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It is contrary to evolutionary theory to argue that a characteristic is 'designed' to do something. And, so far as the brain being 'programmed' implies a programmer, that also is against orthodoxy. The better term is that an organ or a behaviour functions to do such and such. There is one school of thought that says that the brain is basically a software version of the peacock's tail. The peacock's tail, you will recall, doesn't make the peacock faster, it actually slows him down and makes him liable to be eaten by Leo the Leon as he stalks the forests of the night. However Mr Peacock doesn't care about this liability so much as he cares about entering into the good books, and the juicy love canal of his paramour Miss Peahen. Similarly, saith the sage, the brain is an entertainment system which basically attracts the choice of the opposite sex. It may actually detract from the chances of the survival of the individual, for example, where a belief in altruism causes a man to sacrifice his life for the good of others in his group. When St John said 'greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends', he meant greater love in the brotherly Christian sense, he didn't mean the dead guy was getting lots of sex. This hypothesis, or theory, explains the evolution of much of human behaviour which is not explained by survival. For example:
- the big brain evolved about 2 million years ago, but the advantages to natural selection, as opposed to the advantages to sexual selection, did not become really apparent until the last 10,000 years or so, when all the big new techologies got invented. So what was the big brain doing all those millenia when it wasn't being used to invent the wheel and the alphabet and such like: it was devising flatteries ('You're so beautiful, in fact, I think you look even more beautiful with your legs slightly apart'), telling humours anecdotes of the kind that hint at sexual relations, and of course that old staple of religious patriarchs, telling young nubiles "God has issued a commandment that you should have sex with me". (Works with impressionable young things - *or so I am told*!!!)
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