Revelation from biologists to sociologists: You take yourself too seriously!

As early as when I was in graduate school, my advisor always liked to quote a well-known saying in biology: "The truth is more bizarre than the imagination."

I was puzzled for a while, why even though I studied sociology, I had to read biology books. I had almost forgotten about biology.

Later, I went to read books on biology, and gradually realized that the ideas and research methods of biology are very inspiring for studying society and human activities. It can even be said that studying sociology without studying biology is equivalent to peeking at the leopard. Even the conclusion itself was more bizarre than I had imagined.

In the previous article, I mentioned that in my four years of college, I spit out all the truths and concepts I learned in Chinese, history, and politics classes from elementary school to high school, as well as the prejudices I accumulated, although it is not completely. .

After three years as a graduate student, I spit out the way of thinking and research that I learned in nature classes, mathematics, physics and chemistry classes from elementary school to high school.

Why do you say that? Because mathematics at the basic education stage has not yet learned calculus, that is to say, it stayed in the 1780s. It is also not known that there is a "non-Euclidean geometry" that overthrew Euclidean geometry. What? Even "two parallel lines never intersect at a point" should be overturned? ?

High school physics did not learn quantum mechanics and relativity, and stayed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What? "Can the consciousness of the observer also affect the observed physical phenomena?" What? "Can matter and energy be transformed into each other?" Can I become a beam of light? And then a beam of light can turn back into a lump of meat?

As far as my own experience is concerned, after graduating from high school, my worldview is still at the stage of classical Newtonian physics, and I believe that the laws expressed by those physical formulas exist objectively, are not dependent on human will, and exist in the entire universe. It's universal, in other words: what I've learned before is the eternal truth, the truth!

I even feel that "social science" can guide social reality in a high-profile manner, the so-called "theory guides practice".

In short, my worldview, like Marx's, is fixed in the 19th century.

The 19th century was the century of physics. Physics became the highest crown of science, and its ideas and research methods deeply influenced almost all disciplines at that time.

Here, I would like to point out that the most terrible thing is that it has deeply influenced the development of the economics discipline. Economics draws on the geometric research method of Euclid in ancient Greece, and on the basis of a "self-evident" assumption ("rational economic man hypothesis"), a huge theoretical system has been developed through continuous inferences. He also introduced mathematics vigorously, borrowed the "law of conservation of energy" from physics, and came up with the "market equilibrium theory" of economics.

A common feature of mathematics, physics and chemistry is the ability to predict the future. The value of the input variable on the left side of the equation calculates the value on the right side of the equation.

Economics thus uses many of its formulas to predict the future. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Nobel laureates in economics have been predicting that China's economy will have a hard landing and that China's real estate will collapse.

Why do economists keep getting slapped in the face? The root cause is that they are too confident in their research methods.

I was a graduate student for three years, and I had to spit out the milk of Western economics I studied in college.

After so much preparation, let's go back to biology.

Biology has few mathematical formulas and few axioms theorems. Why? Because biologists have long been afraid of being slapped in the face.

To take just one familiar example, Europeans before the 17th century believed that swans were all white. "All swans are white" was a fact that no one doubted until the black swans were discovered in Australia.

The implication of this example for economists and sociologists is: no matter how accurate the data you collect, how representative the sample you draw, even if you collect all the data from the birth of the earth to the present, to construct your the theoretical system, but a destructive anomaly sample discovered at some point in the future will destroy your theoretical assumptions or conclusions.

In a word, mastering all the data that happened in the past may not help you predict the future well, because your data is still not complete. Of course, this is just an extreme example.

The way scientific research survives is experimentation. Scientists make a small gesture, and the real world gives a silent answer. Theoretically, there is such a possibility: the data of a certain experiment repeated by humans for 10,000 years are the same, but suddenly the data given by nature has changed. Scientists have to revise their previous assumptions or conclusions.

Sociologists are more interested in studying the institution of marriage in human society and the phenomenon of extramarital affairs in general. When sociologists are confused as to why human women are willing to marry men of their fathers or grandfathers, and when sociologists are confused as to why Lai, who took the first step, can have more than 100 lovers, for the convenience of management, they also arrange When in the same community, biologists just laugh and don't speak.

Biologists have long noticed that on the beaches of Point Reyes National Park in California, male elephant-trunk seals often "occupy" twenty or thirty female elephant-trunk seals alone, and the young and powerful may have hundreds of wives. . I also mentioned before:

"Actually, those female elephant-trunk seals volunteered to be concubines. The males are huge, the longest is more than 6 meters, and the largest weighs 4 tons! When the breeding season comes, the male elephant-trunk seals often compete for The head is broken. If you don't commit yourself to these strong people and get the genes of the winners, your son may not find a wife in the future. The females who are watching are like chips at the poker table, no matter who they belonged to before, they will win in the end The winner, the winner takes all!" (see "I want to be fair to the big S, you can only envy her")

Of course, the human marriage system and extramarital affairs cannot be completely equated with the elephant-trunk seal's marriage and love rules. Biologists have found that humans are not close relatives of humans that are more similar to the current "monogamy predominant, a large number of covert polygamy and a small number of polyandry, a large number of extramarital affairs and cuckolding". Chimpanzees, but seagulls you would never think of! ! !

