this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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In what way do you think evolution enslaves us?
A fear of death.
Evolution created everything about us to survive long enough to reproduce. It might have created all positive emotions we can ever experience, but it's often advantageous for evolution to design suffering into our lives.
Many animals live short and brutal lives, giving birth through penises, fighting amongst each other to stay on top of violent hierarchies, cheating on their mates whenever possible. Most people are less happy after having children, but knowing that rarely affects our decision to have them. Love often encourages us to enter toxic relationships, taking away our infatuation and rose tinted glasses once leaving the relationship is costly.
About half of all humans are designed to take serious risks to gain status or resources, their bodies aging quicker and doing less to repair itself. The other half gets to live a little longer and be a little healthier, but once they stop being able to have kids, their bodies start breaking down more quickly to hasten their end. Even aging itself only exists to speed up the evolutionary process. Evolution generally wants us to live lives that are as short as possible to allow for more generations in less time.
Evolution is what created all our drives and programs us to do everything we do. That isn't necessarily enslavement by itself, as nothing about us can exist outside of evolution, but the way it drives us towards personal suffering and death is enslavement. We don't matter in comparison to our role in replicating genes. We're designed to be disposable. Evolution may be the process of life, but it's also the process of death.
I think you’re attributing waaay too much to evolution.
You’re describing gender roles, which are very much socially created. This is something we can change and not created by evolution.
It’s manipulation not love (or evolution). This feels like you’re blaming the victim.
This is clearly not true, as evidenced by all the animals that live extremely long lives.
Evolution doesn’t “want” anything. It’s a very passive process.
Evolution may not want, but certain strategies are more successful than others in specific contexts. Long lived animals still age, only seeming so long lived relative to us. Aging is a balancing act of the benefits of generational iterations vs the value of experience.
Toxic relationships don't require manipulation on the part of one person. Infatuation can lead people with incompatible personalities to make costly commitments to each other. Partners can genuinely treat each other with respect and still end up in relationships that harm all parties.
This comes back to the social construction of gender roles, even though I mostly focused on the well accepted effects of primary sex hormones. There are biological factors that limit the gender identities and expressions we can comfortably be. Some people feel comfortable with a wide range of identities, while others are more limited. If anything, seeing one's gender as so maliable to social influence implies that conversion therapy would be effective and validates the idea of trans identities are a social contagion
The constructed nature of gender comes from the constructed nature of essence. Our brains understand the world by constructing a model of reality based on these essences, qualia, or forms. Gender is the simplified categorization of social dynamics, but so are all ideas we could ever use to describe society.