I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the genetic and physiological origins of emotions in individuals. It’s a fascinating topic, but it can be a little hard to map the science of it to the experience of day-to-day life. It can be a challenge to understand how, because of chemical interactions in the body, you are depressed.

I was, however, reading an interesting book recently that provided a nice example of how your genes, programmed from your parents, can affect how you react emotionally when, say, your girlfriend dumps you. It goes a little something like this. There’s a particular protein in the brain whose job it is to transport the neurotransmitter serotonin effectively. The map containing the design of this protein is housed in a gene in your DNA (a gene fundamentally being a specific segment of any one of the extremely long DNA molecules that lives in your chromosomes.) Certain people have a “long” version of this gene which results in proteins which are particularly effective at transporting serotonin. Others have a “short” version, which is less effective.

Now, serotonin is a neurotransmitter that operates in the synapses of your brain, and it correlate with feeling good. By “feeling good” we really just mean feelings of pleasure, or at least lack of pain. So, if you’ve got the “long” version of the gene that produces the better serotonin transporting protein, you’re probably going to go through life feeling better. And, statistics seem to back this up.

Of course, this view — this correlation of emotion and mood to proteins and genes — is largely at odds with the romantic version of emotions that came out of Europe in the 18th and 19th century. During that period poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Lord Byron presented emotions as ethereal, spiritual, unknowable substances; invisible demons and angels that both haunted and tantalized us. This view now seems quite wrong. Emotions are knowable, and can be understood and even regulated.

With this realization in place, and the knowledge that Byron and Rimbaud’s mysterious model of emotional life cast tens of millions into the dank cellars of depression over the past 300 years (resulting in who knows how many suicides) I think we conclude only one thing: the Romantic poets were worse than Hitler. As such, I believe it should be the top priority of this nation to create a time travel device that will allow us to go back to the past and assassinate these two monsters of history. Our end goal should be two beefy Marines bursting into the apartments of each of these pansies, screaming “Eat shit, faggot!” and firing their M-16’s, reducing their targets to gory, fleshy detritus.

Only then can we progress as a species.