NURSING MOTHERS AND THE 'EVOLUTION' OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAITS

In a book I was reading recently, which was in most respects a very sensible and insightful look into human relationships, I read the following:

As any nursing mother can tell you, the amount of milk you produce is affected by how relaxed you feel, which is related to the release of the hormone oxytocin in the brain. So natural selection would favor a female who could quickly soothe herself and calm down after feeling stressed. Her ability to remain composed could enhance her children's chances of survival by optimizing the amount of nutrition they received. But in the male natural selection would reward the opposite response. For these early operative hunters, maintaining vigilance was a key survival skill. So males whose adrenaline kicked in quite readily and who did not calm down so easily were more likely to survive and procreate.

These kind of 'evolutionary' explanations for our behavior are ubiquitous in our culture. They are automatically accepted as 'science' without inspiring the least bit of critical thinking which would quickly and inevitably lead to the conclusion that they are utter nonsense.

Let's imagine what our species or any mammalian species would be like prior to when this 'natural selection' occurred. Did we have mothers that were too vigilant to nurse their babies and fathers that were too 'composed' to protect their family from attack?  If the babies went un-nursed and the family went unprotected, how did they survive during those supposed thousands upon thousands, perhaps millions, of years while this natural selection took place? Let's take nursing itself. How many generations of a species would there have to be before there were the necessary accidental genetic mutations for a mother to 'learn' how to nurse, or for an infant to 'learn' how to suckle. How many generations could there possibly be if these things weren't known right from the inception of any mammalian species?  When a mother's mammary gland is too full she experiences discomfort and the desire to nurse and expel that milk. How many generations did it take for this 'trait' to be naturally selected from random mutations?  How many generations did it take, once that desire to expel the accumulated milk was established, to figure out that she should expel it into the mouth of her crying, bleating, barking, mooing child?  How many generations did it take for the child to 'evolve' the feeling of hunger?  How many more generations did it take for the child to figure out that that hunger would be satisfied by suckling on  it's mother's mammary gland? How many more generations did it take before the child 'learned' (and I keep putting 'learned' in quotes because there is no understanding, but simply an assumption, as to how anyone learns anything from genetic mutations, how genes carry any learning of behavior at all for a living being) to cry or bleat or bark or moo, sounds which are necessary to alert the mother that her child is hungry and needs to nurse? How many generations would survive before these things were figured out?  Or did the desire to nurse and the desire to suckle and the knowledge of how to nurse and how to suckle and the ability on the child's part to alert the mother that it needs to nurse, all have to be there from the beginning, all have to be simultaneously present in the enormously complex and wonderful system of nursing and suckling, an utterly brilliant idea which included all the necessary genes and the unfathomably elaborate timing sequences to fire the myriads of genes in exact proper sequence to deliver all the building materials (proteins, sugars and fats) necessary to construct all these wonderful, functional organs, and the equally elaborate delivery system to get all these manufactured materials to the exact spot in the body where the mammary glands and the mouths with the ability to suckle and the neurons to connect these to the brain and the non-physical attachment of the desire to nurse and the desire to suckle to nerve endings stimulated in the mother's swelling mammary glands and in the child's empty stomach, and the energy blueprint for all these newly manufactured proteins in the developing fetus and the developing maturing woman that allows all these gathering protein molecules to be shaped into the precise shapes and shapes within shapes that allow nursing breasts and suckling mouths and swallowing gullets to function; all of it and so much more that is simply beyond our understanding, all had to arrive simultaneously with the inception of this brilliant idea, this brilliant system of nursing and suckling.

Scientists are now discovering how the milk of any mammalian species is the perfect food for its young.  Recent research shows how absolutely perfect, in every aspect, this milk is.  So, is this again the result of 'natural selection'?  Did mammalian species start out with 'bad' milk, perhaps poisonous milk?  Why not?  In a random world, why wouldn't some of the many toxins that a mother expels every day find it's way into the milk she is producing?  Or, if not poisonous, was it unhealthful, somehow damaging to the health of the child?  Again, how many generations of any species would survive unless the milk was the perfect food for the child from the inception of that species?

