the three amigos ain't gonna study war no more

As Beagles knows I am a follower of evolutionary biology, aka, the selfish gene.  The theory being that if we want to analyze our behavior we take into consideration how that behavior would lead to us having more offspring and hence spread our genes.  Spreading our genes is our sole purpose in life, at least as far as the gene is concerned, and those with genes that aren't as favorable for passing out as many copies of themselves are genes that fade away.  It's not quite that simple, but I can give a lecture lately if anybody wants one.

One sees right away where competitiveness helps.  If Ig is just concerned with making an arrowhead that is perfectly good and doesn't care if it's the best in the tribe Ig won't do as well as Og who has more of the competitive gene, and aims to make the best arrowhead.  He will be more of a star in the tribe, will attract the most beautiful (the best genes) women in the tribe and will be able to fool around more and spread his genes around more, and those are the genes that are around today and not those of Ig.

So that kind of competitiveness makes sense.  But sports fandom is different in that the fan has nothing to do with the success of the team and the fan doesn't get any material advantage out of his team winning.  And like I said it doesn't matter who owns the team or what the players are, so why is sport fandom so prevalent?

I suspect a connection with nationalism/  I can see where one would be loyal to their family, their neighbors, maybe their town, even the area not too far from the town, but when it comes to a big entity like a nation full of people you can't possibly know, and lands you will never get around to seeing, why does one's heart pound when the flag goes by?


The three amigos were like kids everywhere, certainly like me when I was at Tonti grade school,. they just wanted to have fun, they wanted to goof off, tell jokes, possibly impress the fairer sex so that ten years hence they could spread their genes with them.  What I wanted them to do, was some kind of work that the regular teacher had written down in her lesson plan, and mainly not to disrupt the class with their jokes and goofing off.  They briefly fell under the spell of the game, following something like fandom, but when they realized there was nothing in it for them the jig was up for me.
You know you could stretch that into an anti war parable, compare it to the French and German soldiers who fraternized on Christmas during WW I, when they realized that this war had nothing in it for either of them.


I guess singing is involved in that stuff somewhere, we have our anthems, and our Go Cubs Go's (Won last night, series tied at one each).  Well music has the power to calm the savage beast, but also to make the calm beast more savage.