a darwinian love poem

there is probably no truth more fundamental than the fact that we are all here, and sand boas too, and spiny lobsters, because we are our genes' way of making copies of itself that will, in turn, copy theirselves into the next generation and so forth. there are other things a person can do to preserve ones self, to write sonnets or blog entries, hoping that for some reason they will be preserved, and emanations from the consciousness, more true to the self we actually experience every day, or perhaps less so, will somehow transmit themselves into the future. the biological imperative is so strong though, having reinforced itself from common ancestor to common ancestor down the tree of life to the beginning, that to partake in reproduction is an amazingly powerful process. perhaps a sand boa feels the same way about the eggs she lays under layers of closely packed silica, or spiny lobster feel about the growing clutch of moving exoskeletons tucked delicately under the telson. it is this way i feel about my sleeping daughter, strong enough to contain multitudes, strong enough to line a cave under the sea with my own eggs and die incubating them, and yet no death is called for at the moment and i am free to write and eat cinnamon rolls. the reproductive instinct is clear and sure of itself in every thing we do, and it drives us to perform behaviors, in a sequence consistent with increases of our darwinian fitness, willingly, by switching out our motives by a subtle remaking of our hormones, our neurotransmitters. is it the curve of a buttock that is so powerful in and of itself as to stimulate an immediate, urgent need for action, almost always repressed because we are civilized men living in a herd of pleasant buttocks every day, not more than a mere one at best is anything less than severely off limits enforced much more strictly by the women and police of our everyday modern pluralistic world than by the jealous husbands and dominant males of the last six million years of our evolution. it must be this way that mushrooms feel about their fruiting bodies, if they chose to waste the energy to produce structures by which to have feelings rather than to simply grow beautiful fruiting bodies, one after another, till the host tree is dead and the manure pile is broken down to pleasant black soil. it is a pleasant and at the same time paradoxical realization to discover that ones own actions in childhood were most likely driven by ones own genome's attempt to maximize the total number of copies of itself in existence, and once determining that the male in the house was not to be replaced any time soon, to act extra good so as to enable the production of more brothers and sisters, hoping that there will come a time that they will reproduce for the good of my own genome as well. other children are more selfish, and the minds within those bodies generated by that particular sequence of base pairs equally deluded into thinking that they were acting primarily out of free will when they selfishly grabbed time and attention for their own needs, running ones mommy ragged, to secure the resources needed to attain dominance and thus high reproductive status, at the expense of the future darwinian fitness of both parents, who are after all not clones. what teenager has not rebelled against both mother and father, knowing in their heart that it was time to leave the tribe and seek fortunes elsewhere, as our ice age mothers and fathers did not so long ago? the sea calls and young men go to disperse and to seek opportunities to spread their genomes to exotic lands, facilitated by able hands enacted to seek strong drink and women. what little girl has not played scenario after scenario among her friends to rise to the top of a dominance heirarchy by which to extract the appropriate resources for reproduction and parental care, perhaps at the expense of the lower ranking little girls? maybe i write these exact words because the ability to create works of art and literature can be a means of obtaining mates, something that did in fact play a major role in my personal choice of mates and most likely played a part in drawing my mate in my general direction so long ago. some art is, however, an exploration of the self beside the genes, this epiphenomenon that our genes have somehow created alongside themselves, including perhaps most art produced by women and children and perhaps by the few men who are not entirely ruled by their sex lives. i am not nor have i ever been one of these men, however, and my beard is growing long as i watch the younger males parade around the neighborhoods with their short beards and their baby carriages and their fecund women, sporting banjos and singing the joys of rebellion and dispersal, fresh on their minds.