If even a flower or tree were to think, “there is no meaning to this body, no purpose”, then they would be sorely mistaken. All higher life is built from selfless love.

OK, this is not quite the angle you would expect from the title, unless you know me. But I’m quite serious. Sex is love, even though most creatures don’t know it. Luckily we are here, so we can understand on behalf of all creation.

You hear a lot about “the selfish gene” these days, but that is an exaggeration, to put it mildly. More like a delusions. Let us zoom back a billion years or so.

Originally all life on Earth was haploid. That is to say, the living cells had only one copy of each gene. If that copy was bad, the cell was in trouble. If it was really good, the cell would use it for all it was worth to get ahead in life and divide and conquer the seas. (Life was mostly in the water at the time, of course.) Actually there are lots and lots of single-celled organisms today who are haploid and very successful in what they are doing. But some of them also hook up briefly and exchange some genes. Let us not dwell too long on that. These are all primitive organisms, after all.

At some point we got complex cells, however. All large plants and all animals are like this, and a number of big single-celled organisms as well. They have a distinct nucleus where they keep their genes. And they don’t randomly hook up with any passing bacterium. And they have two sets of genes, one from mom and one from dad.

Hey, not so quick! There are haploid eukaryotes out there, you know. Well, actually you should not need to know that if you are a normal person doing a normal job. But you may be familiar with yeast, fungus and perhaps even algae. Some of these critters can go around with just a single set of genes for the longest time. And then under certain circumstances they make spores that meet and greet and hook up and become diploid (having two sets of genes) for a while. Evidently this was considered a rousing success by someone (commonly referred to just as “Evolution”), because by the time we come to snails and weeds and upward, everyone is diploid. Well, not male bees, but they are kind of an exception, and they have only one purpose in life. (Amazingly, human males are diploid.)

Now if you were a selfish gene, there is no way you would share your place in the genome with a stranger. Sure, it might be good for the organism in the long run to have a reserve, or for some remote descendant. But for you as a gene, it would be a bad idea. It means half the offspring would not get a copy of you at all. If only one offspring survived, then there would be a 50% chance that you were not there, and would die with your current body. What kind of gene is willing to work hard even knowing that its neighbor may be the one to survive and not itself? Not a selfish gene, that is for sure. A loving gene, we should call it.

Let us take that again. The average frog / grass / human gene loves its neighbor like itself.

This tolerance for another, competing gene would be one thing if the organism reproduced by just making a small copy of itself. There are indeed some creatures who do this. Mostly plants, but some insects and a lizard or two. But for the most part, plants and animals both gladly accept a deal where the next generation has only half its genes from them, and half from someone else. You’d think they would at least pick a close relative (and I guess that happens too) but most go out of their way to find a stranger. You may even be one of those. But from the point of view of the gene, this is the ultimate sacrifice. Half of your genes give up their life so that the other half may live on.

“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” -Jesus Christ.

So basically humans are almost completely packed with Christ genes (metaphorically speaking), as are our furry and feathered and leafy friends. Love abounds in nature; it is the driving force in the evolution of all higher lifeforms. We are made of this stuff nearly from the molecular level.