“I exist because my genes want to copy themselves.” That’s not poetry, it’s biology. From bacteria to humans, life has a single agenda: replicate the molecule. Richard Dawkins called them “selfish genes” (Dawkins, 2016), and everything we are — flesh, brain, behavior — is just an evolutionary support system.
It’s not the self that wants to reproduce. It’s the genome. As E.O. Wilson put it, “The organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA” (Wilson, 2000).
Once you see this clearly, everything changes. The brain is not the central organ. It’s an assistant — a glorified logistics hub. The real boss is the reproductive apparatus. Everything else is scaffolding.
Muscles? For chasing mates or escaping danger. Digestive tract? Fueling the chase. Immune system? Protecting the genome’s investment. The brain? It calculates how to maximize reproductive advantage.
Even our highest functions — art, philosophy, ambition — often boil down to signaling: peacock feathers of the human mind. Geoffrey Miller (2000) argued that human intelligence evolved not just for survival, but for sexual selection. In that sense, IQ is just foreplay.
The brain is not one thing. Large parts of it — like the cerebellum or cortex — are just functional enhancements. Fine motor skills, speech, predictive modeling — all in service of the limbic system’s core directive: reproductive motivation.
The hypothalamus, buried deep in the brain, governs everything from sexual desire to hormonal control. It's here, in this primal command center, where reproduction takes biochemical command of the body. Neuroendocrinology confirms: “The hypothalamus plays a central role in the regulation of reproductive function” (Plant & Barker-Gibb, 2004).
If reproductive drive shuts down, so does the organism. Libido is not a luxury; it is the spark that justifies every heartbeat, every meal, every movement. Without it, existence loses its evolutionary rationale.
And that’s the punchline: we are not thinking creatures who happen to reproduce. We are reproductive creatures who happen to think.
In a very Cartesian twist, the “I” is not where it thinks it is. René Descartes located the self in the pineal gland. Modern science gets closer: “Self” might be just the limbic computation of gene-serving impulses (Damasio, 1999).
So why do I exist? To serve the replicating molecule. The rest is ornament.
Damasio, A. R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt.
Dawkins, R. (2016). The Selfish Gene (40th Anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press.
Miller, G. (2000). The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. Anchor Books.
Plant, T. M., & Barker-Gibb, M. L. (2004). Neurobiological mechanisms of puberty in higher primates. Human Reproduction Update, 10(1), 67–77. https://doi.org/10.1093/humupd/dmh006
Wilson, E. O. (2000). Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (25th Anniversary ed.). Harvard University Press.