Marry a male who can provide material life support for himself and his offspring. In the days of worry-free food and clothing, while he goes out to hunt for food or earn money, I go to the body to look for "for fun" exercise activities or humorous humor. An interesting soul that can provide so-called "emotional value", which is not too good!

What biologists call "hybrid reproductive strategies" is a euphemism for what sociologists call "extramarital affairs."

Biologists have found that the average weight of a man's eggs (there are two, one on each side) is about 42.5 grams. But our close relatives: male gorillas weighing 200 kilograms, would it be a little sad to know that their eggs are slightly smaller than those of human males?

Human males should not be proud when you see this. Your cousin male chimpanzee (from molecular biology research shows that the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are only 2% different!) weighs only 45.5 kilograms, but the eggs are a full 113.4 grams! Of course, within-species differences are huge, and these figures are just averages. I have not found a more convincing median.

Biologists to weigh the eggs, actually has a great inspiration for the research of sociologists.

"Egg size theory" is an important achievement of modern biological anthropology. After British scientists measured the eggs of 33 primates, they found two "trends": 1. Species with frequent "mates" usually have larger eggs; 2. In "hybrid" species, males often have larger eggs. The experience of taking turns with the same female, especially the need for large eggs (because studies have shown that the male with the most ejaculate has the greatest chance of pregnancy) , thus revealing their marriage form and the frequency of extramarital affairs and the size of the eggs There is still a strong correlation.

In addition, biologists also gave the data of male sticks: "Gorillas have an average of 3.18 cm; orangutans have an average of 3.81 cm; chimpanzees have an average of 7.62 cm; humans have an average of 12.7 cm" to remind again: the differences within species are also extremely huge.

Seeing this, female friends may start to get angry. This is all from your male perspective, okay? In fact, biologists have also studied the breast size of human women and found that: "The level of breast size in women before the first pregnancy is unique among primates."

Biologists have thus asked the question: Why do men need huge and conspicuous sticks? The man's rod is the most majestic among primates. Why do women need huge and conspicuous bobs? A woman's bob is also the most majestic among primates.

They were reminded of Darwin's theory of sexual display, and found that this phenomenon is logically similar to the tail of a male peacock and the mane of a male lion. Of course, if we go deeper, there are still things that the theory of sexual display cannot explain.

It's also strange that biologists find that humans don't have a fixed estrus period. It is also very strange that there are no signs of ovulation in human females, which directly leads to both sexes wasting a lot of time and energy and even risking their lives to cooperate, and they still enjoy it, which is useless for reproduction. (Even if a couple of young couples want to have children, they cooperate with high frequency, and the probability of conception per cycle is only 28%)

Not only gorillas and chimpanzees, but also gibbons can't understand the behavior of human beings who are so happy and frantically burning calories, and even humans themselves can't understand it.

Having said so much, in fact, I want to guide you to think that many social systems, customs, and organizational forms that we are accustomed to are rooted in our bodies and genes .

Those who claim to have discovered the truth, especially the laws of human social development, attempt to transform society through a certain theory, destroy traditions and customs, and even eliminate "family" and create a utopia where everyone is equal, in human history. It stretches on and on and on and on, causing unprecedented disasters.

We humans have always regarded ourselves as "human beings" too much.

In fact, even biology itself is worth reflecting on. As early as when I was in college, I heard that many primary and secondary schools in the United States do not teach Darwin's theory of evolution. My first reaction was that they were too absurd. Should I go back to theology and believe that the world is a Created by God in 6 days? Too much bullshit. I don't even bother to criticize them.

However, once I read Darwin's Black Box by a serious American biochemistry professor and Darwin's Questions by a Ph.D. of Science from Cambridge University, I began to re-examine Darwin's theory of evolution.

Last year, Avi Loeb, former dean of Harvard University’s astronomy department, published an op-ed in the famous popular science magazine “Scientific American”, proposing that the universe may have been formed by “a more advanced technological civilization”. Made in the laboratory. Because our universe has a flat geometry with zero net energy, advanced civilizations could develop a technique to create a "baby universe" from nothing, through quantum tunneling, he said.

What? Didn't our universe come from the big bang? ?

In the end, I can’t help but ask: After so many years of going to school and studying, what did I read?