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He’s not incorrect insofar as most men the world over want sex and also children. Are these people all lying?
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.
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.
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.
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