Understanding The Human Animal

Human behavior can at times seem deeply puzzling. Very few people welcome death, and yet our world is full of war. Our minds can process huge amounts of information, and yet we remain loyal to questionable religions and relationships. Ever greater sums of money fail to satisfy, and yet wealthy people risk jail time to accumulate more.

As a young man, very little of this made sense. I did not understand how the Holocaust could occur. I could not comprehend why politicians lied, or how oppressive dogmas retained followers. In recent years I discovered a possible explanation for much of human behavior. And that explanation is the scientific theory known as evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology posits that our species is governed by similar forces as the animals from which we evolved. Animals are governed by instincts which allow them to survive in an ever-challenging state of nature. Centuries of natural selection have resulted in organisms finely tuned to survival, reproduction, and group interaction.

In terms of describing human behavior, evolutionary psychologists ask what human behaviors tend to be common to all or most cultures, and what survival value such behaviors had in the evolutionary past. Thus, for instance, after discovering that men in every culture surveyed prefer young, curved female bodies, the evolutionary scientist notes that women with such bodies are typically the most fertile and produce the healthiest children. Human males developed a universal attraction to such bodies because men with such attractions generated the best and the most offspring. Whereas a man with genes geared towards elderly or crippled women would produce very few, if any, children to pass on such genes.

Selection pressures can also explain the human desire for ever more material goods. In the very harsh circumstances of the past, those families who accumulated ever greater resources were the families most likely to survive drought and pass on their genes. Likewise, men with the genetic lust for political power were also the men who ended up with the most control of the resources necessary to feed and protect one's offspring.

Even the apparent senselessness of orthodox religion or war begins to make sense now. Cultures whose genes prepared them for war were more likely to protect and expand their territory, whereas tribes with pacifist programming would soon be wiped off the map. Similarly individuals in a society who conformed to the dominant religion and culture would get along better and be more likely to mate than the lone rebel who fought against those around her.

So, when asking why war exists, or why Angelina Jolie is preferred to Rosie, it is useful to look at humans as animals, with motivations driven less by formal logic than by the logic of genetic survival.