Valentine’s Day
Happy Valentines Day!
This is one of those holidays that we ought to pay attention to, for it has a delicious, sensual past. As with many of our favorite holidays — Christmas, Easter, Halloween — we can trace origins back at least to the Romans, where everything was different, only the date stayed the same.
So if with Valentine’s Day you can get beyond the roses, and the chocolates (listen to Sarah’s sermon of last week to understand chocolate), and the marriage proposals on bended knee (has to be on bended knee), and trace back to the beginnings of Valentine’s day, to Lupercalia, a much wilder holiday! Those Romans knew how to party!
Here’s a quote from NPR from 2011:
“From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.
The Roman romantics “were drunk. They were naked,” says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile.”[http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133693152/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day]
Then the Romans held a very early version of our 1960s-era key swap parties:
“The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival — or longer, if the match was right.”
But those Romans should not be remembered for mere mechanical matchmaking. They understood the same passions of love that we do, as the Latin poet Catullus opines in the poem Gary read, Catullus 5, a love poem to his Lesbia, the noble-woman Clodia, who ultimately spurns him.
So Valentine’s Day finds its origins in desire, and passion, and fertility. Desire and fertility also play out in the other topic of this weekend, evolution. For this is Evolution Weekend, celebrating the 205th birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12. The weekend is time to explore the relationship between science and religion, especially around that most heated question, “how did life, including human life, develop?”
Evolution Analogy
The conceptual difficulty for many people is not that species evolved into more complex forms, but that this process can happen without some kind of intelligent architect directing the process. How can evolution be a random process?
We might understand evolution through an analogy. Imagine a mountainous terrain covered in fog. The height of the mountains represents quality of adaptation, progress, complexity, however you want to define it. How do you find the way to the highest peak? Well the obvious thing is to move uphill. Maybe you are a member of some small, slowly moving species. You can’t move far, but your offspring can move a little farther, and some move uphill, and there these offspring are successful, and multiply, and their offspring move farther up still. Ultimately your descendants are guaranteed to get to some precipice, and this is the essence of evolution through natural selection.
But there’s a problem. Your descendants might be stuck at a small local hill or mound rather than the highest peak just across the valley. They’re stuck — for their descendants can’t evolve and change. Game over for them, from an evolutionary perspective. And this is the place that simple unicellular creatures, like bacteria find themselves. They’ve been around for eons, with little change.
Now, what if we introduced something to stir things up? How about a little sex? Maybe we let our individuals be in sexual contact with other individuals, so that their offspring is a somewhat random combination of the parent’s traits. Imagine if on our hilly landscape, two physically separate individuals — the parents — birth their offspring somewhere along a line between them. This means that sometimes, just occasionally, two parents trapped on two local hills with no chance to go up, might drop offspring on a ridge between them, a ridge that leads to a much higher peak otherwise unavailable to the parents.
To summarize: even though it has its costs, sex increases the fitness of the offspring in the environment. And it is through sex that organisms evolved into multicellular forms of great complexity, into ferns and flowers, lions and leopards, parrots, penguins and people.
Desire
And yet, how do you get sex to happen? For most of us, as sexual beings, that seems like an awfully dumb question. We completely get Catullus, with his pining after his Lesbia. And yet sex, from finding a mate, to sizing them up, to reproduction and perhaps caring for offspring takes a lot of effort. What is going to drive creatures to do this work, instead of say, looking for something to eat, like chocolate? It turns out that we have evolved strong motivations to have sex. It’s a desire, a craving, you could say, even an addiction.
Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, writes in her forthcoming book, “Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray.”[Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray © 2016, in http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/love-is-like-cocaine]
“Take romantic love. Even a happy lover shows all of the characteristics of an addict. Foremost, besotted men and women crave emotional and physical union with their beloved. This craving is a central component of all addictions. Lovers also feel a rush of exhilaration when thinking about him or her, a form of “intoxication.” As their obsession builds, the lover seeks to interact with the beloved more and more, known in addiction literature as “intensification.” They also think obsessively about their beloved, a form of intrusive thinking fundamental to drug dependence. Lovers also distort reality, … and often do inappropriate, dangerous, or extreme things to remain in contact with or impress this special other.”
Fisher should know — she studied the changes that being head-over-heels in love cause to the brain. In these people, the ventral tegmental area (or VTA) just lit up, compared to unsmitten control subjects. This VTA is responsible for producing dopamine. As Fisher puts it:
“No wonder lovers can stay awake all night talking and caressing. No wonder they become so absent-minded, so giddy, so optimistic, so gregarious, so full of life. They are high on natural “speed.”
So love is like an addiction. We’re addicts to a natural high, just like we can be addicts to artificial highs. We’ll talk about that kind of addiction next week.
Fisher noted that the VTA region is located in an ancient, primitive part of the brain, near parts that drive hunger and thirst. This area also exists in most mammals and birds, cranking out dopamine when they get properly paired up.
Why Two Sexes?
