Eric P. Metze

Look closer.

Q: What is the meaning of death?

A: Organisms are giant machines, and they require a lot of energy. All day, every day, most organisms spend their time concerned with the consumption and excretion of biological material. And since they constantly reproduce, they are introducing more of these consumers into the environment.

Birth brings about mutations, which brings about change and leads us down the path of evolution. Without birth, nothing would evolve. And without death, we would completely engulf the planet in just a few generations.

And so, the meaning of death is to bring balance to the ecosystem by ensuring that future organisms have a chance to evolve.

Q: How does evolution explain why men tend to outperform women in mathematics and spatial reasoning?

A: Our species has a long biological heritage of men going out to do the hunting while the women stay at the camp to do the gathering. The men that tended to get lost because of their terrible spatial skills were the ones that tended to go hungry, so the men that were more likely to know their way around were more likely to feed and then breed. Over the generations, this tendency has made males slightly more prone to better spatial reasoning.

There are many factors that led to this, but males tend to be more logical while females tend to be more analytical. This is true, but it is far from being the rule. The important word is “tend” in this situation. Males are neither smarter nor more logical than females. Just take a long look at the most vocal sports fans. And females are neither dumber nor less logical than males. Just take a long look at the list of female scientists/physicists/mathematicians of the world.

While it’s easy to overgeneralize based on minute differences, it is the height of foolish to assume that men are naturally pre-disposed towards mathematics and reason. Males tend to be taller and stronger, but that is quickly reaching the point where it’s completely irrelevant. In an enlightened civilization such as ours, it’s increasingly hard for people to play the gender card, especially since it’s just a card trick anyway.

Q: Why has evolution programmed us to believe we have immortal souls?

A: Because (in a sense) we do have immortal souls: our DNA. Every strand of DNA in every living cell of every organism is a genetic history lesson. We share our respiratory, circulatory, digestive, system as trillions of other animals, and we are related to all of them. Our billions of human ancestors lived, learned, died, and passed on their knowledge to us. Long before we had speech or writing, we inherited the instincts of our parents. Those that didn’t listen to those instincts tended to die off, so natural selection favored those that listened.

Those instincts, those primal feelings that everyone feels (even if their logical side seems to think otherwise), are just the shadows of our forgotten ancestors. Their “souls” live on as our instincts, nudging us in certain directions. What some people call “common sense” I like to call “common consciousness” because we all experience it and it doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes our instincts are useful, like defending ourselves from attack. Sometimes they are harmful, like letting religions or politicians exploit our fears. But for the most part they have proven to be highly successful in keeping us alive long enough to pass those instincts onto the next generation.

Though the idea of immortality is a bit exaggerated (because all things must come to an end), we *are* part of an unbroken chain that stretches back almost to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. And considering most humans don’t live beyond 80 years, 4.6 billion years is (practically speaking) eternity.

Q: Can someone tell me why men and women eat differently?

A: Though we are the same species, our differences in gender play a huge role in how our bodies use energy. Males tend to be larger and do more physical labor, so they tend to need more energy. Females tend to be smaller, and since they carry children their diets need to be more nutritious. Because of these biological roles, our eating habits tend to vary greatly.

However, the term “tend” is an important one because not ever male is large, not every male does labor, not every female is small, and not every female gives birth. So, really, there are as many reasons why our diets are different as there are people on the planet. But understanding the biological role of consumption is a good place to start.

Q: Spiritually speaking about midichlorian evolution…?
If midichlorians are symbiotic flora that communicate with the Force, and is present in Jedi who have emerged from genetically unrelated races that evolved from different planets across the galaxy far far away, where did midichlorians come from? How can the same genetic material evolve on multiple planets simultaneously? Could they have been spread by biological vector through interspecies relations during the Old Republic?

A: It’s very likely that there once existed a race of beings that planted the seed of biology on planets all over the universe, much like the Scientologists believe. Natural, normal biological evolution shows almost zero chance of spreading to that many places and being that successful without the intention and care of intelligent beings.

I used to like the idea that Lucas introduced a whole new generation to the idea of mitochondrial evolution, but his half-arsed analogy may be more harmful because it closely (but not accurately) described something that people really should know more about.