovary's Ovaries, that I'm looking forward to reading. In it, they explain the evolutionary psychology behind some of the great themes and characters of literature.
Along the same lines, there's been some fascinating research into how women rate the attractiveness of a man's scent (the sweaty t-shirt studies). A group of men was asked to wear t-shirts for a certain period of time, while staying odor-neutral (no cologne, for example), and women were given the t-shirts to sniff and then asked to rate them for their attractiveness. It turned out that women found a man's scent sexier if the man was different from them biochemically in a particular way, and less sexy if they were similar; it's not clear exactly what's at work here but it appears that the differences would enhance the immune systems of their offspring if they mated. Although we talk about chemistry between people, we don't usually mean it quite so literally. When I think of all the reasons people fall in love (someone's wit or kindness or smile or intelligence, a similar family background, shared interests, in addition to physical attraction) it's almost spooky to learn about the things our bodies are doing behind our backs to ensure viable offspring (especially if we do not plan to reproduce). But that's part of how we work. The experience of falling in love is emotionally complex and contains many elements that have nothing to do with any evolutionary purpose. But the evolutionary purpose is still there underneath it all, and to some degree it explains why falling in love feels the way it does.
I like to understand what's going on. One year when I watched fireworks on the Fourth of July, I speculated about which chemicals were used to produce each of the colors. After a bright white flash, as the boom reverberated off of nearby buildings, I said appreciatively, "Magnesium!" ("Yes, Mom," said my sons, stopping just short of patting me kindly on the head.) Knowing that it's magnesium doesn't take anything away from the experience of the flash and the boom. After all, there has to be some mechanism that makes it happen.
Recently I had some minor outpatient surgery performed, and for some reason the doctor had to inject a little epinephrine at the site where he was operating. He explained that I might feel a little jittery but that it wasn't really me; it was just a result of the procedure. After I left the doctor's office, I had that shaky, slightly sick feeling you get after an adrenaline rush. I don't particularly like the sensations involved in the metabolization of adrenaline, but I knew what was going on and that it would pass in a little while. I knew there was no content behind the experience; I wasn't really afraid or anxious. But even if I had been, I don't see how it would have made the fear any less real to know it was being mediated by the rush of adrenaline (and its aftermath) that I was feeling. As with the magnesium, there has to be something that makes it happen.
Even though the biochemical or evolutionary explanation is not the only explanation, it's still part of the truth of who we are.
I was able to tell myself a story about what I was feeling based on the chemical that I knew had been introduced into my bloodstream. I think it's interesting to be able to do the same with other emotional experiences that do have real emotional content there in addition to the physical manifestations (if not when it's happening, at least after the dust has settled and the intensity of the emotion has faded). The story about the emotional content is still there, but with an added depth and richness from knowing how it works. (It's just as well that many of our reactions are too quick to think about consciously; for example, if something truly scary and dangerous had happened, I would likely either freeze or run, as appropriate, and stop to analyze it later.)
Even though the biochemical or evolutionary explanation is not the only explanation, it's still part of the truth of who we are. The experience of loving someone, for example, includes both biochemistry, the emotions that the biochemistry evokes, evolutionary history, cultural norms, and personal history. Vasopressin and oxytocin are the materials that create part of the physical experience. Understanding the biochemistry doesn't make the experience any less meaningful. We are reluctant to tell ourselves, when we're in the first flush of new love, "This is what a rush of this or that hormone feels like." But that doesn't necessarily have to take away from the content that in this case is there, that you're falling for someone. The neurochemicals mediate what is a meaningful experience on other levels, and make it possible. They don't replace the reality of our emotional experience; they provide the mechanism that makes it possible.
A character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway reflects that the compensation for growing older is that the passions are as strong as ever, but you finally have "the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light." I think that working toward that capacity is not a bad goal for the Thinking Meat Project, which is basically an effort to understand ourselves as conscious animals with a particular evolutionary history. What we should do with our newly gained knowledge of our past as a species and our inner workings is far from clear. I tend to agree with E.O. Wilson that some parts of our nature we want to cherish and others to rein in. But we can't know how or when to do either unless we know where we came from.
