I was talking with a friend today about Love. Not love for mom and dad, or love for your puppy, but romantic sexual love, the kind that grips you, hits you hard and takes you over body and soul, throws you against the wall and says “Hello there big fella!” You know, Love.
I have a theory about romantic love, which addresses that big question: Why is it that with all of the rational thinking enabled by these big brains of ours, in spite of the fact that humans can create computers, send people into space, sequence the genome, solve Fermat’s last theorem and write Goethe’s Faust, we remain fairly irrational when it comes to who we want as a mate?
All throughout history people have chosen the most unlikely of significant others, in ways that completely defy any rational sense of group identity, upward mobility or social self-preservation. Slave owners have fathered children with their slaves, kings and queens have fallen for commoners, soldiers in wartime time have found their brides in the ranks of their sworn enemies. Just what was going on there with Romeo and Juliet, Pyramus and Thisbe, Woody and Soon-Ye? Clearly not social convenience.
My theory is that this is the way we are wired because it is the only way that the species could have survived. If, for a moment, you stop looking at humans as individuals, and instead look at us as carriers of DNA, then we, like all creatures, would have evolved in whatever way maximizes the chance that this DNA will continue to be around to replicate itself.
There clearly came a point in our evolution, sometime in the last few million years, when we developed an enormously expanded facility to use our brains for spoken language and physical invention. One would think that this would greatly expand the ability of some within society to devise various kinds of advantage in control over upward mobility and social status, and therefore in access to mates.
Were we truly able to use these powerful brains of ours to game the system, then a relatively small number of individuals could very well skew the gene pool, diverting mates away from all others. Given the nature of DNA and natural selection, this would result in a weakening, not a strengthening, of our genes, and therefore in our species’ fitness for survival. Smaller gene pools are bad, given the nature of mutation and recombination. It would be as though the fate of our species rested on the fitness of an inbred royal family, which is not a particularly fruitful strategy!
In fact, the greatest opportunities for useful genetic mutations to emerge and to take root throughout the population is to keep the selection process recombining as broadly as possible. You want those genes bouncing around like popping popcorn, forming themselves into all sorts of combinations, because there is no way to know how genes might work in combination. Genes and their mutations are so interdependent in their effects, that the only laboratory that really works for testing them is the one we call life.
And so, the set of mental traits that has won out, that has stood the test of survival by passing its DNA on through generation after generation, is the one that doesn’t permit us to exert too much conscious control over how we recombine our genes. Ergo: people fall in love with the darnedest partners.
Like all genetic selection, the resulting behavior is somewhat messy, being the result of an accretion of various small jags and sidesteps in brain development over a long period of time. So it readily shows up in situations where individual gene selection is not served, including attraction between two people of the same gender and two people who are both well beyond their child-bearing years. These are side benefits, which might very well happen to produce deep and profound connections between individuals. From the point of view of the DNA, the only thing that matters is the effect on total gene propagation and recombination produced by the aggregate behavior of the population.
This makes for much more thrilling romance novels, and of course it also ensures that there will continue to be a thriving and healthy set of people around to read those novels, down through the centuries.
Back in January I quoted Schopenhauer: “A man can do whatever he wants, but he cannot want whatever he wants”. When it comes to True Love, our old friend Mr. Darwin might be able to tell us why.