Sex and the Single Psychic

This blog is not a discussion on how to use your psychic powers to get a mate.  I apologize if the title misled you, but it as you'll see it is not inappropriate, just easily misinterpreted.  A more descriptive title would be " How the process of natural selection selects against the ability to consciously use PSI information".   I want to point out how biology explains a lot of the phenomena we find in the study of PSI, and to encourage more exploration in this area.  I am not a professional biologist but the principles I will discuss are very simple, the most basic fundamentals of the process of natural selection.  In this day and age of mapping genomes and with all the ethical questions and biological potentialities that demand our attention,  there is more information being presented every day that can be applied to our understanding of the mechanics of PSI.  There are many different branches of science that can shed light on the mystery of how PSI happens, and biology is one of them.

Your perceptive hardware, your five senses, are the result of your DNA.  Your consciousness is structured by your interactions with the material world.  In other words, your DNA gave you the equipment to act in this world to propagate itself, and your reality is largely defined by your five senses (and associated neurons) that your DNA gives you. 

PSI has been shown to exist in numerous studies, but though statistically significant, it is almost always barely significant.  And it is well known for being hard to reproduce, capricious, and almost always uncontrollable.  I think these attributes can be explained by natural selection.  As a matter of fact, nature requires PSI work this way.

The process of natural selection requires variability in the gene pool.  Without variability, there is nothing for nature to select from.  Variability comes from mutation, and mutations that severely limit variability would lead to disaster for a species and are eliminated through the process of natural selection.  Without variability, given the inevitability of environmental change, a species could not adapt to that change.  There is of course much more to natural selection than a requirement of variability in the gene-pool but for my point here, that's all I am going into. 

So any trait in an individual (that got there from a mutation) that is overwhelmingly powerful would in short order severely limit the variability in the gene-pool.  For example, if a person did have the ability to use their psychic powers to get a mate, they could also use those powers to give them and theirs every advantage.  Soon, those with the PSI ability would control all the resources, and with each generation of self-selection, the variability of the gene-pool is reduced. 

One may posit that through some higher moral or rational route human beings could think their way around this problem, but keep in mind PSI perception didn't just start with humans, it came into the process early on.  While biology was evolving processes to utilize sound, smells, light and other types of information in the environment, so too would evolve the ability to obtain PSI data.  The built-in brakes to consciously utilizing PSI data has been evolving right along with the other traits we have. 

It is the process of natural selection that explains why PSI is often difficult to reproduce in the lab.  It explains why it is not naturally consciously controllable.  It is by nature just slightly significant, to give a small advantage but not a overwhelming one, to the individual who is getting PSI information.  It is by nature unpredictable, and PSI data is not discernible and therefore capricious in its occurrence.  It can even be argued that it is natural to be afraid of it, to doubt it and marginalizes it, because volitional PSI has been by nature self-destructive.  We have other hard-wired fears, natural fears, and a fear of  PSI may be one of them.  And it doesn't have to be one trait that clamps down on PSI, most functions in humans have multiple genes that control them.  The restriction of volitional PSI doubtless reaches across many biological systems, be they endocrinal, neurological, or whatever is required to maintain variability.  Because PSI would be such a huge advantage, it has to be severely restricted.

The implications for this way of viewing the function of PSI are too vast to go into here.  I do think it may shed some light on the mechanics of the PSI process to explore it from a biological viewpoint.  Again, given the explosion our knowledge of genetics, and our growing ability to apply that knowledge, the biological basis to PSI will be explored, hopefully from a rational and moral foundation.

You comments are invited.
-Benton R. Bogle