Samuel here.
So! Turns out I'm pretty unreliable. Surprise! But I'm back. I currently have two really heavy politics-type images that I really badly want to write about, but I also have two really heavy politics-type essays that are consuming all my liberal self-righteousness. So to my one reader who actually appreciates my 8 page diatribes on libertarianism (Simon, although I'm beginning to suspect he only reads them to get context for Philippe's comments), I will post some politics-type thing within the next week.
I was going to write a summary of the article, which can be found here, but when I finished writing the post I decided that it's not absolutely necessary to read it in order to understand what I'm talking about. So while I very strongly encourage you to read the article, so that you can start reading my post with an opinion of your own already formed, I don't think it's necessary enough that I'm going to bother writing a summary. This should be useful for those of you with enough time to read exactly 6 paragraphs but no more.
You all know how I feel about ad hominems. If you don't know that I avoid personal attacks like the plague, then you are an idiot. I know that it would be impolitic for me to point out that things obviously just never worked out for the author, and she ended up in a loveless marriage out of desperation. It would be similarly crass of me to ask how her husband must have felt when he read that he and his wife "were never nuts about each other". I also would have to be pretty tactless to point out that everything she says about her ex-boyfriends seems to suggest that she is just really good at falling in love with really awful people. And this is my first complaint about this article: it's just one massive case study in sample bias. All of her reasons for not appreciating romance seem to be that she has fallen in love with tons of assholes. The article would be completely different if she had fallen in love with some non-assholes. Her error is that she thinks that a substantial number of people also only fall in love with assholes. She also says that she has friends with the same problem. But I have no clue why the solution is to ignore romance. It seems to me that the solution is simply to get out of unhealthy relationships. The author is railing against romantic love, calling it "responsible for more mischief and misery than any other myth", but I don't get it. What does that mean? That's not just hyperbole; it's abstracted enough from anything verifiable that it's simply nonsense.
I'm not someone who normally says that you should follow your feelings over your thoughts. You might wonder why I would prize an evolutionary relic over, say, reason. The answer comes in two parts. Firstly, axiomatically, it is more fun to be romantically involved with someone you love than with someone you do not love (this is, in one sentence, why I disagree with her article). The axiom comes with the addendum that certain negative qualities make for exceptions (if the person you love is abusive, say, or if they don't like dinosaurs). Disagree with my axiom?* Go fall in love. Then get back to me. Secondly, I'm not sure how much I agree that romantic love is an evolutionary relic. Understand that I have literally no formal training in biology, but nonetheless this is something I have been thinking a lot about lately by means of universally accessible thought experiments. The theory of evolution suggests that a female should pick her mate based on who can provide the most physically viable offspring, while a male should be out mating with as many females as he possibly can. Why, then, would a woman ever feel romantic love for anyone but the most physically sound specimens, and why would a man not feel romantic love for as many people as possible? There are three obvious answers, neither of them very satisfactory. One is that we see exactly this behaviour in cultural stereotypes: attractive men have muscles, and men shop around and cheat on their spouses. But I still don't understand why, if love is a purely evolutionary exercise, it wouldn't be the best idea for women to just only mate with football players. I recognize that you need a varied gene pool to not all get wiped out with the same disease, so you can't restrict all the action to too few dudes, but surely there's some trade-off there that involves fewer men getting any. The second answer is that women are attracted to muscleheads and men are attracted to everyone, but we all have to settle for what we can get. This is unsatisfactory because it would imply that if someone's in love with me and some other dude without glasses and terrible knees comes along, she will automatically leave me. So I automatically reject it on the basis of my own overconfidence. The third answer is much more subtle: while women mating with super buff guys and men mating with everyone is the ultimate result of evolution, it is an ongoing process and we have not yet reached a point of optimal efficiency to perpetuate a species. Evidence of this exists in the persistence of, say, asexuality and homosexuality (I realize the persistence of varying sexual orientations is way more complicated than that. Forgive me). So some day almost all women will be attracted exclusively to male football players and almost all men will be attracted to every fertile woman. But, and I could be wrong about this, I think this is what we see in the non-human animal world. I think evolution selected for that behaviour pretty quickly, and by now everyone who's left pretty much has that algorithm down. So none of the answers satisfy me.
