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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I think this has it the wrong way around. it's not that love is biological bribery, it's that someone studying biology has tried to redefine biological bribery to be love.

Love comes in many shapes. Love for one's family, one's nation, one's profession, even God. It's at best uninformative, at worst nonsensical to try to reduce all of this to interaction found in sexual interaction / reproduction. It's a common thing with these evo-psych explanations. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The more scientific sounding version of thinking every skyscraper represents a phallus.

I doubt this even makes sense across cultural boundaries. For example the fact that oxytocin is apparently indicative of how long a relationsihp lasts. In a Western culture where people nowadays are prone to form relationships spontaneously, sure. In a culture where parents organize relationships based on class, caste or faith? Probably not.

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Those other forms of love are fairly different from the sexual, romantic love that the article is focusing on. It's not "reduce all of this" to sexual interaction, it's focusing on romantic love instead of conflating it with other love.

> It's a common thing with these evo-psych explanations. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If everything in reality is made from nails, then it makes sense to look for the hammer that hammered it in. Everything in human psychology was in fact molded through evolution, so of course it makes sense to look to evolution for potential answers.

> For example the fact that oxytocin is apparently indicative of how long a relationsihp lasts.

If a culture artificially forces relationships to last by, say, heavily stigmatizing divorce, then of course that's going to override the "natural" course of events. That hardly means there isn't useful information to be gleaned from our biological nature in situations where such artificial forces are not in force. (Or you could argue, where different artificial forces are in force.)

> Everything in human psychology was in fact molded through evolution, so of course it makes sense to look to evolution for potential answers.

I disagree with the sense that evolution has answers to begin with, or that everything in human psychology can be assumed to be touched by evolution. Sometimes weird shit happens and it doesn't prevent you from fucking so it sticks and there's no greater purpose to it.

I feel this understanding of evolution ascribes too much anthropomorphism to the phenomenon.

>Sometimes weird shit happens and it doesn't prevent you from fucking so it sticks and there's no greater purpose to it.

That's how you end up with random maladaptive mutations. But they aren't distributed across a species.

You don't end up with near universal traits in a species without them being molded by evolutionary pressures.

A giraffe's elongated laryngeal nerve can be explained by evolution, while still being firmly in the "weird shit happens" category. Explanation != purpose.

wild theory, sometimes I have this feeling that divorce is badly seen because

1) people jump between partners too often when free, it's easier but maybe less deep

2) family stability is important, and noble (it's a hard compromise but others complicated things are important and noble)

3) in the past social, family and intimate stability were probably a lot more important than today, so we inherited that perspective, even though today we may care less

ps: saying this I understand perfectly how human relationship, marriage are complex, volatile and how no one wants to rot in a bad relationship. :)

>ps: saying this I understand perfectly how human relationship, marriage are complex, volatile and how no one wants to rot in a bad relationship. :)

There's a difference between "no one wants to rot in a bad relationship" and "no one wants to put the effort and time to make a relationship work", though.

And while a number of divorces are because of the first, another number is because of the latter.

Now, a question would be "So? Why shouldn't people just jump ship, even if they're just frivolous/bored/have short relationship attention spans/etc?"

And an answer would be, "Well, look at our modern relationship landscape. Does these trends work out well for us? Is yes, then fine..."

There is a certain level of arrogance in looking at how fundamentally important the family unit is for all of human history, and then deciding that this generation knows better than the billions who came before us and that marriage / family / kids is a sham.

And shockingly, depression and anxiety is on the rise, we have a "loneliness epidemic", etc because people can't seem to fill that void.

We could argue that modern technology-oriented cultures are even stretching the social fabric.

I'm nobody but it seems that survival made most mammals social, but we don't owe our survival to the group now, but to a blurry and large system. So why bother with people when I can swipe for all my needs /s

But the thing is, as an ex introvert I can understand, dealing with people is not easy. Just like dealing with love, intimacy, marriage, existence is not easy. But we used to try to find solutions of better quality. Not just "i'm out".

If that were how it worked, we'd expect Utah (the state with the lowest divorce rate) to have very low levels of depression and anxiety compared to the rest of the US. That is not what we see. I don't think it's realistic to say that the alienation of modern society is because we allow divorce.

Not a valid conclusion — you’re not controlling for all other factors that contribute to happiness, such as weather, social environment, local opportunities etc.

Definitely feel free to do all that work if you think there's a case to make. While I agree it's not an exhaustive analysis, I think it's much more rigorous than the comment it was meant to refute.

> There's a difference between "no one wants to rot in a bad relationship" and "no one wants to put the effort and time to make a relationship work", though.

This is a very timely question. There are a few topics about how easy our lives should be, how much effort is considered normal. And beyond efforts, the skills to know when, what and how to apply them to avoid just struggling 24/7.

"There's a difference between "no one wants to rot in a bad relationship" and "no one wants to put the effort and time to make a relationship work", though."

I am not sure, if I understand you right, but you seem to romantize the old version of marriage relationships.

Well, as far as I know, they had only very rarely something to do with love, but rather with violence and domination and "making the relationship work" meant beating the wife to submission. And one of the written duties of a wife were sex, whether they wanted, or not, so basically rape.

And the thought of leaving an abusive partner was considered sin, with real punishment (sometimes torture to death) for making those thoughts real.

It has not been even so long ago, that these laws were abolished in the west. And to my knowledge, they still exist de facto (or even de jure) in many parts of the world.

