Burke intuited the insidious secret of marriage a half-century before Darwin. "Most of the ideas," he wrote, "which are capable of making a powerful impression on the mind, whether simply of pain or pleasure, may be reduced to very nearly these two heads, self-preservation, and society. To the ends of one or the other all our passions are calculated to answer." We might see his use of the terms self-preservation and society as figures of speech. Birth and sex and death is all; the dissemination of genetic material the only necessary logic in life. Not long after that point, the organism is expendable.