Here is my solution: I think that romantic engagements are a cultural, not a natural, construct. What is the stereotypical description of a romantic interest? "He's smart, he's interesting, he's funny..." None of these have to do with reproductive viability. I think that when we claim that love is simply an evolutionary tool, we leave out something quintessentially human. I think that with sentience comes a subconscious ability to select a romantic partner on the basis of intellect, how interesting they are, and other cerebral cortex-type things. And you know what? Language agrees with me! That's why we distinguish between love and lust. Someone you love is someone you want to spend as much time with as possible, with whatever cultural and natural addenda that includes. Someone you lust after is simply someone you want to procreate with. I do not specifically advocate following lustful impulses, much as I do not advocate following hateful or vengeful or angry impulses. I advocate following your heart. And I don't see this as being even a little bit contradictory with my generally Mind Over Matter philosophy. I think that romance, and the constructs we have invented to house it (relationships, marriages), are uniquely human and almost universally good.
Here is my solution: I think that romantic engagements are a cultural, not a natural, construct. What is the stereotypical description of a romantic interest? "He's smart, he's interesting, he's funny..." None of these have to do with reproductive viability. I think that when we claim that love is simply an evolutionary tool, we leave out something quintessentially human. I think that with sentience comes a subconscious ability to select a romantic partner on the basis of intellect, how interesting they are, and other cerebral cortex-type things. And you know what? Language agrees with me! That's why we distinguish between love and lust. Someone you love is someone you want to spend as much time with as possible, with whatever cultural and natural addenda that includes. Someone you lust after is simply someone you want to procreate with. I do not specifically advocate following lustful impulses, much as I do not advocate following hateful or vengeful or angry impulses. I advocate following your heart. And I don't see this as being even a little bit contradictory with my generally Mind Over Matter philosophy. I think that romance, and the constructs we have invented to house it (relationships, marriages), are uniquely human and almost universally good.
Now, the woman who wrote the article obviously has a bit of a problem. She seems to only fall in love with jerks. In her case, I think she made the right decision. Maybe if you have a long track record of falling in love with assholes then you should not be following your heart. This isn't too uncommon a thing (I know people like that), and clearly there is often something slightly haywire with the human ability to select romantic partners. But she turns this into a blanket condemnation of romance. It's like losing to a final boss 10 times and deciding that the video game is impossible. Her article is just a temper tantrum. Love didn't work out for her. That's sad. But leave the rest of us alone.
*Dearest darling math people: I know that I use the word "axiom" quite loosely sometimes. As a social science student and a physical science student with a mad insatiable rigor fetish, I recognise that a lot of claims like "you're happier with someone you love than with someone you don't love" can get pretty murky and impossible to verify. I call them axioms because I have arrived at them from personal experience, whether that means firsthand experience or my general understanding of the subject. I treat them as unverifiable, and therefore axiomatic, because I can offer no better proof than "try it for yourself".
I don't think we'll ever achieve "optimal mating efficiency" as a species, and I don't think we're attempting to in the first place. For most animals, the primary objective is to survive long enough to propagate the species. For humans, it becomes less clear. Certainly, we want to keep making babies to continue the species, but people also want to make art, and travel, and find themselves, and fall in love, and win pie-eating contests, and defeat their enemies, and own the most corporations, and so on and so forth. Plus, there's no need for big, burly guys to hunt their own food and punch other dudes much any more, so women can choose men they want to spend time with, and not worry if their babies don't pop out and start wrasslin' bears. And with medical advances, fewer babies die, so fewer babies need to be made to propagate the species. The typical animal instincts are fading from humans, I think, very slowly, because they're not nearly as necessary these days.
ReplyDeletePlus, yeah, there is all this other crazy stuff about sexual orientation and gender identity and stuff that throws all kinds of monkey wrenches into these sorts of discussions! It's like they have a monopoly on monkey wrench production lines and have redirected them in such a way as to ensure that a constant stream of wrenches is shooting directly into such conversations
The thought experiment demanded that I think in terms of what evolution would have selected for. For the vast majority of our evolutionary history, the things that you're saying are important to humans didn't exist, and your kids had to, if not wrestle bears, at least not be small and sickly. The way that you're approaching it, you're treating my conclusion (that love is a product of sentience as much as of evolution) as a premise. I wanted to get there by a sort of very weak process of elimination.
