Can you be monogamous if you're human?

Emily Nagoski accepts that as a valid question. She compares it to another question: Can you be an astronaut if you aren't good at math? As far as I'm concerned, it's difficult for me to see the parallelism in such questions.

To be or not to be good at math, golf, tennis, etc., is a matter of practice. All those sports are designed to be played by regular humans with arms, legs, a working brain and a lot of training. As far as I know, nobody is born trained to play golf or tennis; however, some people will do better at math and golf and tennis with less practice than others with more practice.

How do those activities compare to monogamy? According to Ph.D. Emily Nagoski, monogamy for humans is just one more activity to be trained for. Is she recognizing the fact that we aren't born with a natural tendency to be monogamous? Maybe she is!

Please, read what she has to say and then come back here and comment at the end of this entry.

The debate Ph.D. Emily Nagoski is suggesting is against the conclusions presented in the book Sex At Dawn by Ph.D. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethà, MD. The book gathers evidence that supports a serious revision of the biological trends of our species, the humans, concerning sexual behavior. Some authors have classified us as naturally monogamous; apparently, Nagoski sees monogamy as a “no problem” condition, something that can be learned and practiced—with no consequences.

However, the book Nagoski seems to dislike, suggests otherwise. It sustains that monogamy is a specific way of organizing reproduction, imposing upon the individuals of the species, a burden of forced behaviors that result in a constant condition of sexual deprivation or, better, of sexual uncertainty. This condition generates a state of unbalance that manifests itself in sexual deviations like pornography, prostitution, rape, pederasty and the constant violations of the exclusivity of sexual partners expected by the monogamy model.

Sex At Dawn presents interesting arguments that indicate the natural sexuality of the human species to be deeply in disagreement with what the models monogamy and polygamy have demanded from the human individuals of both genders. Both models were the result of a new form of adaptation demanded by socio-cultural conditions elaborated by humans in their pursuit of mastering the environment for an efficient survival.

The main technology—the one that caused the need to elaborate new ways of organizing sexuality and reproduction—applied to exploit the environment more efficiently is agriculture. However, such cultural innovation needed paternity certainty. In the original habitat, humans simply took whatever they needed as food—most probably they didn't even eat dead animals. Such habitat of abundance, was gone, terminated, by a planetary event. A lot of species simply didn't make it: they are now extinct. Humans applied the power of their brains to find solutions.

The result has been so successful—in terms of numbers—that today we are 7.2 billion human individuals walking on Planet Earth.

But the success came with a price: paternity certainty required polygamy or monogamy. And paternity certainty was necessary because only identified offspring came to have the right to that which was produced in land owned by the father, with the personal energy of the couple—or the “hired” labor.

So, becoming happily monogamous is not a matter of practice. No matter how much practice is invested, the individual remains biologically non monogamous. It will always be a compromise imposed by the needs of culture.

However, today we are a more mature species. We are more conscious of things like biology versus culture. We know today that ultimately we own any cultural elaboration that we may find ourselves imposing upon our lives. And just as we designed it a few thousand years ago, we are entitled to revise it and modify it according to the better understanding we are capable of having based on our latest scientific process of knowledge.

If we're honest and accept the imperfections we all feel—at more or less intense levels—from living in the conditions imposed by the culture to be overcome, then we shall be able to allow ourselves the freedom to find ways of enjoying our lives, our sexuality and our interaction with other humans.

Thinking In Written Words

Thinking, An Exercise

If you want your muscles to get strong, you need to exercise them. That's a fact. Writing is an activity performed by your brain, an organ that needs to be treated like a muscle, and more. If you don't use your brain, it will lose its capacity to do quickly and efficiently that which it's designed to do: think, invent, imagine, create, solve, decide, write, speak, dream, and similar things. Those are actions. They're all performed by our brains. When you say I, what do you imagine you're referring to? Your brain! Of course, what else?

For some people it's simply impossible to accept the fact that our brains are the organs in our bodies that execute our actions of thinking. All of our memories exist within our brains. Nothing that we imagine, that we decide, think, dream or feel has its origins in any other part of our bodies, but our brains.

What a fantastic piece of design our brains are! They are so incredibly fantastic that we reject to believe that when we say "I", it's our brain the one that's speaking, thinking, deciding, remembering and making choices. We have not been able to design any machine even close in power, to our biological brains. Computers, and the network of them have an incredibly efficient memory system at the service of millions of brains. But they are way less powerful than one single human brain.

We've been able to teach our computers to make decisions. If they're capable of moving robots and robotic arms and robotic storage houses, then they're close, but not quite that close to mirroring what our brains do. Our brains make decisions considering a literal myriad of factors simultaneously. Computers are capable of reasoning down a gigantic hierarchy of if-then-else's at lightning speeds — probably much faster than our brains — but we don't seem to have been able to make any computer consider, simultaneously, variables chosen by the computer itself, in order to end up with a refined decision. Our brains do that all the time, and we don't even know they're doing it!

Also, the most powerful computers — as far as I know, maybe some of you know better — are ordered to consider a preset collection of conditions, including any conditions that might derive from the initial tree node, but not any conditions outside the initial node of reasoning — which is really that hierarchy of if-then-else statements.

