• 19/05/2022
• By wizewebsite
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:: OSEL.CZ :: - Does monogamy destroy intelligence?<

Common Octomilk. Scientists call them grape flies. At the optimal temperature, their development cycle lasts 8-10 days. Larvae hatch from eggs within 24 hours, pupate in 4 days, and adults hatch in another 4 days. Due to their high "turnover", they are a popular model organism of population geneticists. Credit: André Karwath, Wikipedia

Brian Hollis and Tadeusz Kawecki of the University of Lausanne published the results of their experiment in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. It follows that if we force males to live in monogamy, their cognitive abilities deteriorate.

What are cognitive functions? They translate as "cognitive". For us humans, they represent the main area of ​​the human psyche. We know about them that they do not reside in one place in the brain and that it is thanks to them that we perceive the world around us, react to situations and deal with the tasks that life puts before us. Learning, the ability to remember things and adapt to changing environments depends on them. In addition to memory, we humans like to include the ability to concentrate, speaking skills, speed of thought and understanding contexts. Politicians like to highlight their ability to plan and organize.

Charles Darwin: "If great advances in medicine are not balanced by well-thought-out population control, natural selection will be disrupted and the unfit will have the same chance of survival as the strong." of the very foundations of the organization of Christian society and that it will cause a commotion. Šalamounsky therefore invited his colleagues from other laboratories to repeat their experiment. It is said to be best on other organisms as well. Even that is somewhat "fancy". Even if they distance themselves from similar interpretative results, it would be difficult to claim that one stands aside from the events and that similar findings do not concern us.

Gerald R. Crabtree, Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford: “We have been losing intellect for some time. Humanity is gradually becoming stupid, we are slowly becoming heartless brutes. The rapidly developing knowledge of genetic manipulations can save us from a society of the deprived."

And what does he actually claim? That under normal circumstances, a monogamous relationship without the possibility of natural selection leads to less cognitive productivity. Supposedly because the fight for mutual supremacy and for the greatest possible affection of the females ceases, because it does not bring any advantage to the males in reproduction. In fact, it is nothing more than a different formulation of the well-known fact that only the best who win it among females pass on their genes. Evolution has devised a number of tricks for this, and as the classics say, everything is allowed in love and fight. This time, it is not about a competition between sperm and their linking in a kind of train, which then wins over the juice in speed, nor about punishing promiscuous partners by creating a plug from part of the ejaculate, which then prevents the essential. This time it is about the impact of the organization of partnership relations on the entire community. Under normal conditions, if you put a male fruit fly in a bottle with several partners, only one of whom is suitable and willing to mate, the male will first go around them all and then decide which one to start courting. How quickly the flycatcher realizes which female is the most suitable is used as a criterion of the fly's intelligence.

We probably wouldn't have written about the results of this experiment if the publication had only written about the fact that males lost their ability to choose after ordained monogamy over time. There is nothing world-shattering about the fact that they stunt "things" by not using them. But the males lost more. Forcibly preventing polygamy among them resulted in gelinia without the option of choice becoming much slower to learn in general. They also lost the ability to remember the smell associated with an unsuitable environment for flying (a shaking bottle). In other words, monogamy was not associated with a decline in one but cognitive abilities in general.

Brian Hollis, evolutionary biologistUniversity of Lausanne, Switzerland: "Long-term monogamy does not benefit the population". It kind of raises the question of whether, from a purely genetic and evolutionary point of view, the elimination of hectic competition between males would not lead to a decline in cognitive performance in our country as well. To this, the scientists answer cautiously in the negative. It is said to be an experiment on the fly, focused on their specific "intelligence". No matter how they camouflage it, they have established the idea that we can be stupid with the application of monogamy. And in a roundabout way, they brought back to the table the dispute over what had arisen with the publication of Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection with the subtitle "The Preservation of Beneficial Breeds in the Struggle for Life". A little later, a group of European thinkers known as Social Darwinists gave it the crown and gave the basis for the defense of racial engineering. Anthropologists weighed skulls and measured noses, which eventually degenerated into emphasizing hair and eye color...

Although already in a somewhat different position, two irreconcilable camps still stand against each other to this day. One can be characterized by the attitude of Stanford scientist Gerald R. Crabtree, lamenting how humanity is "almost certainly" losing its best intellectual and emotional capacities, and something needs to be done about it. At the other end is the Catholic Church with its position based on the encyclical Casti connubii. The ideas of eugenics are far from dead. Even in civilized countries they are operated on. For example, with diagnostics that allow pregnant women to detect hereditary diseases and fetal defects. It is practically carried out to a limited extent when sterilizing the mentally disabled and criminals. But rarely, because the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Article 5) stipulates that a person cannot be sterilized without their consent. Whatever we call this, with advancing knowledge and the development of genetic methods, the targeted removal of genetic defects and disorders will increase rapidly.

Tadeusz Kawecki, evolutionary biologist, University of Lausanne, Switzerland: "It impairs the cognitive abilities of males". However, we cannot avoid the essential point that the cognitive system is an integrated structure in which the individual functions follow each other and are interconnected, so that one cannot function independently without the other. And if it has now become clear that monogamy is not conducive to the development of their abilities, the legitimate question of its impact on the fate of the masters of creation will probably not disappear immediately either. While the experts assure us that what applies to primitive organisms does not apply to humans, it is enough to look at the TV news and it is immediately obvious that we have not progressed much since the days of applying the natural selection of the wolf pack. We haven't come up with anything reasonable since Plato, according to whom the ideal offspring should come from the best men and women. And now there's the question of the possible impact of monogamy. A statistical investigation directly on people could put an end to conjecture. Following the model of drosophila, the analogous effect should become apparent already after a hundred generations. The question is whether there will be enough volunteers. The successors of the line who started the path of monogamy should not deviate from the path and sin for at least 2500 years.

LiteratureJournal reference:Proceedings of the Royal Society B