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Friday, October 12, 2018

Enrolling Baboons In Diversity Studies

... is what we should have done hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Or maybe bonobos. Or is it chimpanzees? I forget which one is our closest genetic relative.

I heard a sermon from our priest the other Sunday that perfectly encapsulated the elite, modern way of thinking about sexual relationships from the past. In the old days, you see, women had no power and were considered the property of men. They had no choice in marriage, either. Or so it's claimed.

The former is true, but the latter depended on the location and era. As I recall, in England in the Middle Ages, women could choose who they married, provided they weren't constrained by the political necessities of royalty where marriage bound treaties. In any case, what did you expect from a species evolving from creatures not known for getting positive, formal consent before proceeding along the path of behaviors that led to mating?

Evolutionary biology, which was a science last time I checked and therefore is governed by objective reality and logical thought, has concluded that in order to fulfill their biological imperative to propagate their genetic code through time, males will want to mate with as many females as possible. That's just the way it is. To get control of this impulse, marriage was created to give males pride of ownership and a desire to associate themselves with particular women and children.

Baboons don't do this, you see. Men do. Now. But not always, if evolution is to be believed.

You see, if evolution is correct, then humans had to go from indiscriminate spreaders of seed to modern, male feminists in steps. It didn't happen all at once. Our priest, who talked mockingly of societies that saw women as male property, was just making fun of a necessary intermediate step in getting to modern soy boys.

Therein lies the problem. If we saw the past through the lens of science, evolutionary biology to be precise, then we'd hate our ancestors a good deal less. They were making their way along a tortuous and uncertain path from baboons to Social Justice Warriors. Science would suggest that we would not transform from brutal primates to SJWs instantly, there would be steps.

Ah, but science is a product of white, male, Enlightenment thinking! That's wrong, you see. We've thrown that out and now know that progressive, post-modernism is the only right way to think. With progressive post-modernism, we can indulge in magical thought and condemn our predecessors for not having had the wisdom to behave like gender studies graduates from 2018, the hopelessly ignorant bigots!

So preach on, good Padre! Make all the fun you want of those swine from the past. It's OK to hate them because there's no need for logical thought or objective reality. Those are things of the past and are only useful to religious zealots like Catholics.

...

Uh oh.

Of course, had baboons instantly evolved into male feminists, they'd have stopped breeding and none of us would be here today.
Oh well, that would have been a small price to pay for moral superiority, don't you think?

1 comment:

  1. Figuring out "closest genetic cousin" is pretty much a mess, because the reporting focuses on identified genes and ignores "junk DNA."

    Which turns out to not actually be "junk," but more like "currently unknown use DNA."

    They also try to match the genes up without consideration for order.

    So...yeah, a mess.

    Going off of the bone reconstruction, they think chimps and bonobos.

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