DeleteI said that it was way more complicated than that because I know evolution will never create optimal efficiency. That just seemed like the shortest way of communicating what I wanted to communicate: that evolution is still an operative process
well actually I'm right and you're wrong and that's that, sorry
Deletei know you know i'm kidding but let me assure our readers that I am kidding so they don't stop taking my arguments seriously
DeleteWhile I agree with your conclusion in general, I'm not sure your argument that love is not an evolutionary relic is valid. Now, I'm no more trained in evolution than you, so I'm not sure if my picture of evolution is actually evolution or the stuff they use to justify 1950's gender roles, but it's food for thought either way.
DeleteThe premise from which you derived your three possible explanations was that the theory of evolution suggests that women choose mates based on physical viability and men simply mate with as many women as possible. I think that oversimplifies the analysis. Ensuring that your genes get passed on to arbitrary generations is not simply a matter of getting the best genes and the most offspring; also in play is keeping the offspring alive. This is perhaps more important to the female, as she can produce offspring only once every nine months, and therefore has an interest in keeping those offspring alive.
<possibly uninformed remarks>
If you accept that males were providers in early society, then, as a female, you'd want a male willing to provide for your offspring. If that male happens to be one who is mating with every other woman in town, he has much less of an interest in keeping your particular offspring (as opposed to all of his children by other women) alive. This applies (possibly to a lesser extent) to the male: if you know your mate will leave you once a better football player becomes available, you know she will (soon) have less of a vested interest in keeping your child alive; she'll have backups. The upshot being that both parties, in fact, want the other party to be exclusive. For the female, this means two conflicting motives: better genetic material for a male might mean wanting more women, but if the cost of getting that for your kid is that the male won't be exclusive, is it worth it? For the male, you may be more likely to get a woman if you promise to be exclusive, but that means (assuming you don't cheat--it's a model, okay?) not reaching your full reproductive potential. I'm not at all prepared to go any more in-depth on the analysis, as I'm no better versed in game theory than I am in evolution, but I don't have a hard time imagining this leading to the social conventions and constructs around love that we enjoy today--I could see the idea of monogamy developing similarly to how religion/ethics was used as a way to help society function better. Perhaps love was developed similarly on an evolutionary level rather than a meme level?
</possibly uninformed remarks>
<!-- That's right, everything from here on is perfectly informed. -->
Anyway, although my analysis may be hazy on the details, the point I'm getting at is that a one-paragraph argument that love doesn't come from evolution is almost certainly incomplete to the point of being unconvincing.
I do think, though, that love is a good thing even if you assume it is an "evolutionary relic". Sex, for example, is evolutionary (I highly doubt anyone will dispute this), but that's not to say it's not fun.
--
Summer Glau
Firstly, I take objection to your use of the word "valid" in this context. It wasn't a proof, nor was it exhaustive. It was a proposition, then every refutation I could think of, and refutations of those refutations, and then a tentative conclusion. By no means rigorous. Furthermore, you don't mean valid. Your complaint is with the consistency of my premise with the real world, not the consistency of my conclusion with my premise. An argument is valid iff its conclusion follows from its premis(es). An argument about the real world is sound iff it is true. Semantics, but important ones; I don't like being accused of mounting faulty proofs or invalid arguments when I have done neither. If I felt it were a valid proof, I would be comfortable ending it with "QED", and to end my paragraph up there with "QED" that would be a sin worthy of hellfire.
