Scattering Gametes
The more I study evolution, the more I realize how little we know about it and yet how badly we want to be able to use it to explain everything around us in terms of competition and fitness. The strong, sexy male competes with other males and "wins" the opportunity to mate with the female. Traits that females find attractive in males are always tied in some way to genetic superiority and must improve fitness to be considered a true adaptation. Done deal, close the book. No need to investigate other reasons for attraction between individuals of a population, and thus no need to question how power structures formed around us either, because we can assume that the systems we built operate on the same fundamental interactions of competition, adaptation, and survival of the fittest. Right?
Survival of the fittest has been used to justify some of the worst ideas that we have had as a species, like economic monopolies, religious violence, and eugenics. The fittest business will eventually own all business in its field, and killing off people with "bad genes" will ensure a better gene pool for future humans. Scientists who want to distance evolution from these deleterious ideas seem to take the enlightened Christian's approach, which goes as follows:
When presented with the absolute atrocities perpetrated on the population through religion, the Christian of the 21st century will say something like "well, all those pedophilic genocidal Christians were not REAL Christians but wolves in sheep's clothing. If they followed what the scripture REALLY said, none of these bad things would have happened." They will never edit their holy books to reflect this, however, and we are all left to wonder why a man made in the image an obviously genocidal maniac of a God won't become a genocidal maniac himself.
The scientist who is aware of the aforementioned logically derived yet obviously harmful conclusions of modern evolutionary theory will say something similar, that all those Nazis and immoral business moguls were somehow doing it wrong. Usually, they fail to give a good explanation as to why, and sadly this is because there is no reasonable explanation if you really believe that every biological adaptation, both physical and psychological, has evolved because it is fundamentally beneficial to the species, even if we can't see how. They are left grasping at straws to come up with reasons for us to not act selfishly and cruelly.
The standard model of evolution always left me wondering... if we are supposedly modeling our economic and moral systems on the principles of biological evolution, why has biological evolution led to all of the endless diversity in life that we see before us, while human-built systems tend to strangle diversity at every fucking turn? We MUST be missing something, and I believe that what we are ignoring is the fact that evolution is driven by sexual reproduction, which almost always entails a free giving of one half of one's genetic material with no idea as to what the consequences of doing so will be. This is true In the case of males especially, who for the most part mate and fuck off without knowing if their attempt at procreation was even successful at all. Females must let a complete stranger provide half of the genes required to create new offspring, with only an educated guess at which male that they have access to will provide the best genes to do so. We must give our information freely, and allow others to modify our own data, for subsequent generations to thrive and build upon our creations unhindered.
In most of nature, your genes are your most precious asset. It seems that for most of life, the whole point of the game we play here on earth is to survive long enough to pass on your genes, and that's it. In many species, at least one parent dies immediately after mating. You don't stay and control the product of your genes, you don't copyright them. Your offspring then go off and do the same, and as genes mutate and beneficial (or even harmful) genes are spread throughout the population, evolution occurs, for better or worse.
Copyright and patent law, eugenics, corporate subsidies, proprietary information, and closed systems are all blocks to diversity, and thus are skewing our cultural evolution toward the selfish. Do not fool yourself; holding on to your art, your words, your inventions for fear of being ripped off not only harms your competitors, but it will come back to bite you or your kin. Just look at Kodak, a once mighty, unstoppable force who have become scroungers in the camera industry they created. They could have produced the first digital camera and continued their reign as the most innovative in the game. Instead, they withheld it in an attempt to stop progress and their own evolution. Now they are left begging for scraps.
I say go forth and spread your knowledge, get your gametes out there. Be comfortable with being mostly out of control and ignorant of everything around you. And take refuge in the fact that this proliferation of negativity and selfishness in the world is not normal, natural operation of evolution, but a malfunction in the system. We can fix this.