Reproduction as raison d’être has always seemed to me to beg the whole question of existence. If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what’s the purpose of your children’s lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn’t anyone’s life ultimately meaningful in itself? If not, what’s the point of propagating it ad infinitum? After all, 0 × ∞ = 0. It would seem a pretty low-rent ultimate purpose that’s shared with viruses and bacteria. The current human population is descended from a relatively low number of ancestors after a series of population bottlenecks in the late Pleistocene. Most
...more
