The Human Equation

The fulfillment of your own sexuality is nothing less than your battle for existence.

Hi, Mr. Tomassi. My question is: Why were our ancestors, as mortal species, so interested in passing on their genes to the next generation despite it being so pointless, knowing they'll die anyway, and that whether the survival of our species happens or not, it won't benefit them on a personal level? Why the continuation of a species to its members is so significant since it is technically meaningless? 

To my knowledge, there are no “immortal” species on Earth, nor have there ever been. However, the answer to your existential question is implied in the question itself. Why would a mortal animal ever bother with perpetuating its existence as a species? Isn’t it all pointless? Why would evolution prioritize the proliferation of a species at the expense of the individual organism?

Mapping human meaning and existentialism onto biological and empirical realities is something even the greatest philosophers fail at. Nature doesn’t care about the individual, the species, or the adverse (or advantageous) environments that challenge its existence. Evolution is a math problem, not a free-will problem. Meaning is added after that equation resolves. It doesn’t prioritize an individual or a species. It’s about adapt or die. Only humans agonize over the meaning of life and celebrate or commiserate its ups and downs once the blood is spilled and the dust settles.

That evolutionary equation reduces down to two variables: survival and reproduction. Survival is always the prime number in the equation. Reproduction is the next priority, but you can’t fuck if you’re dead, so survival trumps reproduction in the equation. If survival interests are semi-secure, reproduction is the highest order of needs. Evolutionary psychology has told Maslow to shove his hierarchy of needs up his ass. Once the base needs of survival are met, virtually every higher-order need can be reduced to a reproductive adaptation or imperative. Touchy-feely humanist psychology hates this combination of reductionism and determinism, but the evolutionary approach to existence is a math problem, not a feelings or morality problem.

In this respect, reproduction is our meaning in life.

Think about it. The only immortal part of the human machine is our DNA. The only real, physical legacy we leave after our machine has decomposed is the genetic code we successfully passed and replicated in a successive generation. Our children, grandchildren and their future progeny carry on the only physical remnants of ourselves – our genetic footprints. Today, 1 in 200 men on planet Earth carry some snatch of the genetic code passed on from Genghis Khan. Old Uncle Genghis was probably not the best example of prosocial humanism, but he was a raging success from the evolutionary equation’s purview. Likewise, the fertility clinic doctor using his sperm to inseminate women is another equation success story.

Online moralists love the oneupmanship game of flexing their four children as a metric of their masculine value. TradCons use their wives and children (fuck trophies, as Rian Stone calls them) as their Real Man® bonafides in the high-value man competitions – all intersexual competitions. But why would a man’s offspring be a metric of his quality? Because passing one’s DNA on to the next generation is the point of life. And we all know it.

We manifest this prioritization in our basest behaviors. Men and women mate guard their spouses, girlfriends, and even prospective lovers to pass on our genetics, secure our children’s wellbeing, and ensure the children produced carry our DNA. The evolutionary equation doesn’t resolve unless the variables of cuckoldry and sunk cost are factored in. When men kill a rival, an unfaithful lover, or kill themselves after discovering the children they raised to adulthood are not biologically their own, this is the evolutionary equation balancing itself or attempting to. We make up psychological and sociological rationales to explain these antisocial behaviors to ourselves because the root reasons are ugly and unsettling.

We see educating our children and instilling our values in them as a human good, but this is to prepare them better to pass on the only immortal parts of ourselves, perhaps more (or less) efficiently than we could. When we lament the pitiable state of Incels today, we’re not pitying them for dropping out of society. We see them as genetic dead ends. They represent the extinction of a genetic line. 

We also fear the means they may use to resolve their reproductive problem. The Equation mandates that fewer men than women will reproduce over time. Since plotting the human genome, we know that only one man for every 17 women passed on their DNA to successive generations. Socially enforced monogamy has historically been a buffer against the worst aspects of this reality, but it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the equation. For various reasons, some men will not reproduce. And then, as now, moralism, exceptionalism, and social conventions step in to ameliorate this ugly reality.

In evolutionary theory, a school of thought posits that all organisms are just vehicles for their genetic code. All animals, plants, and bacteria are simply vessels to deliver a complex code of instructions to recombine and replicate with one another, ideally creating a new vessel better adapted to continue passing on this code. If the vessel isn’t equipped to deal with a changing environment, it means that immortal code is erased from existence. I’m not sure I like the proposition that I’m basically a more complex form of pickup truck for my genes, but this theory does answer my reader’s original question. What makes me me is irrelevant to the equation. 

Nature, evolution, doesn’t care what our genes’ vehicles think is meaningful. Its only directive is solving an evolutionary equation by ensuring our genes’ immortality in this physical realm. That’s why we cannot help but find sex so damn important. 200,000 years of successful replication and becoming this planet’s apex species proves our design’s efficiency. The human machine has been subject to this equation since then, and its influence will continue to define our existence despite all our navel-gazing polemics about consciousness and meaning. While we have the power to exercise our will over the equation, we are still subject to its rules. Our operative state doesn’t change because we feel like something about it should. Powerless people think they can change the equation to better fit their deficit of ability to deal with it. Powerful people function within the equation and master it.