Helter Skelter Genes

We see the world from the perspective of our individuality.  We celebrate the years of our life, and mark the presence of a person from their birth to their death.  But we're each just a bubble that rises out of the vast pool of life, organizing matter into our individual form for a few years before giving way to time.  We are each a living thing, and we share certain qualities with other living things.  The mechanisms of our existence, the genetic material and biochemical processes that construct and sustain us, are common to almost all life.  Every individual life ends, but life continues.

We value ourselves so highly.  Would each of us not like to think that we had the ideal genes - the best genes to thrive in our environment?  And yet, the way life works, even the most perfectly adapted individual will die, and if they procreate, their genes will be diluted by half, perhaps for the better, but more likely for the worse.  Why does the sexual strategy rip apart even a successful combination of genes and roll the dice for the next generation?

I was reminded of Thoreau writing in Walden, about his observation of a red squirrel in winter, approaching a feast of corn ears Thoreau had laid out.  In the snowy carpet of winter, the dark-coated squirrel is much easier to see than in other seasons.  He wrote:

"One would approach, at first warily, through the shrub oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his 'trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him..."

And perhaps they are - the eyes of the hawk, the owl, the fox.  The strategy of rapid, helter-skelter  movements is programmed into the squirrel's being, the unpredictability making survival a bit more likely.

Our genes are a program to create an individual being, one of whose functions is to pass the genes on to the next generation of life.  It is key that the individual be successful at procreating, but the sexual strategy hedges its bets.  Like the squirrel darting either left or right, our strategy sends a random half of our genes forward into the next round.  Even the genes of the most perfect individual are, heading to the next generation, divided, shuffled, and combined with the equal contribution of the mate.  A darting, helter-skelter strategy to create a new individual, perhaps with a fortuitous genetic makeup that proves fit for the environment of its life.