Evolutionarily, these chemicals, which are after all produced by our own bodies, may have arisen to some good survival-promoting purpose. My research is based on the assumption that all, ALL our beautiful abstractions in government, religion, art, science, are based in and shaped by this tidal ebb and flow of chemicals in our bodies. Among the many startling results of our study, none surprised us as much as the discovery that various nation-state groupings of human beings are dominated and indeed defined by different hormones. We believe we have solved the mystery. Our research, which consisted of telemetric monitoring of 97,312 French persons of all ages and economic backgrounds over a 24-hour period, revealed that to be French means you swim in a level of the hormone prolactin, far higher than that experienced by any other group in the world.
Prolactin is the hormone which promotes milk production.
Evolutionarily, of course, it arose to provide direct sustenance from the female mammal to the newborn offspring. Today, in France, indeed every day in France, the hormone prolactin rages out of control , producing a populace which, to use the common term, desires nothing so much as to feed its face. So dominant is this hormonal effect that the best and brightest French minds find themselves eating, drinking, and smoking all the time, and then, in a kind of yin-yang effect, use their minds to try to escape this mushing about in food, by creating worlds of purest abstract theory in art, literature, and the movies. Estrogenics Another of the world most celebrated but least understood cultures is that of China. Given our initial and surprising discovery of the prolactic basis of French culture, we thought, as we approached China, that we might find the same hormone at play there.