Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Love and Evolutionary Psych

Is love the result of natural selection?--i.e. the outcome of successful mates who stay together because they and their kids tend to survive in higher numbers as compared to non-coupled (loving) pairs?    If the answer is yes, then our feelings around love (and commitment) are fully real, but entirely untrue--we don't love someone because of "who" they are, with regard to their principles, or how they treat other people, or how they might treat us, necessarily, or solely, but instead because those behaviors offer something else entirely: successful reproductive capacity.

Caveat: I don't know where I stand on this, but it is worth pursing a little bit.  The easiest rebuke, that love and human emotive potential cannot (or maybe just should not) be distilled down into a singular dimension, could be turned around: why can't the product of successful reproduction be myriad emotional commitments that are vital and, indeed, life sustaining (ahem, on average)?  Why couldn't the most important essence about our love for one another be grounded, again, on average, in reproductive fitness?  Fundamentally, what stops the core of our thinking about love, regardless of love's incarnations, or actual reproductive capacity once established, from being based on evolution?  It need not be a thin or manufactured reality.  If it is the case, it sure does change my thoughts about love, but won't, through making this link with current aspects of my relationships, make me more endearing.  A worthy point to keep in mind.

To spread this out a little more, consider the idea that we don't like to change our minds once we set them in place, and that outside information to the contrary makes many of us more rigid, not less, as we seek confirmation of our beliefs and dismiss perceived minutia.  Gets kind of scary, not being sure why I'm doing what I'm doing, especially when decision making capacity is highly valued.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"If the answer is yes, then our feelings around love (and commitment) are fully real, but entirely untrue--we don't love someone because of "who" they are (...) but instead because those behaviors offer (...) successful reproductive capacity."

Non sequitur. It's entirely possible that loving someone only because of who they are, without any regard for anything else, also happens to increase reproductive capacity (on average), sort of as a side effect or unintended consequence. The implication "If the answer is yes, then our feelings around love are real but untrue," is simply not true.

hmm said...

That's a good point, one that I'm struggling with, but probably have made clear enough here. I'll work on refining this thread a little more soon. Thanks.

hmm said...

edit: one that I haven't made clear enough here.

hmm said...

I thought a little bit more about this:

"Non sequitur. It's entirely possible that loving someone only because of who they are, without any regard for anything else, also happens to increase reproductive capacity (on average), sort of as a side effect or unintended consequence. The implication "If the answer is yes, then our feelings around love are real but untrue," is simply not true."

My frustration (or misunderstanding) is that we can't exclude love and reproductive fitness from one another--i.e. we can't tell whether it is the person we love, or their reproductive potential that we love. My point (and it could be totally wrong, please tell me) is that both are right simultaneously (because we love (are highly attracted to) that which is more reproductively fit--).

Anonymous said...

Where I disagree is that I think both may be right simultaneously, and not that they always are. That's the general disagreement. Here are the detailed ones:

First, I'm not sure how much sense it means to say that "we can't tell whether it is the person we love or their reproductive potential." When we love a person, our feeling is unique to that person. How could we possibly love someone uniquely for their reproductive potential? There are millions of people out there with reproductive potential, and yet we don't love all of them.

Your belief seems to me to be the following. Suppose consciously like some thing or action X because of some properties that don't have anything to do with reproductive fitness. Then I discover that liking X actually increases fitness on average. Then, I can't be sure if the properties I consciously like are even there, or if my subconscious mind making them up to get me to do stuff that's good for maximizing the expected number of my offspring.

This is a legitimate worry, in that it is true for some X. I'm just saying it's not true for all X, and I think romantic love is probably one of those things where it does not apply.

Some properties of some things exist independently of whether you like them or not. Also, some properties of some things are completely independent of evolution, in a very much objective sense. If you happen to like something for properties like that then, even if liking those properties conveys an evolutionary advantage, it does not follow that you are deceiving yourself as to why you like that thing.

Here's an example. Some people love doing math. They think they love it because math poses deep questions, offers a strong intellectual stimulation, and mathematical discoveries often have practical applications that increase the quality of life. Now the fact is that doing math is one of a large set of behaviors serving as signaling gene quality to potential mates (because they separate highly intelligent people from the rest of the pool). However, even if you know that the reason people evolved to be interested in math is evolutionary, math still poses deep intellectual questions, is stimulating, and has beneficial practical implications.

hmm said...

I'm convinced that we agree. You say:

"However, even if you know that the reason people evolved to be interested in math is evolutionary, math still poses deep intellectual questions, is stimulating, and has beneficial practical implications."

That's precisely correct. Even if you know all of the specific individual reasons you love your spouse, many of them also act as indicators of evolutionary fitness. What I'm trying to get at is that this might not be the self deceiving the self, but in fact, a beautiful and profound synergy of general and specific reasons which coalesce around each other.