Thursday 23 September 2004

I won't at the moment recommend the magazine as a whole, because I haven't read it; but I found this particular essay interesting. It was lucid, reasonable and thought provoking, and steeped in a rare compassion. It is uncommon for me to agree so much with a human, because I have already chosen differently from the most humans in so many things for so many years. But this person is actually ahead of me, saying things that I would not have thought about for years yet.

I wish this was the wave of the future. Perhaps one day it will be, when the unprecedented cultural renaissance caused by the Flynn effect reaches that age segment. One can only hope. One can certainly not see, because I am just a harbinger of that time that may come; I shall surely not live to see it, whatever shape it will take -- if our species manages to stay alive for a couple more generations, that is.

But right now the world seems to move in the opposite direction. European and American culture, which also dominates the world, is focused on youth. You are not really supposed to grow old. Eventually it will happen to your body, although if you are supposed to postpone it as long as possible and then hide it until you have nothing more to live for. But you are supposed to keep a young mind even as your body grows old. This is probably not a good idea, not to mention that this is not really possible. Because we were not designed that way.

***

Grandparents are not unique to the human species; elephants have them too. But nowhere has this invention reached the same level as in humans: The maximum lifespan in animals can be counted in heartbeats, and most animals have approximately the same number. Small animals simply live faster, and large animals live slower lives. But the human heart beats four times as long as this average before it wears out. This cannot be a coincidence. We are designed to be grandparents; whether you believe in an Intelligent Designer or just dumb luck, it has clearly been a winning formula. All modern humans descend from the same stock, which has this trait. The difference between ethnic groups is moderate.

I have repeatedly brought up my pet theory, that the individual human is supposed to gradually change throughout life. We all necessarily start out as parasites in the most literal sense. It is also obvious that we cannot continue that way. For the next generation to grow up, the parent generation has to give more than it gets. Or that is what I claimed. This may be slightly wrong. Come to think of it, perhaps the parent generation was supposed to be balanced between giving and receiving. When I say this, please take into consideration that in the wild, humans start to procreate in their teens. It really makes no sense to expect them to provide for a child, not to mention several children, when they themselves have barely stopped growing. That's where the grandparents come in. Ideally, a child has four grandparents. But time and destiny meets us all, and the number could be lower. But this is the starting point.

(It has been taken for granted by even the greatest minds on Earth that the almost universal aversion against incest is caused by the risk of birth defects. But incest accumulates both good traits and bad traits, and natural selection would weed out the bad traits faster. Natural selection can however not instantly increase the number of living older relatives. Breeding outside the family can and will do that. There is no help trying to breed a race of superhumans if the kids don't grow up.)

***

I recently read in a popular science magazine that not all grandparents are equally helpful. On average the mother of your mother is willing to make the most sacrifices for you, while the father of your father is the least helpful normally. This is a big victory for evolutionary psychology. The idea is that people normally don't help other people, they help their own genes. The more of your DNA a person shares, the more sense it makes to sacrifice something for him, whether it be time or money or your life. If you are a woman, there is not much doubt about which children are yours, and the same holds true for your daughter. Heritage through sons is less certain unless you live in a really lonely place.

Of course, we are not blindly following our instincts like birds or bees, but as the saying goes: It is easier to ride the horse in the direction it wants to go. You cannot predict how one particular person will react; but when you have thousands of them, the individual choices tend to cancel out and the undercurrent becomes visible. So we are not denying free will here, just accepting the fact that you cannot predict how people will use their free will. Seen from a distance it looks like background noise. But instincts keep their direction across time and space. Even if we say it is culture, there is a reason why culture evolved the way it did.

In conclusion, then: Grandparents are meant to be. It is an important part of being human. Without grandparents our species could never have advanced to the level of civilization. Whether we can keep up civilization without the help of grandparents, about that I will make no bets.