I have always wondered, well if two to tango is better than one, why not three, or four?
There are a few examples in nature of three sexes or even four. Harvester ants are one example: I quote Amanda Schaffer, in Slate Magazine [http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_sex_issue/2007/09/pas_de_deux.html]:
“These ants live in colonies, each of which has a queen. For the ants to be fruitful and multiply, she needs to mate with two different strains of male. She needs the sperm of one type of male to make future queens and the sperm of the other type of male to make future workers. So, the colony must include sex cells from “parents” of three different sexes, says Joel Parker, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southampton. Two parents for each ant, three parents for each colony.”
But this is an unusual situation. Two sexes seems to be the most stable formation, because each sex takes a particular role. Again, from Schaffer:
“In most animals, some individuals (males) produce lots of small, motile sperm, while others (females) invest in a smaller number of larger eggs and try to position them to get fertilized. These approaches are evolutionary winners. Mathematical models suggest that “anything in between would be at a selective disadvantage,” says Brian Charlesworth of the University of Edinburgh.”
This may be why two sexes is more or less the universal form. Male and female, God made them. But is it that simple? In nature, nothing is so simple.
Gay Animals
Researchers long assumed that birds that mate for life, like albatrosses, paired up, male and female, on the nest. One researcher finally checked out the birds’ privates, and found fully a third of the couples were female – female pairs. [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html]
These pairings may be adaptive, since there tend to be more female than male albatrosses, and female pairings allow these extra females to reproduce, to the benefit of the overall species.
And same-sex activity has been recorded in over 450 different species, from beetles to bison. Simply because biologists are now looking for same-sex animal relationships, we’re now finding them, and beginning to make sense of them from an evolutionary sense. Including humans, where same–sex desire may help in social group cohesion.
Sex and Death
So we see that sex is a big win from an evolutionary standpoint. Sex has led to all of the wonderful complexity of life that is around us. Sex has led to you and me, with our big brains, and our self awareness, and our ability to understand the world at a deep level. This is an awesome, wondrous thing.
And there is a cost. The price of sex is that we die. Unlike asexual unicellular creatures that potentially could live forever, happily dividing along the way, there is no way for sexual beings to be immortal. The same forces of evolution that drive complexity drive mortality, because once we’ve reproduced, there is no adaptive advantage for us to stick around. And so we die.
I Praise My Destroyer
I love the poem “I Praise My Destroyer” by Diane Ackerman, and in fact have used it as the title for a Dia de los Muertos service, where we explored how we praise death and the dead as part of that holiday. Today, we read the full version of the poem that included verses about romance and sex, highlighting the personal connection between sex and death that is part of life.
On the one hand, “you’re so alive”, Diane’s lover tells her. And yet to be alive as complex multicellular beings, we die. And to be alive, as sentient beings with “cavernous brains”, means knowing we will die. And for most of us:
Despite passion’s rule, deep play
and wonder, worry hangs
like a curtain of trembling beads
across every doorway.
Like Ackerman, I strive to praise my destroyer, to embrace my finitude, to know that evolution has had its part in my birth and will have its part in my death. I am part of this amazing creative force that has shaped me, all of us, and this whole world.
Creative Force
We are all parts, cells in the vast body of life. This evolutionary creative force that runs through all of us, through our DNA, our epigenetics, is a force that shapes and modifies the forms of all life over the generations. We each are but one instant along the way, one brief drop in the churning stream of life.
Charles Darwin ends his Origin of Species with the line, “There is grandeur in this view of life, … [that] from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
There is grandeur. Could we see this creative force that is evolution as grand, as divine, as that creator of old? Could evolution even be a manifestation of god? I think that for many theistic supplicants, the lack of a sense of intelligence in evolution spoils the game. How can one offer praise to that which does not even hear the praises?
Perhaps, though, we are being too narrow in our definition of intelligence. I’m not advocating intelligent design or creationism or any of that here! But perhaps intelligence seen most broadly is that which creates, so all aspects that we consider intelligent lead to creation in some form or another. We, with our limited view, may not see intelligence fully or clearly.
Some have even suggested that wherever there is an energy flow in the universe, evolution happens, creativity happens, and complexity emerges. [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/] So we may be immersed within a vast, pervading creative force, much bigger than us. We form relationship with creativity only in our willingness to be creative alongside it. As the Transcendentalists of old would put it, “We are part and particle of god.[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature]
Today we might call such an understanding, as writer Michael Dowd calls it, ‘religious naturalism’. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-michael-dowd/new-theists-knowers-not-believers_b_1586301.html] We draw on naturalism, the clear scientific understanding of the natural world, as we cherish the evidence of our senses. At the same time, we cherish the mystical aspects that religion offers, finding appropriate humility in the awareness that the mystery is large, that there is much we do not know. We have faith, not in some certain set of beliefs, but in the possibilities that may emerge in our own evolving understanding. We are willing to search and search again, for truth, without losing hope. For we know our journey of love is a very long journey. And we are grateful to be on it.