My hypothesis will be that explanation is to cognition as orgasm is to reproduction. It is the phenomenological mark of the fulfillment of an evolutionarily determined drive.

It may seem to us that we construct and use theories in order to achieve explanation or have sex in order to achieve orgasm.

From an evolutionary point of view, however, the relation is reversed: we experience orgasms and explanations to ensure that we make babies and theories.

Alison Gopnik, Explanation As Orgasm

I think that there is only one way to science—or to philosophy for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part—unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution.

But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children . . .

Karl Popper, Realism And Aim Of Science

A newborn infant may automatically root for a nipple, but the mother still needs to learn how to nurse. This holds true for humans as well as apes.

Many apes fail to take care of their offspring at zoos due to a lack of experience and examples. They don’t hold their infant in the right position for nursing, or they pull back if the infant latches onto a nipple. They often need human models to fill the knowledge gap.

Zoos with a pregnant ape commonly invite women volunteers to demonstrate how to feed a baby. Motherhood and bodily similarity naturally brings humans and apes together. The ape observes the nursing human mother and copies her every move once her own baby arrives.

Frans de Waal, Different

All those techniques of caring for young, of good parenting itself, could have arisen first by circuit repurposing (such recycling seems to explain so much of evolution)—here by inserting the other individual, the offspring, onto one’s own need and motivation structure, creating a simulation dwelling within, as a trick to use the self’s internal processes to rapidly model and infer the other’s needs.

Karl Deisseroth, Projections

The inevitable, relentless background noise of this clockwork universe to which we have found ourselves exiled, now witnessing The Origin of the World, but unlike Courbet’s version, ours yawns wide to reveal a coming world, as a head crowns, pushing forth a new consciousness, it seems, protected by its skin-covered casing, but at the same time vulnerable to influence, to corruption, its fontanel bared to us—what better symbol of the openness and hence the complete vulnerability of the very young?

Is it a metaphorical accident that the cranium will fuse in months to come, thus illustrating the ensuing closed-mindedness, the inevitable, tragic separation of the I from the World?

Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

Good stories give birth to many different meanings, generating “children” of meaning in their own image.

Dan McAdams, Stories We Live By

My child was helpless and cold and dying somewhere on the ground, apart from me.

As I searched I could feel a fine thread connecting us—the baby was me, a part of me, apart and needing me, though I could not see where in the outside world the thread projected.

But within me, the loss had a definite place, a position in space that I could feel. It was in my chest, in those deep muscles that sweep the arms.

The inner feeling, the loss of a child, had been mapped there somehow—that was where evolution had set this feeling, this was how it should feel, to make me do what needed to be done.

It ravaged me as I dug, and drove my arms to seek the piece of my heart that I had held so long.

It was a gap, it was a savage gape, and it made me dig.

Karl Deisseroth, Projections