Don’t Get It Twisted, Love is a Beautiful Thing
But here’s why it might leave you twisted
She died before she got to see the house her grandson had bought her.
It was one of the saddest scenes in Suits, the series.
Mike Ross became an orphan when he was young. His grandmother had to step in and raise him.
Retired, there was little that she could do. Luckily, Ross was gifted. He had a brain to rival that of Rain Man.
His memory granted him the ability to memorize books fast and recall every punctuation mark. Initially, he would do tests for college students or those seeking to get into top universities. Later, the same brain landed him a job in one of the top law firms in the city.
He made so much money.
Must be nice.
To show his love to the one mother figure she has known for the greatest part of his life, he wanted to buy her a house.
But, you see, the grandmother was sick. He was under the constant care of health workers in a facility that Mike would frequent.
On the day when he wanted to surprise her grandmother with the new house he bought for her, he heard the news that she had passed on.
I broke him.
Almost.
Love is a beautiful thing.
Them say love is blind oh
It is.
I’ll explain why in a bit.
Ross was raised by someone who had long past her menopausal transition phase. She was no longer able to give birth to more kids. Regardless, she continued to raise Mike Ross, one of the stars of the show.
In humans, this concept is seen in so many communities the world over. I began raising my sisters’ kids when I was in class 5. They’d go to work and I’d change napkins and feed and take care of them until their mothers came back. I often joke about how I became a father at a tender age.
Years would pass and I’d consider babysitting when I was on campus. Life was hard. I would come across stories of foreign babysitters earning amounts I could only dream of. But I passed that hurdle.
Babysitting is one of the features of an evolutionary concept known as alloparenting.
Alloparenting was first coined by the legendary E. O. Wilson in the tome of a book, Sociobiology. He tried to attribute the social aspects of life to genes, much to the chagrin of so many scientists.
He didn’t care.
You have to love such ambition.
If someone completely unrelated to you would commit to raising your child while you worked elsewhere, then love can be blind.
Maybe that might not be convincing enough, but it’s where I start.
Evolution states that we all want to improve our fitness.
Fitness is the ability to survive, seek mates, and successfully reproduce. Our genes would then survive to the next generation.
Natural Selection is often touted as the best theory to explain this. It even developed the term fitness.
But here you have someone completely strange doing the work the mother, according to evolution, should. The child will not be a direct descendant of the babysitter, but it will receive care from it.
Still not believe love is blind? I’m yet to hit you with my best shot.
See I used to lie to myself that I’ll always be a player
If the goal is to increase as many offspring as possible, then males have a biased advantage.
In humans, once a male starts producing sperms, they do so until they die. Unless they have their balls chopped off. Chemically or physically.
Females would also have millions of eggs. But have you ever tried to carry loads of eggs? I’m talking about the kind of eggs you crack for breakfast or any other meal.
The analogy might be the wrong one, but the point you will have in mind is eggs can break easily. In females, they have a strict timeline and a finite amount of eggs.
At birth, only around 300,000 eggs remain. However, not all of them get released during ovulation. Men, on the other hand, are production mills.
So they can be players.
But don’t get it twisted, love is a beautiful thing.
Alloparenting occurs in many species. An estimated 150 mammals and 120 birds have exhibited alloparenting behaviour. I even wrote a piece on African spiders that displayed this trait.
In pilot whales, the males are the ones often seen taking care of the young, even though they are genetically unrelated.
Among the African social spiders, males die by the drones after a short time. Mothers are left to take care of the hatchlings, related or not.
In bees, the reproductive capabilities of many female bees are silenced. Usually, only the queen can reproduce. Usually.
The rest of the colony works to take care of the hatched eggs, fertilized or not. The care is given in various forms.
First, through nourishment. Bees travel millions of kilometers in their lifetimes to produce food for the queen and offspring they might never get to see.
You are no different from a bee.
You wade through days from 8 to 5 working only to have your money taxed to sustain people you might never encounter. Bee-littling, huh?
But don’t get it twisted, love is a beautiful thing.
Your role serves another and their role serves you.
I call this a merger. Mergers are any bond between two entities which, if stable enough, help sustain the primary constituents.
A family is an example of a merger. The role of the parents serve the children and the children, by continuing to survive, serve the parents, in an evolutionary sense. This is a stable merger.
Mergers are a highlight of my theory, Organismal Selection. They are the reason humans, bees, and ants are one of the most dominant creatures on Earth.
Your role as an 8-to-5 bee in your country serves another. You survive because of somebody you may never get to see. I don’t want to laud some states that don’t care much for suffering families who struggle to keep up with state demands.
I only belabour an evolutionary concept.
And while leaders can be cruel, exploitative behaviour exists in the wild in the most unexpected of ways.
For better for worse oh
Cuckoos are very conniving.
The mother lays her eggs in other birds’ nests. When their chicks hatch, they are taken care of together with the mother’s true offspring.
It is an anomaly. Many scientists have tried to explain why this is so.
If you ever watched Tom and Jerry, there were scenes when a hatched duck would consider Jerry its mother. It’s an instinct the chick has once it is born.
The first thing it notices when it is born, it considers it its mother. Jerry then became a mother.
The same could be said about the cuckoos that parasitize themselves in the nests they shouldn’t be in. You will find the mother, smaller than the hatched cuckoo, slaves — past 8-to-5 — to get food for a bird almost twice its size.
In the above picture, you can clearly see they are different. But the mother continues to care for it. Why?
Love is blind?
They do this for better or worse.
For the spiders I had previously talked about, the children eat their mothers. The sisters sit back and watch. They dare not intervene, because the practice strengthens the colony.
An ugly scene. Possibly.
Love is blind, mmh?
You dey make my head scatter
Scientists struggle to identify the brain mechanisms which trigger organisms into such behaviour.
The reasons range from genetic to hormonal. Others are enforced by societal norms.
But there is no one consensus.
Dbanj would say the anomaly dey make my head scatter.
It can.
I have mentioned that alloparenting is seen in many species of mammals and birds. It has evolved independently. But it is only seen in 3–5% of these classes.
If you’re to draw a bell curve, 3–5% points towards outliers. Outliers are the strangest of people. They are far from normal.
Why does Jay-Z have such an empire?
Why does Michael Jordan or LeBron have such a record?
Why is Oprah so successful?
In this article, we ask, why are these groups of animals, a meagre 3–5% of mammals and birds, including some arthropods, existent?
Why should I care if nobody knows my mother? Why should I slave for someone who would spend all their money on booze and other drugs while on campus?
Why should sperm whales defend the young of other mothers?
Now you have it twisted.
But still, love is a beautiful thing.
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