It’s not a ‘goal’ there is no purpose or goal to evolution or life…it’s a property of life that it propagates itself but that’s not the goal, reproduction is a function or a property of life. You could also argue the ‘goal’ is survival and there are sticks and carrots poking at making an organism survive, but again it just sounds like you’re misunderstanding how those words are used in academia, you’re doing the same thing with fitness. Fitness in evolution isn’t about running or being strong it’s how well an organism functions in its environment and what makes an organism fit varies from organism to organism and environment to environment.

[–] shoo@lemmy.world -2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

One of us is misunderstanding for sure.

Fitness is a quantitative representation of individual reproductive success.

You're conflating metaphysical goals with the literal biological goals of propogation. It has nothing to do with survival, plenty of animals sacrifice themselves after reproducing, either as a food source or lack of evolutionary pressure to stay alive. The human exceptionalism that our awareness puts us above these natural processes is part of the problem.

[–] Gecko4469@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah you’re the one misunderstanding lol

[–] shoo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Must be a reading comprehension issue, I specifically pointed to genetic [biological] fitness in that context. The definition is right there, I'm not wrong. I can reword it if you want: "my argument is explicitly not supporting eugenics"

And still, no actual counter argument. Just responses that might as well be "I don't like what you're saying" followed by a short philosophical essay. What humans morally should or shouldn't do is completely orthogonal to what humans are as biological creatures.

If I'm misunderstanding the dozens of hours of conversations I've had with personal friends who professionally research animal+human evolution and behavioral neuroscience, please enlighten me. To summarize my understanding:

Sex is a widely researched topic, it's mental health benefits are well established and there are dozens of studies on the physiological benefits in multiple species.
Neural pathways for sexual behavior have ties to drug addiction and violence.
Disrupting or over stimulating those pathways has very clear behavioral implications.

All of this points to a very reasonable statement: humans are designed for a non-zero amount sex and large deviations from that can negatively impact social behavior.

People in this thread hallucinate that as an endorsement of regressive public policy or toxic ideology. It's possible (if you reeeeally really stretch your mind) to want more healthy sexual behavior in society without also supporting sexual enslavement.