Jan 23, 2025

Your Emotions are Strategies

Evolution is the process by which chemical replicators called DNA have organized matter and energy to the purposes of their own replication, resulting in the large amount of biological machines we see around us: grass, bushes, trees, bugs, birds, mammals, lizards, whales, dogs, and other humans.

The act of DNA using matter and energy to their own interests, (survival and replication), happens in 2 broad categories:

1. Building machines

Machines are built via proteins which collect matter from the environment and assemble such matter into devices capable of doing work. A purely chemical mechanism converts the materials in the environment into trees.

2. Playing strategies

DNA play strategies by influencing the machines they have built to perform certain actions. Sometimes this is hard to differentiate from building the machines themselves. For example, one plant might send out branches across the ground called crawlers that will someday live on their own, whereas other plants grow seeds. Some grow seeds as high as possible, others low to the ground. Some grow seeds so that birds will eat them, others such as the dandelion make their own flying machines for transport.

Other strategies can be easily separated from the machine’s physical structure. For example, ants respond to each other and the environment in a way they are not physically required to. Birds use their brains to build nests. Bees cooperate to build complex architecture, with different species having similar body plans but building different types of nests 1.

You too

So long as you believe that your person is a product of evolution, then you might accept that your actions, or at least your emotions which produce desires for certain actions, are influenced by these strategies that our DNA is trying to play, for the same reason that our DNA has built our persons as machines. There is a possible case to be made that we are more than the machines produced by DNA, as this is currently argued by all religions that I know of, and has been championed by some of the smartest people in history. Such an argument is outside of the scope of this post.

Everything that makes up the structure of you, from the lense of your eyes to the retina, from your frontal lobe to your brain stem, from your hips to your toes, both your ear lobe and drums, and every organ and gland, had its design encoded and was built by DNA and the process of chemical replication.

Your body is the machine of the design of your genetics.

The strategies of your DNA are built in to the structure of your brain, glands, and organs.

“Influence” is too light a word in saying “genes influence you when you are lazy, sad, happy, energetic, etc.”

These emotions, as well as most of your interests and desires, are all carefully refined strategies.