"Is Love a Mechanism of Evolution?"

Great Debates
21

My take on the utility of love is that propounded by author Steven Pinker. Essentially it goes like this:

Out of the billions of people in this world there is a person who is the best looking, smartest, kindest, richest, funniest, wealthiest, etc. potential mate who will settle for you. It is unlikely that you will ever meet this person therefore it is in your best interest to accept someone of lesser quality (quantitatively speaking) since there are costs to remaining single (lack of affection, companionship, etc.). Once you do accept this person what is there to keep you from “trading up” once a marginally better mate comes along? What assurance do the parties involved have that their partner will remain with them? In today’s modern world we have marriage and all of the legal rights and responsibilities that it entails. However, prior to the eventual creation of marriage as a cultural and legal arrangement, what assurance did a person have that a romantic partner wouldn’t abandon them when the next best thing came along? The answer is an irrational emotion, i.e. romantic love. If you can’t “help it” when you fall in love with a person (i.e. you have no choice) then you certainly can’t fall out of love when someone “better” comes along. People therefore are committed by an adaptive, but in some ways irrational, emotion.

As Pinker quotes Douglas Yates: “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it”

22

Various things are postulated to drive evolution. Natural selection is what most people are familiar with but there is also “nuetral drift” and “sexual selection”.

Sexual selection is, simplifying madly, the selection of desired characteristics in a mate. This can cause an organism to be “fitter” not because it’s better at living in its niche but because it’s more desirable to the opposite sex and thus reproduces more.

This possibly results in things like peacock tails, birds or paradise, blue backsides of female baboons etc.

Perhaps you could connect sexual selection with love but I admit it’s a bit tenuous :slight_smile:

23

A biological behavior or a social behavior?

Well, biological relationships are treated as unalterable fact by human language. Mother, father, brother, sister. Each has a single, and simple meaning, permanent, and inherent in the biological facts. Wife, fiancee, boyfriend, are tempting, but think about this. There is no such thing as a ex-mother. You don’t have a former sister. You are one, and you stay one.

The existence of ex-wives, and former boyfriends is pretty conclusive evidence that the relationship is social, not biological. In species that do have biological pair bonding, surviving members of a pair bond remain without a mate, permanently. There is no trip to Vegas for a Goose, nor is there a trophy mate for the lead Gander.

Human evolution is affected by marriage customs. And like all variations on life strategies, individuals play their inexorable part in evolution. They die. That is the individual’s personal involvement in evolution. They die. Some leave progeny, some don’t. That’s evolution in action.

Evolution doesn’t have strategies, or mechanisms. It is a consequence of procreation, and death. Or rather it is the consequence of irregularities in that random process. Monogamy is a strict limit on gene dispersal. It has potential to reduce, or expand the possibility of survival among progeny. Wide spread adherence to monogamy has some consequence on the nature of our species. However it is far too soon to evaluate what that is, since we have no evidence that monogamy has been, or even is sufficiently strictly practiced in genetic terms.

Fifteen thousand years is a pretty short time span, when discussing the evolution of a species that has generations measured in decades. It is pure speculation to imagine monogamy over a longer time span than that.

Tris

24

To answer the question in the thread title, no, love is not a mechanism of evolution. Love may (or may not) be a product of evolution, but it does not drive it. Love may present a means to procreate, but neither does simple procreation drive evolution. It is variation coupled with differential reproductive success which provides the essential mechanism. And love plays no part in producing variation, nor, to judge by the number of failed human relationships which nevertheless produce offspring, does it appear to have much to do with procreating.

25

One additional note. WRT monogamy it seems to me that women are more likely to desire, as an evolutionary adaptation, a relatively monogamous relationship since their greater burden of raising and bearing children (essentially their higher investment level) is going to motivate them to choose a mate who will continue to support the child (and her) after birth. There is a limit to the number of children that a woman can produce so it is of less importance to her how many different sexual partners she can have when compared with how likely those partners are to continue contributing to the relationship.

On the other hand men, due to their lesser investment in the act of procreation, seem more likely to be biologically wired with preferences and instincts with the greatest probability of passing along their genes. Their lower costs potentially allow men to pass their genes on to many, many, many children and their insatiable sexual appetite is a biological adaption intended to maximize that potential.

Based on this it it is my opinion that it’s a bit simplistic to state whether the nature of homo sapiens is sexual monogamy when each gender has competing interests when it comes to ensuring the continuance of their genes.