DeleteMoving on, I simply cannot accept that my premise should be altered to include the idea that the male should be capable of protecting the offspring, because I don't believe that this is how it generally works in most of the mammalian world. I don't think that this is an evolutionary phenomenon. But then when you say that I should "accept that males were providers in early society", you seem to not be contending that this is an evolutionary construct (unless you believe that evolution has exacted measurable behavioral changes on the human species since the time of early societies, which I think is probably not true). So I think that this would be a societal construct, if it is true at all. I'm prepared to be completely wrong about this if someone who knows more about mammals than I do says that the males really are supposed to protect their offspring, but I don't think that's the case. Which means that I'm totally comfortable ignoring this, because it treats my conclusion as already being correct: if this aspect of love that you're examining exists because of how people behaved in early societies, and is similar to the evolution of religion (which is obviously a cultural construct, albeit perhaps an inevitable one), then you're accepting my conclusion. Which obviously poses no threat to my conclusion. So that already is something I don't get about what you're saying.
However, that's a pretty lame response after you went to all that trouble, so let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you're right. Let's change my premise to "The theory of evolution suggests that a female should pick her mate based on who can provide the most physically viable offspring while simultaneously offering the best protection for her offrspring, while a male should be out mating with as many females as he possibly can." and see where that takes us. Your analysis seems pretty fair. I guess my worry then, as a dude, would be pretty easily altered: that accepting that romance is subject to this premise would mean that the moment some dude without glasses or sucky knees and who is also more super obviously committed to a long-term relationship than I am comes along, the object of my affections will drop me like a hot potato. Same fear, same reason I reject it (in the post I chalked it up to my own overconfidence, because I am a sassy beast, but really it's more another one of those personal experience-type arguments that I love to make so much). But you can see, going through your analysis, that you are, like Ian before you, just assuming my conclusion in what I think is an attempt to augment my argument. You are treating love as a social convention. There is no true disagreement here. But then I don't get your last sentence at all. Why would what you just said make you think that love was developed on an evolutionary level? You seemed to be saying just the opposite.
And I really, really wanted to write about meme theory, but when I tried it just got way too long. I love meme theory. I am all about the memes.
DeleteBut to say that "a one-paragraph argument that love doesn't come from evolution is almost certainly incomplete to the point of being unconvincing" is a strikingly petty complaint about the obvious space limitations that I operate under. Of course it was one paragraph. When I wanted people to not say what you just said about my points of disagreement with Ron Paul, more people complained to me about the length of that post than have spoken to me about all the other posts combined. Obviously I lost a ton of potential readers from making my first post 8 pages long, but I did it anyways because I do not like being in the business of dumbing things down for the Knights of Tl;dr. I'm sorry people don't have an infinite attention span. I hate it way more than you do. But it's an unavoidable limitation that we'll both just have to deal with.
And I have no Earthly idea why you would write up a rhetorically moderate post and then in your signature tell me that you thought my post was stupid, but that's actually playground bully-level meanness. You are obviously taking advantage the mask of anonymity here to be rude to people who aren't anonymous and are incapable of responding in kind. I only regret that the rest of your post was so reasonable-sounding; I had to keep going back and rewriting this comment to tone down my obnoxiousness and dismissiveness. What a useless waste of my time.
^posted in three parts due to character limits
DeleteYeah, the more I consider the fact that you ended your wall of text with "I only commented because you are stupid and I wanted to blow off steam at you", the more blatant it becomes to me that I absolutely should not have taken the time to respond to your comment.
DeleteIf your rebuttal was, per your signature, "exhaustively researched," most of it probably wouldn't come with the disclaimer , a euphemism for "definitely not researched."
DeleteLet me apologize for the signature; you're right, that was rude.
ReplyDeleteIt will take a bit of writing to accurately convey the level of idiocy that lead me to use that signature, so bear with me.
Hard though it may be to believe, I did not intend at all to imply that your blog post was stupid, that I only commented to blow off steam, or that my comment was at all well-researched. To the contrary, I quite like this blog, my comment was entirely intended as a serious response (although by no means a rebuttal), and, as Simon pointed out, I did no research whatsoever. I appreciate that you took the time to write a reply anyway (I think that you did reflects quite well on you), and I'm sorry for the time you had to waste toning it down.