Every organ in the body that requires behavior on our part to function, is connected to a desire. So much has been written about the so-called evolution of the eye. But the eye is nothing more than an electric camera, albeit an incredibly sophisticated one. The eye does not see. You see. And to be able to see whatever it is that you want to look at, you have to be able to focus your eyes in a specific direction when you have the desire to look at something. So the eye is an amazingly elaborate device, but it can only be used in conjunction with a living being that wants to look at something and that has the ability to focus the eye in the direction that it wants to look. Could you possibly imagine the human eye, or any eye, arriving on this planet in any species, without the requisite desire to look at things and the ability to focus that eye in the direction that that being wants to look? A stomach, for it to be of any use, must be connected to a being that experiences the desire for food (hunger) , and that has the know-how to be able to locate, move to and ingest the food it desires. The eye, the desire to look at things and the ability to focus the eye; and the stomach, the desire for food and the ability to locate, move to and ingest that food, had to arrive simultaneously, not one by one, each separated by a long period of random mutations and natural selection. Do you really think that animals were provided randomly with mammary glands, eyes and stomachs, and then gradually, over thousands of generations, the ability to use these organs evolved? This is absurd. Mammalian young have to be nursed in every generation or else they would not survive for more than a week. Not just mammals, but all life forms, even microbes,  must arrive here with a desire to eat (hunger) and the ability to locate and move to the sources of food that they need when they experience that hunger.

There is no sequence of genetic mutations that could possibly lead from a light sensitive membrane to a human eye while all the while sustaining a long, continuous line of generations of living creatures that would be the recipients of these mutations. That would be like building an atomic bomb by gradually adding on tiny pieces to a fire cracker and at every stage, with the addition of every piece, have a functional incendiary device.  Not only are all the parts of an advanced organ synchronous with each other but they have to be intimately connected to a whole system of nerves and muscles that connect that organ to the brain and that allow that organ to be used when it is 'desired' to be used by the being that occupies that body. And that system of desires, although related to certain nerves and nerve endings, is not 'identical' with those nerves or nerve endings, but is an entire system of desires that exist on a non-physical plane, that we experience at every moment but that we cannot observe or measure directly.

Scientists are limited to their observation of the physical, measurable universe.  With that limitation they overlook ideas, desires, consciousness, they even overlook 'you,' yourself,  which is the real 'stuff' of life, even though it is non-physical, unobservable stuff.  Scientists look at genes and see the physical part of the gene which is a string of nucleic acids which codes for a string of amino acids and then they make the ridiculous deduction from this that all the amazing and amazingly intricate shapes of organs and organelles and living bodies themselves, and all the behavior and desires and consciousness connected to these living bodies is the 'result' of random, accidental changes in strings of nucleic acids.  This is such obvious silliness.  The genetic code is not the 'cause' of traits and behavior.  The genetic code is a code which, like any other code, is a means of communicating ideas.  What scientists observe is the physical genetic system whereby the raw materials to materialize these ideas are manufactured.  Scientists are also beginning to observe, but not directly, the timing patterns, many times more complicated than the genome itself, by which these materials are manufactured at precisely the right moment that they are needed in the body and in the growing organism; and they are also able to observe the fantastically complex delivery systems whereby these manufactured materials are moved to the microscopically precise place in the body where they are needed.  What they cannot observe is the idea which then shapes these materials into intricate designs and which connects this creation to a whole system of nerves and brain function and desires and consciousness which allows this new creation to be used when desired.  And all of this obviously happens simultaneously with the introduction of the new idea and all its components; not piece meal, tiny bit by tiny bit until many, many thousands of generations later it is able to be of any use.

The conclusion that living beings, just like elaborate machines, are the result of an accumulation of ideas and not an accumulation of random copying accidents of nucleic acids, is not only the obvious result of clear thinking but is also the obvious result of looking at geological evidence; all of which points to the 'sudden' arrival of microbes, of oxygen metabolizing life forms, of eukaryotic cells, of all the basic body types we find today, not gradually over many thousands and millions of generations of failed replication accidents, but as soon as conditions on this planet allowed for the survival of these more advanced life forms (a cooler, more oxygenated environment, a stable magnetic field, the arrival of phosphorous and other essential elements to the surface of the planet, etc.).

We have inherited a system, a brilliant system, of having two sets of genes and in the process of sexual reproduction these sets of genes of the mother and the father are mixed so that each new generation has a unique set of 'healthy' genes, which yields variety in each species and with it an enhanced ability for that species to survive various environmental threats.  No one in their right mind argues with this. It is also true that we produce enzymes every day that help us digest food and that protect us from  harmful microscopic invaders and that mutations, or copying accidents (if they are indeed 'accidents') can confer upon an already constructed, functional, living being an advantage to be able to digest a previously unknown food source or neutralize a previously unknown pathogen.  There is no room for disagreement here, except as to whether these 'mutations' are accidental or purposeful.   But regarding the creation of living bodies, the construction and design of living bodies, with their impossibly complex and precise construction processes and there almost endless synchronicity and their beautiful and amazingly functional shapes and shapes within shapes and shapes within shapes within shapes; the idea that all this brilliance and creativity, the arrival, the inception, the invention, of all that is miraculous in living beings comes from genetic copying 'mistakes' is obviously ludicrous if you can just for a moment put aside all the Darwinian cliches that we have blindly accepted in modern culture and look at the problem clearly.

As always, your comments are welcome.