I Don't Believe in Nature
Reject the biological default.
I recently thought about and got annoyed at evolution for creating women the way it did. Not only did nature decide for us to suffer from the pain of childbirth, but also bear the mental and physical burden from 9 months of pregnancy, where some women may never even recover from the after-effects and permanent hormonal disruptions of post-delivery (see postpartum depression). Should the process of extending an existence of a species be so uncomfortable and potentially even dangerous to the species itself? Moreover, why only one of the sexes?
Many evolutionarily beneficial behaviors involve some form of pleasure,
so one would think that evolution should keep childbirth as enjoyable as possible.
This should in theory encourage reproduction and reinforce the process to carry out our species.
After all, pleasure is nature's bribe to get us to do things that help us survive, like eating or sleeping.
But no, nature decided to make it fucking painful. Then I thought about it some more.
Childbearing is a two-step recipe: sex and fertilization. Sex serves as a motivator for reproduction,
which makes sense as it activates pleasure pathways for both parties involved.
But once fertilization is achieved, only one of the two parties gets screwed over and
begins a laborious, painful, and potentially dangerous process to grow new life. Afterwards,
nature leaves them to suffer through the rest. So tldr; sex is kind of a scam, and women bear the consequences.
It seems to be all fun and games until some parasite-like fetus begins to suck all available
nutrients and energy from its host, while placing them at risk to horrible things
like gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and pregnancy nose. And even after all of this,
like a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome, many women will relive it all for more children.
Why? Because again, I claim nature is great at crafting scams. After childbirth, the
mother’s body releases a surge of oxytocin and other hormones that gets
them all drugged up into thinking that it was all… worth it? I mean maybe. But we never asked to
take one for the team, so the least nature could have done for us is to not make childbirth so damn
painful (btw I’m obviously kidding, don’t take anything I say above too seriously).
I should probably mention I'm drawing a very isolated "biological" perspective here, and am completely disregarding
things like sociology or culture. It is only partially true that humans are just some mechanical biological vessel. Also to be fair,
some studies have shown that women who went through full-term pregnancies had lower chances of developing certain ovarian and endometrial cancers.
But then there are also studies that reveal pregnancy can increase risks of breast cancer for years after delivery.
This isn’t too surprising though, since there are many more examples of biological dilemmas and tradeoffs that go far beyond reproduction.
Basically, it's really fucking complicated.
Anyways, to try to make sense of it, I had to look at things under a different light. I realized I can't be angry and blame nature for the way things are, because there is nothing and no one to blame. Evolution doesn’t care about our feelings or what's fair or what’s “the best”. It’s about what works, up until it doesn’t. It is simply a stochastic process driven by physical laws governing chemistry and biology, so me complaining about these things is like me complaining that e = mc^2.
Perhaps even thinking about evolution in terms of whether an event or trait is “beneficial” can be misleading. A better way to think about things might be: “It’s the logical outcome that arises when nature takes the path of least resistance, given the organism’s genetic makeup and its surrounding environmental pressures”.
And by path of least resistance, I mean in the physical sense that processes tends to favor trajectories requiring the least amount of energy to result in something without regard for the quality of the outcome.
There is no intrinsic directionality to evolution, so thinking there’s some higher level goal (such as procreation) could very well be wrong. Things are the way they are because, by random permutation, they just so happen to end up in a state that works. Nature’s slogan should probably just be “shit happens”, and if things work, it sticks around.
Sometimes along the way, very cool things occur. However, this also means that some not-so-cool things occur. This is more of a tangent, but we suffer and die. Death is probably fine, but suffering is not (one can philosophically argue that suffering is necessary in order for happiness to exist but imho I believe that’s bullshit and just a way for humans to try and justify the unfair world we live in. People suffer at different levels, and some people can live a great life without much suffering).
With that being said, I do not believe in letting nature carry out its natural course. If we did not actively intervene, life expectancy would hover at around 33 years of age, many women would be dying from natural childbirth, life-saving surgical procedures would not exist, and many viral infectious diseases like measles would easily wipe us out. So I absolutely think that we should, in fact, change the default trajectory of evolution and alter our biology to improve it. If we have the technological potential to improve nature’s random outcomes, we shall make it our priority to do so.