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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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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,

a: the reason something is done or used : intention b: the feeling of being determined to do or achieve something : resolution, determination c: the aim or goal of a person

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.

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?)

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.