[goatlover]

You really care about their genes? What if they adopt kids or choose not to have any? Will it distress you greatly that you went through all that effort just to have your genes not continue to the next generation?

I think it's likely you're applying an evolutionary explanation to your parenting behavior, but don't really care that much about your children's actual genes. You care about your children as persons, not their molecular machinery.

If you really, really cared you would have your genes cloned and be donating massively to sperm banks and what not.

[menacingly]

Oh, I definitely care. I'd prefer at least some of them have biological kids, but the odds of that are good with my buckshot approach.

I think mine is actually the simpler explanation, and yours is reaching a bit. We're surrounded by vicious competition for genetic reproduction, I don't know why humans would be the exception.

And I don't want a clone, I want to pick a partner with all kinds of good genes to bring to the mix and toss them together, which I did. A partner I'm attracted to in part because of a lot of cues she gives me indicating her genes.

I think when you've had the pride of a son or daughter who is the spitting image of you, or walks just like you, or is noticeably muscular in the places you are, it's hard to deny exactly where that is coming from..

[goatlover]

You're admitting that you want someone else's genes in addition to yours to be passed on. Someone you're not related to, which is your wife. And then your kids spouses. Your genes will get diluted each generation.

Anyway, there was an interesting philosophy podcast that rejected reductionistic evolutionary explanations for human behavior. The reasoning goes that yes, evolution is responsible for creating our minds, but once we have the ability to be conscious, to reflect, ask all sorts of questions and form new ideas and what not, that this is a new level of explanation. Thus the need for psychology, sociology, etc.

Call it an emergent if you like. Evolution itself is emergent upon physics, chemistry, geology, climatology, etc.