"You can't spell 'evolution' without 'love'."

topic of the day 046 & video of the day 042

Why do You Love your Family?

You'll never question whether or not you'll put your own family first over others. It's never in doubt! But Joe Hanson is on hand to decipher if it's all because it's embedded in your genes. Below are my choiced transcript:

What? Who? When? Why? Then? So?

Staying alive long enough to have healthy offspring and getting our traits from one generation to the next is the basic tenet of evolution for the living things. If these traits help in organism's chance of surviving and reproducing, then they become more common in the future, as described by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

All these traits from how our body is built and how we think is the product of thousands of genes all interacting with each other and the environment. We are survival machines, exist purely to pass on our genes to the next following us.

Focusing more on the relationship the host and his male baby for example putting his willingness to sacrifice himself for the baby in the face of danger is under the branch of altruism, meaning "your pain for someone else's gain." If the offspring only carry half of his genes and the other half is from his wife, why would he sacrifice himself will full genes in favour of the half genes? Biologist W.D. Hamilton tried to deduce this by coming out with an equation: the cost to you (C), how closely related the two of you are (r) and the benefit to the other individual (B). If the cost is less than the benefit gained by the other individual, multiply by the individual's relatedness to you, than acting altruistically is worth it in the eye of evolution.

If you're somehow in the predicament of saving only one individual between the brother or the son while sacrificing yourself, parents would choose the latter unquestionably and evolution backs this up by emphasizing the infant son have the rest of his life ahead of him hence much greater reproductive potential than the fully grown brother. As the percentage of genes decrease from one generation to another, from half to a quarter for the son's own children, it would eventually even up or even be ahead in the future. This is why it would be beneficial to save your own kid's life over yours because it will pay off in the long run with all the potential grandchildren in the future.

If the organisms in the group are completely unrelated, there is no valid explanation behind their actions but if they're all related to each other even if distant, these altruistic behaviours might spread through the population, by helping individual's genes survives in their relatives. This is known as kin selection.

Nevertheless, we never do sit and run equations to decide whether or not to save people we care about. It's the complexity of emotions such as love and kindness that ultimately motivate us to do so but the way we behave have been influenced by evolution the same as any other animals.

Helping each other helps us survive, and not just in this generation.

Stay curious.

Lesson learned:

Evolution told us that we save our own fresh and blood to save our genes, but in the end what really matters is what they mean to us.

source: It's Okay to be Smart, Youtube channel