Three Muses - Reproduction

Our Western ‘modern day’ story posits that we evolved from beasts like those we see about us.  We are all the leaves on the edge of a large tree of life.  Our branches follow back to one central life-giving trunk.  We recognise the family resemblance with our close neighbours.  It is in our eyes, ears, testis, and mammary glands.

The great drive of nature is to reproduce. 

The command is to go forth and multiply; the writer of the early Jewish text got it right. 

But where did this urgency to reproduce come from? 

Fortunes are spent searching for life on Mars.   Why on earth should life exist on Mars?  Why should it exist? Reproduction is such an effort.  The benefits are slight.

The theory goes that proteins, for some inexplicable reason began self-replicating.  Replicating became ‘the thing’.  Eventually single cell organisms were doing it; dividing down the middle.

Reproduction takes energy and resources.  Pelicans famously puck their own chest to feed their offspring.  What an effort!  When I die, I gain nothing.  What do I care if my off-spring go on to inherited the world?

In my mind’s eye, I live in the Stone Age.  It is a fantasy of Eden; the beginning of time.  According the Yoval Noah Harari the Stone Age was the ‘best of times’.  It was short and sweet.  Work comprised of an average of four hours a day of hunting and gathering. 

For me the Stone Age is the way I can consider life without the cultural context that surrounds me now.  It is like the first time a teenage leaves home and moves to a university town.  This is when they discover what they truly believe; what they value.  They learn what is their own taste, and what is the ‘wallpaper’ they have been surrounded by for years.

As Julian Baggini points out, the chances of being a Catholic are significantly increased if you are born in Poland, and a Hindu if India, a Muslim if born in Malaysia, and so on.  In the Stone Age of course these cultural contexts exist, but perhaps I get a truer view of on the ‘essence of life’ with the use of this contrasting lens.

I once met an English sociologist in Nepal who worked for an NGO.  Sociology is very democratic.  It defines religion by how the majority describe it.  In this way my sociologist conjectured that although he professed to be a Christian, he might not define himself as the Christian using the majority view.  Britain is described as a post-Christian country, yet, over the years, it has not done much to convince the world that its inhabitants live like Jesus.

Ref:

How the World Thinks, by Julian Baggini

Homosapian, by Yoval Noah Harari