The start of a warm day.  Retelling thoughts to myself of previous moments.

Noting the difference between a public persona and the private self, no matter how in/famous one may be (or imagine one is).

Allowing that some will control their selves with drugs – the so-called modern life – crafting states of energy like a microscopic logic board designer or chainsaw-wielding ice carver.

Some subcultures maintaining a separation of gender roles.

Others going with the flow, allowing people to assume they know best what they want to learn/do best.

Is monogamy innate or learned?

And if innate, is it gender-specific?

And if gender-specific, how does one gender teach the other the perceived importance of monogamy?

As our population continues to crowd in, how many other innate behaviours become commonplace in place of the formerly common behaviour of lifetime monogamy?

How do we signal zygotes to become antisocial and will RNA independence later wreak more havoc in one’s genetic tendencies?

Does the sound of a lawnmower influence the mating behaviour of cicadas?

What about an old B-17 flying overhead?

Will cosmic rays change space travelers into a distinct sub/super species due to changes in our copassengers: bacteria in our guts and pores?

The following was going to be part of this blog entry but I’ve decided to challenge myself to stop blogging about politics as a unique category of our human behaviour…

[Someone told me that if my culture eliminated Glenn Beck it would also eliminate the usefulness of a person named Jon Stewart because of the duality present in our cultural subconsciousness.

What if I don’t believe in duality?

Could Tina Fey then complete against Sarah Palin for mass media supremacy and have more real nonviolent power than anyone in the U.S. government?]

Seven billion people, no matter how unimportant or unempowered they may feel, lead this planet but rarely do we act like wise leaders.

We play at competing against each other while ignoring our effects on the states of energy around us that aren’t our species.

Is this a 100% redeemable quality?

Can I lose myself in the fun of the moment and yet be aware of my effect on the environment and the future?

On the dance floor last night, looking into the beautiful eyes of a stranger, having a brief conversation, and then changing dance partners, I felt the concept of opportunity costs and sunk costs as it pertained to social relationships rather than business management.

Soon, I will celebrate 25 years of marriage, my first and only marriage.  According to statistics, less than 50% of my local culture has households with two people being married as the single head of household.

How those statistics account for widows/widowers, young people buying a first house or renting a first flat before finding a marriage partner, or others who believe in marriage but are unmarried at the time of the statistics-taking, I don’t know.

The statistics do not imply, and we cannot infer from the statistics, that monogamy is no longer a preferred innate trait of our species.

Marriage and monogamy are not synonymous.  Neither is marriage and compatibility or monogamy and harmony.

For the most part, our species reproduces by sexual intercourse between the male and the female and subsequent fertilisation of egg by sperm.

We can prevent the fertilisation through contraception and we can fertilise eggs without sexual intercourse.

If contraception and artificial insemination were universally available for subcultures that accept these modern conveniences (and gently encouraged for subcultures that don’t), would we in those subcultures naturally breed monogamy out of our genetic trait set?

If we removed headlines that say overpopulation is an inevitable fatal train wreck for our species and started noting that we had solved the problem of overpopulation and are now managing resources for our population, would our bodies’ reproduction systems adjust accordingly and stop producing antisocial types?

In other words, when we see natural changes of other species in population sizes that peak and shrink, can we honestly tell ourselves we’re just as susceptible to these changes, including nonmonogamous relationships?

My thoughts are clouded by a stressful family situation right now so I can’t be sure if I’m looking at today’s blog as if I’m staring at us outside our species and/or applying [non]relativistic moral/ethical constraints on my suppositions.

We talk about the birth and death of civilisations and cultures as if we’re not the same as any other social species on this planet.

Take away the labels “civilisation” and “culture” and look at simple population growth statistics.

Certainly, as a population grows, the social interconnections grow and thus the population’s interface with the surrounding environment grows more complicated.

The birds in these woods are fattening up on cicadas this year.  Next year, assuming no major environmental disasters in the next nine months, we should have a bumper crop of birds born of this year’s wellfed avian breeders.

Eliminating all our innerspecies squawking and carrying on, I observe our change in population growth.

In previous overpopulation studies I’ve read, not knowing the mindset or intent of the researchers or the sponsors/producers of the studies, a species that contains a supermajority of paired-off male/female breeders will start producing offspring that do not exhibit male/female breeding preferences.

Of course, we say we’re the only species that can objectively observe the behaviour of other species (we are not the only organisms that can control the behaviour of other organisms), which makes us believe we may be similar to other species but we have a great advantage over them because we don’t have to just react to environmental changes.

In fact, we can create our own environmental success or destruction stories!

If marriage, as a cultural example of monogamous behaviour, is no longer necessary for species survival in our current global civilisation’s modern condition, is it just a temporary reaction to our population growth or a permanent change in our genetic makeup?

Concluding this train of thought, if a sudden environmental megadisaster reduced our population dramatically, how would we view marriage and/or monogamy?

And finally, as a test of my mental state, has this blog entry indicated a family crisis fogged my usual rational yet humourous reasoning?