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He's incorrect insofar as the only point of your existence is to have sex and children. The meaning of life is not "whatever biology says it is"
Whether or not you find fulfillment in other things is irrelevant to what your biological purpose is. Live your life however you want; that isn’t the point.
How exactly do you define "biological purpose"? How do you know your "biological purpose" is not dying on the battlefield so that the wealthiest man in your village gets enough loot to afford his 50th kid, or consuming more low-growing wild berries so that tapeworms, who happen to be the true Pinnacle of Creation and Protagonists of Biology, may thrive?
I say this unironically: I check my penis and that’s about where the analysis ends. I also have biology textbooks and know about the theory of evolution. That you can’t have other purposes in life isn’t the point. My only coda to his statement is to attach to the argument the fact that to the OP’s point, for most men on planet Earth, their biological purpose converges with the rest of their natural desires in life. As I said originally: most men desire sex and also desire children. It does nothing to rebut the argument to say that some men don’t desire sex or children, or elevate alternative meanings of purpose in their lives (a minority viewpoint, hence why “most” was the keyword in that sentence).
It seems to be that you have completely dodged the question. Words are supposed to mean things. What does "biological purpose" mean to you? It's not a concept that is in my dictionary, nor one that I encounter frequently enough to intuitively understand from the corpus like an LLM. As far as I can tell, you might just have strung together two words into a nonsensical compound that only gains an air of importance because of the meaning of the second one. I might as well retort that whatever your biological purpose is, the fear of grammatical asphyxiation which nobody can deny will happen to you if you are a horndog means you best give up on actualising it!
More to the point, M-W. says for purpose,
Which one of these is it supposed be? People are not "done or used" in general although I guess you could e.g. say the purpose(a) of a surrogate mother is procreation; if it's (b) or (c) you just reduce the problem to needing to define a biological feeling or biological aim or goal.
I literally just told you what it means, and you just blew right past it. Your biological purpose is identified with your sexual organs.
I blew past it because I actually can't make sense of your statement, and I can't make any more sense of it with your current restatement. Look, as I stated in my response to @Corvos one over, at first I thought I was going to do a little dance to exaggerate the degree to which I have no clue what you are trying to say because you were being deliberately obscurantist, but now I am confused to a point that no exaggeration is needed (and/or think that you are). What do you mean by the phrasing "identified with"? Should I read it as analogous to "dictated by [the canonical use of]"? That neither answers the question of why you single out the sexual organs as opposed to e.g. the liver as a giver of purpose, nor does it resolve the more fundamental question of how you make the leap from "something about you was optimised by the evolutionary process for X" to some variant of "it is imperative for you do X" that you are refusing to specify. Is one of the interpretations that I suggested in my response to Corvos in line with what you meant?
I’ve got to say at this point it just feels to me like you’re trolling. It seems like I’m arguing with a leftist over gender who’s suddenly forgot that words have basic meanings, and now they can’t tell who they are. People like @Corvos seem to get what I’m saying perfectly fine, I don’t know what your difficulty is and I don’t think I can help with it.
Be well.
From what I see, you are the one who is refusing to commit to a basic meaning for the words you are using, even when offered a number of perfectly reasonable options (you could have pointed at some specific thing Corvos said, too, if you were so reluctant to put it in your own words). Would it be appropriate if I said in response that it seems like I'm arguing with a rightist of the oldschool antiintellectual type, who thinks that speaking analytically is some gay nerd shit?
I can assure you I was not trying to argue in bad faith here - I even tried, especially in the subthread with Corvos, to proactively suggest some interpretations, which you only would have to say yes or no to. I understand that you are waving at something that feels very obvious to you, and perhaps it is also obvious to Corvos and other people who share your outlook, but it isn't to me. People are not all the same! I don't look at my genitals, or anyone else's, and get any sort of feeling that I would describe as "purpose". I can abstractly imagine a number of ways in which someone could get a feeling like that, but depending on which one it is, the interpretation of your statement changes, and maybe I am off the mark with each and every of my guesses. If you want to make an argument based on that feeling, it is on you to explain it.
(The parallel with leftist gender arguments is really not there, because in those arguments rightists generally have no problem offering up serviceable definitions of gender. If the rightists had nothing better to say than "I know a woman when I see one", their case would be rather weak.)
