The biological and cultural ethereal conflict

To the extent Nature is conceived, marriage should never stand against our
intrinsic polygamic instincts driven by our biologically pre-programmed ultimate
goal of self-reproducing. Hence, it's not surprising that both men and women are
following their basic instincts in the grounds of divorce, since no single life-
form on Earth has been ever evolved to establish long-term matrimonial unions.
However, it's well known that Humans, as highly susceptible to culture and
morality, are being pushed towards the establishment of solid relationships, which
in turn have been proved to play an important role in social mobility.

Based on these assumptions, it seems clear to me that there's a conflict of

interests between our biological and social goals. On one hand, there's the need
for each human of serving as generators of genetic diversity for the sake of
continuous biological evolution, which is still happening among the human race.
It's interesting to note, though, that our needs as social beings go straight in
the opposite direction: we don't want to change our sexual partners all the time
(at least when it comes to kinship descending) and, therefore, we end up by
slowing down the diversity generation process in human race by preferring stable
matrimonial engagements under social standards.

It turns out that there is a noticeable and complex interaction between genes and
memes. This has been already observed by many researchers, including those working
on memetic computing field. Since it seems that social evolution is surpassing
biological evolution in terms of how much they affect human development (just look
at how technology and culture are rapidly changing human behavior under a much
higher pace than genes have done before the last decades), it's reasonable to
imagine that there will come the day when the human race will transcend from its
old-fashioned biological prision (i.e., the carbon-based "survival machines" of
Richard Dawkins) to perpetuate itself through cultural and technological meanings.

Again, nothing new here, yet another appealing topic which should be more often
discussed by academics.

Written by Carlos Renato Belo Azevedo, November 2009