The closer we push computers to do what our brains do, the more energy they need to fulfill their tasks. That should give us an idea of the efficiency with which our brains are capable of using energy. The energy we provide to our brains is fed into our system via the carbohydrates of the food we eat. That's all our brains need to function. The modern and most integral dietitians recommend that our calories should come from protein, fats and carbohydrates. We need only 5% of our calories to come from proteins, which leaves 95% to come from carbohydrates and fats. The myth of "high protein diets" for muscle building has been busted. (Please, investigate the details by yourself and let me know what you found out.)

This Was All About Thinking

That's it! We said that at the beginning, and there isn't a good reason — at least, one we could think of right now — to change our minds: this was supposed to have been a thinking exercise. As such, we are free to consider it concluded anytime we feel our muscle — our brain — has worked enough.

And it has! Just as I sat to write this, it occurred to me that, after all, it's our brains the ones that have generated every single piece of culture that exists today or has ever existed on the surface of our planet, The Earth.

And I have questions that were the result of this exercise, and I asked you, the readers, to proceed to finding answers to those questions. Are we getting closer, with computers, to the way our brains work? Have we chosen — randomly, of course — a line of development that will force the increments of technology in our computers to follow a line different from the line our brains followed during evolution?

Just a physical body ... "just"?

It's extremely difficult for me to believe that when I think of myself as being "just a physical body" I'm missing something. I am "just" a physical body, but ... what a fantastic entity this physical body is! If we think only for 10 seconds about the incredible number of events that needed to take place in the "right direction" for this "inferior" physical body to exist, then we are no longer going to to say, ever, that "just being a physical body" is not something extremely special in the Universe.

Yes, I am very proud to be a physical body, and a great one at that. I don't have to imagine a supreme being with whom to connect in order to transcend my physical body. And there is no way that I will ever accept that the being inside this body is anything else but one of the functionalities of the body itself. Do you want to call this inner formation "a soul"? Go ahead! Call it anything you wish! However, it won't change what it really is: a physical body with incredible intellectual capabilities.

Our body is a mixture of atoms, fixed into molecules. As an entity, it is simply marvelous. It takes longer for a Sun to form itself and start generating energy to supply to surrounding planets, than it takes, once the proper planet is formed, to generate living creatures. The rare thing here is the planet appropriate for life.

Once the proper planet exists, then the level to which these living entities can evolve depends on time and lots of different and complex conditions. In our case, our species, homo sapiens sapiens, is an extreme amongst the extremes. It's so special! If you conceived for a moment the degree of value that our body has, you would never think that believing of ourselves to be "just physical bodies" is something that needs to be fixed with connecting with "supreme beings". We are supreme beings!

The simple fact that we can conceive our existence, that is, to be conscious of the fact that we exist as aware entities, is already a great marvel in itself. We are aware that we exist, we are aware that we evolve, we are aware of the Universe in which we exist. We have made up a large number of expressions to call our essence and that which surrounds us. We are now aware—if we don't get ourselves lost in the "supreme being" attractive idea—that the simple event of our existence is an incredibly improbable happening in the Universe. And yet, we also know now that, after all, the Universe itself has a tendency to create places where beings similar to us can exist.

We are—something difficult to understand—just one form of life. And life is the concept we have developed so we can name entities that evolve according to a program embedded in helical molecules, perfectly bound together, that we call DNA. We get to become whatever we become—as living organisms—because during millions and millions of years—"year" being just one unit of time, so we can get the idea—molecules of certain elements get together, bind themselves using the free orbits of their atoms and determine to register the bindings into DNA, so the same variations of molecule bindings can take place in almost exactly the same way, time after time after time.

Why do we need the concept of "soul"? Even if the soul, spirit, supreme being hypothesis were true, things would not change for our living condition. We would still need to forego the living paths programmed in our cells and then in our particular creations as a different species. So, what do the souls or spirits need to "come down" to matter—the inferior element—and invade bodies that are already equipped with every single element they need in order be conscious of their existence? If the souls are real, then do they duplicate the capabilities of the physical body?

Everything that traditionally has been intended to be explained as possible only because of the soul, we know now that happens inside the brain. It's the brain and the way its neurons are connected, and they were they interact, that what we call "thinking" happens. Our memories are nothing but active connections amongst neurons. Our feelings and what we call consciousness exist within the brain functions, and the brain itself is only one more organ of the "physical body" they are always under valuing in the name of the superiority of the soul.

I don't even need to ask the question of where the idea of the soul came from. It's useless and we all know the answer. We have learned that different human conglomerates throughout their histories developed different theories to explain what they didn't understand. They created hypothesis and tried to improve them as some deeds were impossible to explain. The soul is the most logical concept to design, since our thought and our imagination almost depict ourselves as separate entities from our bodies. But the fact is that we aren't! Our consciousness, no matter how "superior" it might look to you, is something that exists within the confines of your working organism.

Yes, sadly, when the body stops working, it all ceases to exist. So, the soul doesn't go anywhere? Is there no soul? Then, what is the meaning of life?

Who said that life needed a meaning? Does the Universe need a meaning? Things need meanings only because we abstract them from the flow of events in which they are all embedded. We become real slaves of our beliefs, false beliefs. Why don't we try to concentrate in appreciating the real value of what we are? We are great bodies in an incredible Universe and we know we are! And this is the most fantastic element of it all.