A large share of the confusion here (and the reaction to Ms. Lloyd’s post) appears to stem from the belief that “sexual reproduction”, as socially constructed, actually exists. Of course, it does not.

In direct contrast to asexual modes of advancing the genotype/phenotype through time, in which a genetic code is actually copied or maintained; in sexual “reproduction” there is nothing that is “reproduced” – the very purpose of sexual systems is to replace what is current with something different. They are two distinct and radically different evolutionary strategies: one preserves the way that an evolutionary line is interacting, or fitting, with its environment; the other produces change which might provide for a better fit. (More accurately, it’s a gradient with differential provided by endless variations in mating systems, life histories, etc.) Overlooked here have been the “costs” incurred in sexual systems, in terms of information lost, including the fact that the reshuffling is random (through random assortment).

Under what conditions would you attempt to improve (as opposed to leave alone) the performance of your operating system by making RANDOM changes in configuration, without a restore option? If it was running pretty well? Not likely, but you might take the chance on improvement if it was running like shit. After a few tries, you’d have to work out a remove function (or death function, so to speak) before all of those old versions cluttered up the drive and took resources away from the newest version. Duh.

C.A.B. Fredericks’s companion is on the right track with the riddle. To the extent that an evolutionary line becomes fit in its environment, generating random change becomes a cost, and what is favored evolutionarily is persistance, stability, as represented at the extreme by asexual modes and by lines which essentially approach immortality. In lines which are relatively unfit, mechanisms promoting change are favored. That’s why we see sexual systems where and when we do.

Apparently the fact that multicellular lines tend to be relatively unfit is discomforting to . . . . . . .well, to some sexually reproducing multicellulars.

Congratulations to Broadsheet for a post that respects the science on a complex subject and resists the common practice of leaping to positions unsupported by a particular study. Truthfully and accurately reporting ambiguity and inconclusiveness respects readers’ choice and intelligence more than does jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.

Harm will always be done whenever a developing child is viewed as anything less than an increasingly independent and autonomous individual with her own best interests and chosen relationships, completely free from “blood” or kinship ties - whether in India as a family-owned laborer or baby incubator or in our culture as a psychological and emotional slave to “family”. Girls who are conceived and valued as potential supporters of their families are no less enslaved than boys.

We simultaneously decry certain correlates (like infanticide) of this social pathology while embracing and celebrating its core symptomatology in our own culture as in, for example, “honor your father and mother” or when we absurdly and slavishly construct individuals relationally as “mom”, “grandpa”, or “family” no matter how toxic, dangerous, parasitic, or unwanted they are.

We seem much more comfortable keeping ourselves and each other ill than growing up. Modeling our own escape from "family" to independent, autonomous adulthood is potentially the most powerful way to be helpful to others.

Dear Stuck in Indecision,

You wrote this letter for a very important reason. There is something that you “know” and yet haven’t been able to consciously acknowledge: that you really don’t want to go be with your extended “family”, and you don’t want to harm your real chosen relationship with your partner and lover. That’s terribly hard to acknowledge because nearly everyone would judge you as a deficient “son”, brother”, “nephew”, etc. if you don’t go spend time with people (let’s admit it) not because you really want to, but out of “obligation” (as you told us).

As you’ve seen in the many letters, there is no limit to the number of individuals willing to project their arrested infancy onto you. What might make them feel a little better about their own arrested development is that someone else, like you, might also fail to differentiate from mommy and daddy. They want you to sit with them in a big cyber circle, and they want to hear you say “Hi, I’m Stuck in Indecision, and I will always need mommy and daddy.”

You wrote the letter because what you really want this Christmas is to be with your only real “family” – your chosen relationship with your girlfriend who, unlike these other people you feel “obligation” to, you feel real love for, the type of love that comes only by choice. You wanted someone brave enough to tell you that it’s OK to cut off those obligations that weigh you down with judgment and guilt and to be with the two people you really love. It is OK.

But you already knew that.

“Mary” has choices and is responsible for them, but not the choices we have, probably never has. The social conditions (from what she experienced in her childhood environment, to what she was taught about birth control, to the educational, caste and economic systems she was born into) under which she has made choices, and more importantly has formed internal models with which she interprets the world, are the result of neither chance nor fate. We each decide every day whether to help maintain or deconstruct them. Maybe it’s fitting that the human struggle to cope with those conditions sometimes finds its way into our neighborhoods.