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As a biologist it seems entirely obvious to me. Biologically people are the end result of an optimisation process running many hundreds of millions of years with the sole goal of shaping you to reproduce your genes. You exist only in as far as your ancestors were able to reproduce. Your body and your mind are incredibly strongly shaped for ‘what is needed for you to reproduce’. It makes sense to call the utility function through which you were ‘designed’ your purpose, biologically speaking.
To be frank you are an educated man and know this already, and I assume your statement of bafflement is a refutation of the idea that we should care what evolution ‘intended’ for us.
To which I can only reply that my brain was shaped by these same processes and I & many others find ourselves caring regardless of whether you do.
Your interpretation is not wholly off the mark, but more specifically I wanted @Tretiak to be explicit about the assumptions he is smuggling in. Evolution did not meaningfully intend for us to do anything, unless you believe in some flavour of supernatural will driving it; but without that you are really left with some statement along the lines of your ancestors reproducing having been causal to your existence (indisputable) + evolution probably having optimised you to pursue it (but this latter statement has a lot of obligatory footnotes that seem highly relevant to this question). So does he believe that there is some moral obligation to engage in the things that some process in the past optimised you for? Does he believe that not doing so locally, or globally, leads to unhappiness? Does he believe in some sort of duty to replicate the actions of your ancestors, along the lines of Tanner Greer's "procession of the centuries" (I can never shill this essay enough)? Each of those unpacked statements can be defended, as well as argued against, in a way that produces interesting discussion. On the other hand, just slapping a fancy label like "biological purpose" on it and refusing to elaborate seems to be a rhetorical trick that is designed to make that discussion impossible, instead just bamboozling people by keeping the different interpretations in convenient superposition.
(On the meta level, I do stand by the appropriateness of some degree of playing dumb as a response to obscurantism. If someone doesn't want me to get the true essence of their point, why should I be obliged to try and guess and walk into some rhetorical trap they have prepared?)
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I do not mind when people descriptively state that they want children etc. Coming back to evolution as a prescriptive guide for what one "should" want though is just weird.
I think it makes sense in the context of a) a confusing world and b) a general understanding that humans and animals are usually more comfortable in their native environment.
So e.g. nobody blinks twice if you say that humans (or tigers) need a green environment and lots of sunlight, because we evolved to expect these things. Likewise, mildly more controversial, the similar arguments made in favour of exercise and combat sports.
From there it doesn't seem inherently unreasonable to say, 'Look, you're designed to breed. You may think you would be happy with porn / in a monastery / DINKing but your brain and your body expect kids and the longer you ignore that impulse the more you're going to regret it later'.
THEN of course you get all the complications around group reproduction. Obviously you have Palestinians literally saying the battle for Palestine happens in the womb, but you also have the demographic tax pyramid where a failure to reproduce can collectively screw over your entire society. Of course it's up to people who much they care about that, but I don't think that caring more than zero is invalid.
Well, I for my part blink a lot! If we just blindly look at everything that was a given in the ancestral environment, we find
some things like sunlight that people still seem to struggle if bereft of
some other things like eating meat and a highly diverse diet of foraged plants, doing without which seems to be basically fine for most everyone
some things like walking barefoot that are only advocated by weird people with benefits that are probably minimal, if at all existent
some things like having high parasite load all your life where the upsides of not doing it clearly far outweigh whatever downsides (higher propensity for allergies?)
some things like chimpanzee-style violent tribal conflict that we have decided we don't want and seem to be happier off without on an intellectual level, but that sometimes reassert themselves in strange ways.
How do we know which of these classes breeding is in? To begin with, apart from some very indirect methods like genetic drift estimation on gonosomes, what can we even infer about the exact type of "breeding" that we were optimised for? There are a lot of wobbly bridges being crossed here from what we actually know to the "it is imperative that all young men be given an opportunity to breed" conclusion.
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This is what we have a fundamental values difference on and won't agree on. Your biological purpose (also I'm not accepting that procreation is your biological purpose either) is not your life's purpose. The point of your life is not your biology.
You keep arguing something I’m not contesting here. Whatever other purpose you construct for yourself is irrelevant as far as what your biological purpose is. You can keep saying, “Yes, but your biological purpose isn’t this other purpose in life that I have!,” yes; and that’s not what I’m arguing and that’s not the point.
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