26

Great post, Tris!

By the way, if I ever go back to using a sig, would you mind terribly if I quoted the following?

27

]Triskadecamus:
Evolution doesn’t have strategies, or mechanisms.


Well then **Tris**, what does?

The all of everything is evolution. If we choose to differentiate we can say either  "biological" evolution or "social" evolution but only  if it helps to understand a point. But in reality the two are one in the same. If you think about it, it is obvious - all biological entities interact  with their envioroment in a structured way.

Understanding this makes understanding "**romantic love**" a cinch.

**Romantic love**: A childhood of mate selection conditioning that interacts with great effect as   a  form of  human imprinting that occurs at sexual maturity and normally  finds focus on a single mate...monogamy being the  cultural sexual invention  that best advances the full slate of cultural conditions that best insure the continuing survival of the  inbreeding group.
28

Fathers who did not ‘fall in love’ with the mother are less likely to stick around to help the mother with food, shelter and protection in the late stages of her preganacy and they are less likely to stick around and help raise and protect the child during the child’s early years. The presence and help of the father during both of these periods, I would think, would give a definate survival advanage to the children of fathers who ‘love’ the mothers when compared to the children of fathers who leave.

Females who are in ‘love,’ tend to be monogamous. A female who shows the signs of love helps ensure the male that the child will be his. Helps ensure that he will not be raising the genetic offspring of another. That’s the role I see ‘love’ playing –

29

If you look at actual human behaviour, there’s a spectrum; if you want to posit that there’s something for evolution to work on, there has to be a spectrum.

I know a guy who’s apparently so monogamously wired-up that he’s incapable of developing a relationship with anyone other than his first love. He doesn’t seem to mind much. I know people who are wired monogamous (by which I mean they don’t develop additional attractions when they’re in a healthy relationship). I know people who choose monogamy; they don’t pursue their additional attractions when they’re in a relationship. Then there are the people who don’t particularly care if they’re in one sort of relationship or the other, the people with a preference one way, the people who flatly refuse to be in a monogamous relationship, the people who can’t do monogamy healthily . . . A spectrum. (I haven’t seen evidence that the spectrum has significantly different distribution by sex, but this is from my own biased observations; I do note, as a point of data, that it was my influence that created my open relationship, not my husband’s. He’s one of the folks who doesn’t care.)

Socialisation pressures act upon this spectrum. Create a myth that true love consumes all external attractions, for example, and is eternal; those people who buy into this and don’t natively fit a monogamous worldview will start exhibiting serial monogamy. “I’ve fallen in love with this new person. I must not really love my old partner.” Create a strong pressure towards monogamous pair bonding and only the people with really strong opinions on the matter will do anything else. And so on.

My understanding of studies of actual biological stuff is that the huge majority of species tend towards limited-term pair-bonding and cheating (and both sexes cheat); this seems to be fairly common among humans.

30

Not sure that anyone will have a totally complete response for you on this one! LOVE is, first of all, a four letter word! It means many things to many people…including but not exclusively in reference to their ‘favorite’ things, foods, movies, TV shows, clothes, car, furniture…etc and etc and etc, as well as to the people in their lives!

Love seldom, these days, means the action that takes place to procreate (and does it really take ‘love’ to make love?)…though we do call it ‘making love’. Men are stimulated by seeing things…women by feeling things…and our interpretation of that sexual attraction is ‘love’…but could it be another four letter word? Like ‘lust’? Obviously, it takes more than ‘love’ to create a child, just ask anyone going through in vitro fertilization or the barren one who resorts to adoption to have ‘a family’.

From my perspective, ‘love’ is a vehicle that brings about many things in life…it makes one feel good, it supports one in life, giving security and leading to relationships that can produce the children to rear…but it doesn’t always begin as love…many times it is the adventure, the attraction, the possibilities that exist because of the respect that one has for oneself and for others…the interest that one has to mate and find a lifelong partner…etc. Then, there is the other side of ‘love’…the love that our parents had for us, that we just ‘felt’, that has nothing to do with reproducing children, for we were the children.

Obviously, I could go on and on…but think that the answer that you are looking for might be in ALL the responses that you get to this question…not in just one attitude or opinion…for I doubt that anyone has pinned down the real meaning of love, nor what it’s purpose is, except that it feels good, and we need it in our lives to feel secure and worthwhile!