On Thanksgiving, in normal times, Americans travel more than any day of the year, to sit down and eat with people they love. This year is of course not normal. However, a forum inspired by fighting ever remains a perfectly appropriate place to celebrate love and friendship, because love and friendship evolved from fighting.

Sam Sheridan explains in his great “A Fighter’s Heart,” relating pioneering academic research on aggression by Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz.

[Lorenz] talks about geese and says that two furiously aggressive animals must bond and live together in a small space, all without weakening intra-species aggression. They have evolved inhibitors, behavior-changing devices, that turns the aggression they normally feel toward others of their species into something else when they mate.

The same thing, although in a more complex way takes place among men and women of the same tribe or family, bound together for increased success against the outside world. Lorenz writes that friendship is found only in animals with ‘highly developed intra-species aggression,’ and goes on to say that the more aggressive the animal, the deeper the friendship.

The ability to love and form bonds has evolved as a way to temper aggression, to turn it into something more powerful when defending hearth and home. Friendship and love are essentially evolutionary by-products of aggression. Men and women who form these deep bonds – who evolved ways to mitigate interspecies aggression – have great success in passing along their genes.

So, yah, sex+fighting = love. #yeahscience.

Dana White famously explained to the Oxford Debating Society (and everyone else) that fighting is in our DNA. But it’s more than that. Fighting, along with fear and procreation, are not just in there, they are the core of who and what we are. Love and friendship developed to make fighting and aggression work for us. Without fighting in our DNA, our species would not have developed the capacity for deep friendship, and above all, for love. 

So in the beginning of Thanksgiving, there naturally was fighting.

397 years ago, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag came together for the first Thanksgiving. They feasted on venison, popcorn, and, it’s said, wild turkey. The original colonists that day included William and Mary Brewster, and their sons Love and Wrestling. The historical record shows that the settlers and the Indians wrestled, for days.

Thus this is a fitting place to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who comes to The UnderGround. Without each of you, this place would be what my high school wrestling coach said was the most worthless word in the world – potential. And a special shout out to anyone cutting for a fight, for who the feast is a piece of skinless turkey and several green beans, no butter. I hope you win. I hope everybody wins, I really do.

A friend of this sport is a friend of mine, so If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit digitally next to me, on the UG and the OG.