7 Scientific Reasons You'll Turn Out Just Like Your Parents

From Cracked, courtesy of a buddy on facebook:

Old people are cranky, slow and boring. Kids are noisy, restless and irritating. For most of us, life is about making sure we stay as awesome as we are right now -- we'll always love our video games, and music, and eating burritos at two in the morning after the bars closed. Isn't that what all the commercials tell us, that you're only as old as you feel?

Well, science has some bad news for you. The behaviors of the elderly that you write off as old-person lameness, and your behavior that the elderly credit to dickish rebellion, are all based in biology. And no, you can't stop it.

Click here to read 'em.

So I, and probably most Americans, have been operating on a somewhat dubious principle in our dealings with the rest of the human race: people's behaviors and attitudes are mostly governed by conscious thought. I mean, people's behaviors and attitudes are governed mostly by conscious thought, but I, for one, have wildly underestimated biology, hormones, and genetically hardwired routines in human interaction for most of my life. Actually, I probably continue to do so, but I'm trying to catch up.

For me, this all began a few years ago when I started reading George Lakoff essays about conservative versus liberal attitudes. In a particular interview with him, he asserted that logic, within the human mind, is inextricably intertwined with emotion. That is, there can be no such thing as a purely logical decision; logic is always associated with emotion, whether you like it or not. It is an easy conclusion to make, and further reading on my part has supported this, that humans aren't really logical. We are, first and foremost, biological creatures, subject to our own physicality, which includes the brain, an important and complex organ, but an organ nonetheless. That is, logic, while valuable, is simply an intellectual construction of the human brain, rather than our natural way of understanding the universe. In short, we must make an effort to be reasonable.

Don't get me wrong: human beings do have a great deal of conscious control over their own thoughts and behaviors, but looking back on that great literary theme we all study in high school, reason versus passion, I find myself reevaluating the impact of passion, or rather biology, in the overall equation. Passion apparently counts for a whole lot more than I could have possibly imagined a decade ago.

I have no idea where this notion will eventually take me.

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