All You Need Is Biology?
Love is arguably one of the most complicated human emotions but can also be argued as the most simple of all the emotions. Humans covet love and struggle their whole lives to find their “soul-mate”. Well, what if this magical human emotion could be explained scientifically? Would humans still believe that love can heal all wounds or would our views change over time? Even though human biology and chemistry may play a big role in our emotions – love reaches beyond the world of scientific terms and chemical reactions.
There are scientists and philosophers who continue to work on finding a scientific explanation for the common feelings of love that humans feel. In their article, “Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Attractiveness”, Berhnard Fink and Ian Penton-Voak choose three factors of human behavior to explain how we choose a mate. “Evolution psychology has focused on the perception of three major cues that may underpin biologically significant assessments of mate value: (a) symmetry, (b) averageness, and (c) nonaverage sexually dimorphic features” (Fink & Voak, 155). The article continues to describe those three factors as being the main reasons we pick a mate (at least in the category of their facial features). Scientists are striving to pinpoint aspects of love and match them with our “lovey-dovey” feelings. But in the case of Fink & Voak, does facial attractiveness outweigh other decisions when we find our soul-mate? Despite the intriguing data and conclusions about evolutionary psychology, the findings do not encompass the entire emotion of human love.
Helen Fisher and her associates are spending their time to further the research of human love. In the article, “Romantic Love: A Mammalian Brain System for Mate Choice”, Fisher et al. relate the brain systems of other mammals to human brain systems in an effort to see some similarities.
“A number of groups have reported that the basic human motivations and emotions arise from distinct systems of neural activity and that these brain systems derive from mammalian precursors. Thus, it is parsimonious to suggest that a mammalian brain mechanism for courtship attraction is also active in Homo sapiens. Moreover, because human romantic love is a universal human phenomenon, because romantic love’s central characteristic is mate preference and because ‘being in love’ exhibits many of the other traits associated with mammalian courtship attraction, it has been hypothesized that human romantic love is a developed form of this mammalian neural mechanism for mate choice” (H. E. Fisher et al., 2174).
Even though the data from this article is clear and thoroughly supported with other resources, it still seems to short-change the common idea of romantic love. Finding a neural mechanism for mate choice (or even specifically romantic love) does not explain our human nature to “fall in love” and spend the rest of our lives living happily ever after.
If love were solely a matter of chemistry and biology, we as humans would not care about finding our “true” love or our “soul mate”. We would view love as a situation “for the moment”, we would date others without intention of marriage or life-long monogamy. We would view physical attraction as a type of natural order and sexual intercourse would be mostly for procreation. Having children would only be for populating the Earth, not for the joy and happiness that a child brings to a family. Courtship would only be for obtaining another mate, not for finding a life-long partner. Changes in our beliefs about love would not only affect our behavior but it would drastically affect our institution of marriage. Marriage would be obsolete – why get married if biology dictates our lives and biology tells us to have many partners? Living in a world without marriage is a hard concept to wrap my brain around and it almost seems like a scary though. The institution of marriage is so deep-seeded in to our culture and is one the strongest traditions in the United States
Our culture would observe a drastic change if love and relationships were matters of chemistry and biology. We are a culture that values love – so much so that almost every single song ever made has to do with some type of love (and of those, mostly romantic love). My generation values love as the one thing that can make you truly happy; we’re seeing more and more younger couples getting married without having a set career or plan in life because “love it all that matters”. If everyone gave up on finding their true love, I think a lot of us would feel empty and that is something that science cannot explain. Just because human romantic love is outside the boundaries of science should not stop scientists (and all others) from continuing research about love as a human emotion. Research and knowledge can only further our understanding of love even without scientific terms.
Works Cited
Buss, David. “The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating.” Academic Communities/Disciplinary Conventions. Ed. Bonnie Beedles and Michael Petracca. Upper Saddle River
Fink, Bernhard & Penton-Voak, Ian. “Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Attractiveness." Current Directions in Psychological Science Oct. 2002: 154-158. JSTOR. Web. 12 Sep. 2010.
Fisher, Helen E., Aron, Arthur, & Brown, Lucy L. “Romantic Love: A Mammalian Brain System for Mate Choice.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences Dec. 2006: 2173-2186. Google Scholar. Web. 5 Dec. 2010.
Images One and Three were found at http://love-theonlyrule.tumblr.com/
Image Two was found at http://weheartit.com/entry/5340947
Images One and Three were found at http://love-theonlyrule.tumblr.com/
Image Two was found at http://weheartit.com/entry/5340947
