> So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success.
I’m responding to this and saying that’s not an accurate way to frame it. I’m saying you are participating in evolutionary success even if you don’t reproduce. For example, a more social family where there are siblings that don’t reproduce and instead invest in the success of the reproductive sibling’s offspring is still evolutionary success and would be being selected for through your whole families reproductive success as a whole rather than your individual success.
The argument being made here is similar to the argument that sterilizing would result in removal of genes from the pool - it doesn’t work because gene selection is very complicated and doesn’t solely rely on individual reproduction.
I'm currently more focused on spreading good memes to the next generation.
Memes like kindness, empathy, planning ahead, being honest with yourself (and preferably others), communicating your intentions clearly ahead of time, and how good parenting takes more emotional labor and emotional intelligence than, say, the kind of parenting that solely consists of yelling when the parent does not receive the desired response from the child.
Genes are not the only thing the next generation needs.
I like this argument because it frames the “self”/“you” as an illusion—instead, there is a more distributed self. I recognize that there are arguments against this argument — but you point out that DNA identity is pretty distributed as well. Neat.
My mistake, I presumed incorrectly, that the argument you were making came from a place of defensiveness, rather than a more holistic framing of evolutionary success. Thanks for providing further clarity.