I believe an explanation for my staggering lack of foresight may be in order:
Truth be told, I threw in the signature as an afterthought. I intended it more as an (evidently ill-advised) attempt at humour than as an expression of my motivation in commenting. I don't comment on blogs very frequently, so, when it occurred to me, the idea of signing my comment "Summer Glau" seemed amusing. The only thing even remotely in common with the xkcd in question was that I was posting on the internet and signing it "Summer Glau", but my sense of humour is such that I am entertained by anything resembling an xkcd scenario. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to link to the comic in case you didn't get the reference. Yes, I'm dumb. In retrospect, it was blindingly obvious that it would come off as an insult, and I should have taken the time to think it over.
Anyway, it was an incredibly stupid and rude thing to write, and I'm truly sorry for insulting you and wasting your time.
No hard feelings whatsoever! Understand that it's the internet, so I am morally obligated to take everything as a personal attack. I'm glad that you like the blog, and yours was a very interesting comment that I had to take some time to figure out how to respond to. Thanks for the input, and please keep commenting.
DeletePhilippe here again.
ReplyDeleteBeen meaning to write this for a while, but stuff kept coming up.
Ignoring comment drama because, seriously, life's too short.
1. I think you're misunderstanding the article. The author's closing remarks indicate that she is happy with how things turned out, and I think she was trying to say that you don't need romantic ideals for a healthy relationship.
She kinda mangled that point, though.
She was much stronger on her other point, which is that it often isn't healthy to listen to the butterflies in your stomach. And she's quite right about that; the simple fact that one can fall in love with tons of assholes can serve as proof.
2. Evolution is a complicated and somewhat random process. It can turn up all sorts of things that don't actually make sense. And if you phrase things correctly, you can come up with an evolutionary rationale for almost anything.
So I don't think that talking about what might or might not be an evolutionary artifact is terribly productive.
3. I think that romance is probably a cultural construct. I could be wrong, but I think that there are (or were) many cultures where our ideas of romance would be (or would have been) regarded as insane.
4. Your unreliability isn't terribly surprising, I seem to recall you saying something like "I seem reliable but I'm actually not" last year.
1. I would not argue that you "need romantic ideals for a healthy relationship". I would not feel comfortable passing judgment on that statement. But I would, unsurprisingly, contend that reciprocated love makes a romantic relationship happier. I am quite comfortable in my interpretation of the text as being in disagreement with that statement, because of the particularly egregious anti-love lines that I quoted in the post.
Delete2. I agree about evolution. Sorry you don't think it's productive. I certainly both gleaned something from it and enjoyed the exercise.
3. Me too.
4. A great man once said: "Ignoring comment drama because, seriously, life's too short."
Oh, missed something. I agree that it often isn't healthy to listen to the butterflies in your stomach, as I acknowledged in my post when I wrote "I have no clue why the solution is to ignore romance. It seems to me that the solution is simply to get out of unhealthy relationships."
DeletePhilippe here again.
Delete1. Eh, fair enough. It's honestly not such a great article, makes it a bit tricky to work out what she means.
2. It is fun to think about evolutionary reasons for things. Problem is, there's no way to get solid results from such an exercise.
4. Indeed! I am the greatest!
But seriously, classy answer there.
Yeah, a thought experiment like the one above is definitely way more philosophy than biology. The only result that I want to get out of it is for people to stop saying that love is just an undesirable evolutionary artifact.
DeleteI think Phillipe`s first point is incredibly right. After reading the article, the woman was actually trying to say that right now her love life is pretty good, and so that`s why she`s giving people advice. She`s actually complimenting the relationship with her husband, not insulting him.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Samuel, I think your argument is timeless: love is about enjoying one`s company and wanting to be with him or her for the rest of your life. In modern society, people love too quickly, too irrationally, and too fleetingly. I like that your point considers how love should be long term and sustainable, and that falling in love ensures that you will be happy with your partner. The problem is that sure, we can all fall in love, but do we know how to express that love? Can we make that love work in our life, and can we do things for the other person through that love? Is that love more important than other things that may get in the way? Having feelings for someone is only the very beginning.
I certainly interpreted it to mean that one should ignore love because it is more damaging than good. That she ends by saying that she's happy with her husband is pretty unsatisfying to me. Good for her. I'm sure people who aren't in love can be happy living their lives together. But I quite comfortably stick with my axiom.
DeleteYeah, you're absolutely right. These are questions that I struggle with and that probably we all do. Well said.