Who Will Win the Election and Why (Wonderful Sex)

According to the Theory of Evolution, the only thing everyone on Earth is trying to do is get laid. Reproduction (genes getting passed on to successfully live for another generation) is the engine of life on our planet, and whether you're a fruit fly with a day to live or a newborn American female with 80.1 years ahead of you, you are inextricably tied to your purpose as a gene injection/reception device.

Now before you go ape-shit and start throwing 50,000 years of evidence at me proving that this is not always true, understand that this theory operates on a bell curve, so there will always be outliers and exceptions, but for the vast majority of our history it's provable and statistically true.

For human beings, reproduction is not as simple as a little coitus sweet tangus. Successful human reproduction requires enormous amounts of "parental investment" long after getting it on -- which is a fancy way of saying "years of protecting your kid from harm, feeding your kid, and teaching him about life so he can grow up healthy and won't act like a moron and get himself killed."

Human being babies, in fact, require some of the highest levels of this "parental investment" of any modern species. Two big reasons:

1) Human babies are always technically born 'premature' my mammalian standards so that their fat human brains can squeeze out of the mom's narrow hips without killing her; because of their premature bodies, they are largely immobile for their first several years of life, so they need to be protected and fed for a comparatively long time. Contrast this with an animal like a horse that plops straight out of his mom and is running around "like a pony" within hours.

2) Humans outsmarted their competition through a very complicated set of social skills like verbal language that take years to develop and master.

So almost half a decade after birth, humans are still pretty helpless.
Which group are you more likely to trust to survive to adulthood on their own in the forest?
a. 10,000 four-year-old human beings
b. 10 four-year-old grizzly bears

Correct Answer: b.

Okay, so if reproduction is the fundamental task of all living things, and if with humans that means feeding/protecting your kids and teaching them well, what does it have to do with the 2008 Presidential Election? I propose the following explanation!

Firstly, though we live in a democracy in which the presidency is supposed to be only as powerful as Congress and the Supreme Court, we tend to exaggerate its importance to the point of electing a "father" or "mother" for our "family" (country).

Secondly, because we innately think in terms of electing a head-of-household, we look for surprising and sometimes completely unnecessary characteristics in a president: can you relate to him on a personal level? Does he make you feel safe? How is he with kids?

(Enter the political necessity of baby kissing... a practice so old, male chimps looking to climb the social ladder have been documented spending a good deal of time kissing/grooming unrelated babies to gain support from powerful females.)

This is the first round of tests for presidents. Our brains didn't evolve for hundreds of thousands of years on the African savanna deciphering the merits of flat tax policy or Medicare premiums. We evolved to value leaders that could ensure an environment in which we could successfully mate/raise kids, and every single issue in the campaign is tied to this value. Their order of importance is based in evolutionary terms:

It's Just That The Saber-tooth Tiger Doesn't See America the Way You and I Do...
The Saber-tooth Tiger Pals Around With Terrorists

#1 Physical Safety - The quickest way to kill your chances of reproduction is to get killed or wounded by a wild animal or another human being. A war thousands of miles away in Iraq does not threaten your immediate safety, but if America were getting invaded by another country, you can bet your monkey ass that even the vaunted "economy" issue would be taking a back seat, and we'd be looking to the first guy who could viably get us out of that mess -- sub-prime mortgages are hardly a concern when your house is being shelled.

#2 Food Availability - The second quickest way to kill your chances of reproduction is to starve. "The economy" and the housing crisis is a big deal right now, but don't be fooled -- your home losing "value" is just a metaphor. A house's "value" is only important because at the end of the day, that value=money and that money=food.

#3 Direct Child Investment - Health care and education overlap as issues in this category. The idea of modern health care is not rooted in any part of your genes, but the notion of saving yourself or your child from sickness and disease is a fundamental concern of human parents. And even if you're safe, healthy, and well fed, if you never learn to feed yourself, communicate with other humans, or solve complex problems in your environment, you are also screwed.

("Education" as I'm using the term is the same in every culture, but it is brought to children in very different ways depending on the culture. Our society just happens to rely on 'schools' to accomplish it.)

Again, this is why the Evolutionary Issues are ordered as such -- early death because of improper education may take years, death by disease can take weeks or months, starving/dehydrating to death can take only 2 days, and getting your head bit off by a lion takes about 3 seconds.

ALL other issues: energy, immigration, taxes, etc. must be tied to one of the three evolution based categories above if they are to become important to the majority of the American bell curve. The issue of climate change is a great example... only a few scientists/tree huggers gave a shit about the issue until it was made evident to the public that it threatened the economic health of the nation. And for many hardcore Republicans, even that wasn't enough -- John McCain had to spin it into a national security issue just to make it click with his base.

WHO WILL WIN IN 2008:

Every election is decided on one of the above Evolutionary Issues, it's just a matter of which one of the three is the greatest threat to successful reproduction at the time of the election.

John McCain and the Republican Party poll better on physical safety issues, but most Americans see these issues as far less pressing than the current potential loss of access to food (57% ranked economy as top issue and 9% ranked terrorism as a top issue in the latest CBS News/NYTimes Poll and it continues to trend that way.)

Barack Obama and the Democratic Party poll better on issues regarding food availability, therefore Barack Obama will win this election.

Education and health care are less important than food availability (8% ranked those as a top priorities in the same poll), but a majority of Americans see Obama as stronger in those categories as well so it will add to his electoral victory.

Racism will be a deciding factor for voters only in outlying mutant populations where reproductive priorities have been retarded by extreme cultural factors. But in evolutionary terms, humans making decisions based upon skin color in times in which skin color has absolutely no effect on their access to food will, over time, eventually die out and be replaced by more responsible (and well fed) populations.