The seven deadly curs’d sins …Lust

In today's climate of political correctness, I shall have to be very careful in choosing my words in this letter, because I do not want to stand trial for conspiring to provoke lewd behaviour, should our private correspondence fall into the wrong hands. The modern meaning of lust has very bad connotations. It suggests uncontrolled sexual desire or an overwhelming craving for money, fame or power, all of which are related to sex, anyway. And it implies that the people who lust for all the lustable things don't merely desire them but also go out and acquire them, often by unpleasant means. Perhaps this is a post-modern meaning, because those who only want such lustable things will probably be unsuccessful in getting them, either lacking or suppressing the fearful beast of action within themselves. I have found that there is a whole body of biological theory dealing with this subject that has, to my knowledge, never been put together in one place. (It also occurs to me that the subject itself would make an admirable four-letter journal title — LUST, a journal devoted to research on the baser aspects of biology.) The general theory, in brief, states that all the bad and sinful things within us are legacy from our animal past: they are a relic, if you like, of earlier evolutionary stages. In later stages, when we became human beings, these were no longer absolutely essential for our survival, and so mechanisms evolved to contain them. This took place at the time our brains underwent dramatic changes and we discovered that smooth talking could succeed where brute force would not. Although it is unclear what changes took place in the genome to turn crocodiles into venture capitalists, we are pretty sure how this is represented in the phenotype. It resides in the brain, and clearly the animal in us lives in the older mid-brain while the human part is probably in the cerebral cortex and particularly in the enlarged forebrain. The contemporary preoccupation of neuroscientists with problems such as vision, memory, language, consciousness and thought has led to a neglect of the more interesting part of our brains that directly controls our basic physiology and baser psychology. My guess is that the key to this will be found in the hypothalamus, and we should all be hard at work on this part of the brain rather than studying long-term …