You know why I love my wife and kids? Ultimately, because several billion years of evolution have designed me to do so. Nothing more or less.

You were not designed to love your wife, you chose to, or you made multiple decisions that paved the path to love as you got to know her. Our responsibility for the cultivation of our feelings is the nut of JP Sartre's most important thinking, I think. You may get an urge to kill everyone on the board, but it's your choice whether or not you act on it.

Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime. Saint-Just

And I will come up with another diary on the empirical basis of traditional morality.

that is, the human mind operates with sets of a priori "folk psychological" conceptions that differ depending on the task at hand. For example, when we have to make life-and-death decisions quickly, or at least irrevocably, our notion of the world contracts so that we assume all we know at that moment is all there is to know, or all that is worth knowing.

In a more reflective mood we might say all we know at the moment represents all that there is available to know -- it's a microcosm or model of all that can be known.

Necessity causes us to employ these assumptions, both of which are of course fallacies. Synechdochic fallacies, that is: instead of using part to represent the whole, the distinction is elided and the part is taken for the whole, replaces so that we mistake the word for the thing itself, the picture of the Big Mac for the burger itself.

But evolution has also equipped us to question fallacies like these, in the form of a sense of wonder, awe, the sublime, the uncanny...mental triggers based on various realizations that all we see, all we hear, all we name with words is not even a tiny fraction of a percent of all there is to know.

Much as the visual cortex translates upside-down, fragmentary, 2-dimensional snapshots from the saccades of the eye into the illusion of a total visual field -- the illusion of totality is a self-deception and what we "see" is actually a complex combination of memory, hypothesis and current visual impressions.

Or another analogy from linguistics: the distinction between langue and parole, language and speech act reveals that no one person ever knows language in its entirety, even as the speech act must assume that knowledge of the total at least for practical purposes (of all available insults, you pick only the best one you can remember while the guy drives off with your car).

Consciousness, the 'unconscious' and the simply unknown. Bottom line, no human being at any one time knows all that is knowable, and of course even the most perceptive among us know nothing about what is unknown. But we're driven, presumably for reasons similar to what compels a cat to crawl into any unsniffed paper bag, to expand into the unknown, to wonder obsessively about it, to be annoyed and/or enthralled by it.

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH

The How of evolution is a sum of vectors, driving all life into the forms we see today. Our genome seems to be more like an untidy scientist's notebooks. Active sites open, the double helix unzips, copies of the active site are sent through to the protein factories via messenger RNA transcriptase.

But the scientist never threw anything away. It seems, based on present analysis of the genome, vast tracts of the genome are junk, repetitions of the same sequences, meaningless until one considers the whim and vagary of the process which brought us here.

Males are blessed and cursed with the Rage Molecule, testosterone. A tiny thing, 288.424 g/mol. Yet consider its Why implications. From Achilles roaring before the gates of Troy to the shy adolescent boy inspecting the changes in his body, the Whys of testosterone are as complex as any man now reading this reply.

Most of life is beyond our reach. We are the little ape who looked up and saw the stars. We haven't reached a star yet, but we can split the light coming from them in prisms, as surely as a chemist looking for testosterone in his chromatograph. What does this teach us? Plenty of Hows and precious few Whys.

Whys aren't biological. They couldn't be. We men sit around and hear women say we are bullheaded and violent, sheepishly grinning to hear Men are Pigs. Are women any less piggish by dint of less testosterone and more estrogen? Haeckel's recapitulation theory has long since been debunked. As ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny, neither does ontology. Religion is the flower which grows on the plant of a culture, encapsulating a society's mores, rites and mythology, its hopes of heaven, its fears of hell. It is the truest of all our societal expressions, with all its curious and wonderful tidbits of creation, the doings of gods and men.

It should not surprise us therefore to see modern man reject religion so abruptly, for societies have declined into silent cubicles full of lonely people who return home to watch television, eating food they did not grow, whose feet and hands never touched the soil which grew them. Passive and overspecialized, they regret their pasts and fear their futures.

There is no distinction between How and Why for modern man. The Why is merely the How of the endless loop of his days, and the sacred is lost in the passive blur of images on billboards and television and now the Internet. The web of life which once bound him to the earth and the sky and the sea is shrink wrapped and bar coded at the supermarket, paid for with money directly deposited into his bank account by a corporation which views him as disposable, as disposable as the styrofoam tray holding the hamburger he buys made from a cow he never saw. He has little input into the lives of his children or the care of his parents. He dulls his mind with drugs, overeats, takes antidepressants, He is as isolated as an astronaut in orbit around a distant planet.

We all arrive at Why via different routes. We all have faith in something larger than ourselves, but faith in what? The simulacrum of Asimov's female android has been given life in chat rooms, where lonely hearts gather to assume alternate identities, including alternate gender identification. Online, we're all happy, wealthy, tanned and well-adjusted. We're well past the exploratory phase here, in a world where illusion sells product, which is the more real, that which sells or that which leads us to buy it?

And it's useful to learn that I'm probably going to have to take you out first.

Nothing personal, certainly. Just time management.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. - W. Somerset Maugham

I'm not going to defend romanticism (mostly because I can't assert it, and romantics get all cute arty girls, and--wait, does that mean romanticism is selected for?), but that 'loving ones family' is selected for doesn't mean it's a sufficient answer to the question of why you love your wife and kids. That'd be like me saying "'My coffee cup is blue' is true because it doesn't run afoul of the law of non-contradiction;" or "I'm a 6'1", 30 year old white guy because I didn't develop any fatal congenital defects in the womb."

Or, if you want your explanation to be different from my examples, you need to appeal to some as-yet-undeveloped robust evolutionary anthropology.

"There is nothing beyond our reach"

So one a priori claim deserves another? Maybe we should just be chary about making a priori claims altogether ;D

Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.