The only reason I can think of, of "making a relationship work", is when there are already kids, who need stability. Then both adults should get their act together and work it out like responsible, mature people. But in the cases I have witnessed, the children usually were acting more mature, than their parents.

I'm not sure how you made the leap from "lasting relationships require work" ---> "lasting relationships are inherently abusive and rapey".

All relationships require upkeep. If you never make any time for a friend, the friendship deteriorates. You need to make time for each other and show each other that you care.

The fact that you see this as abusive is perhaps revealing why marriage and lasting relationships are at an all time low.

And I do not know, how you made the leap from traditional (forced) marriages I was specifically talking about - to any relationship.

> 3) in the past social, family and intimate stability were probably a lot more important than today

Many past societies did not have atomic families like we do today.

In fact, even couple-marriage is not _that_ old (several thousands of years)? I remember reading about this stuff in "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", which, while somewhat dated (125 years ago or so?) is quite interesting. Matrilineal societies, group marriage (i.e. being 'married' to all people in a certain category so that if you travel to another village you have people in your 'family' or 'marriage group' there even if you've never met them) and other arrangements.

Even without the social contract. First time I held someone in my arms I had visions of life long companionship. Not everybody is wired this way but it's often programmed deep down inside of us. Marriage is just the social incarnation of that feeling IMO.

Also some people say that a lot of animals have similar emotional/biological needs. It's not just a matter of homo-* history it seems.

I'm not saying that there isn't something biological or authentic to it, but you probably saw a bunch of Disney movies and a bunch of other cultural messaging when you were a child that helped prime you to have this response.

Reminds me of this image:

https://i.redd.it/lr5rfu3paen61.jpg

I always have a big problem with this argument. To me the social protocol take roots in the emotional thus the biological. It's not really propaganda, it's self amplified reflection.

> Even without the social contract. First time I held someone in my arms I had visions of life long companionship

I would assume you were brought up in a modern cultural environment. That means your view of the world, your values, your expectations, your fantasies - are shaped by that upbringing.

So, your feelings are not good evidence that this is "programmed deep down inside of us".

Are you claiming that a desire for companionship with another human being is purely a modern social construct?

That seems a … bizarre opinion. Until industrialization, human relationships were directly tied to survival.

I claimed no such thing...

And, in fact you're making the point even more strongly, in that you seem to identify lifelong, formal, monogamous pairing with the potential for human companionship.

>In fact, even couple-marriage is not _that_ old (several thousands of years)?

Cities and written language and written laws and such are not that old either...

What was the case in some earlier societies shouldn't be a yardstick...

> "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State"

By Fredrick Engles, known most popularly when associated with his co-author Karl Marx. Who among their many philisophical ideas advocated things such as

- "All history is class warfare"

- Dialectical materialism that proved to be so wrong no one even knows about it anymore.

- Or my personal favorite that the communist revolution would come first to the most capitalist countries, when in fact the only countries that fell to communism were backward feudal societies or those that had communism forced on them by the Soviet Union.

My point if your source of information is Engles then I'd suggest checking out some resources from people haven't been quite so thoroughly eviscerated by actual reality when their ideas were put to any sort of test.

The appeal of theories like these to a lot of people is that they are quite simple to understand. Has also to do with that in a society where all subjectivity is informed by the valueform everything seems to appear as a market. And isn't it flattering to be part of the group that has access to the hegemony of scientific knowledge? Probably. You can thus think about why you re conditioned to find ideas like these appealing. Or why a popularscientific enterprise (the authors book in the article wich is basically advertisement and as such partaking in libidinal economy) emphasises these aspects and reserves the position of "exception to the rule" to cutting edge research on neuroplasticity.

I think this is overly reductive of the types of things that can result from darwinian forces

> If everything in reality is made from nails, then it makes sense to look for the hammer that hammered it in. Everything in human psychology was in fact molded through evolution, so of course it makes sense to look to evolution for potential answers.

What is the question and what are the possible answers? What difference would it make in our morals?

That sounds like the reverse of the good old "Well, if God does not exist, why don't you just kill random people, then?"

Anger and violence and rape and murder, are all bilogical and evolutionary based. So what?

> "If a culture artificially forces relationships to last by, say, heavily stigmatizing divorce, then of course that's going to override the "natural" course of events.

See the above argument, it changes nothing. And by the way, divorce is more normalized than ever and divorce rates are falling in the developed world.

On the countrary, if lustful love is just a chemical process that eventually wears off, you're better off not divorcing. If love was this astral magestic thing, then sure, divorce and pursue it.

People have this idea "yeah, but back then, there was no marriage and both men and women could just fuck arround".

Sure, some people did just like today, but back then, we lived in small groups, a coule hundred individuals, the opportunities to fuck around were not as great as today and there was no anonymity as today.

I've been 20 pumped with testosterone. Was it not for my religious education and moral sense, I would probably have slept with a lot more women. Between age 20-35 I think I only cried 3 times, when my grandparents died.

As my testosterone levels are declining, my emotions are coming back.

I'm still the same biological organism, evolution did not intend one course or the other. I just find a lot of satisfaction now from family life.

There is no contradiction or dilema for me. I do not feel oppressed by society or morals or biology.

> What is the question and what are the possible answers? What difference would it make in our morals?

Who said anything about morals here? The questions are, why do we feel the way we do, and why do our feelings make us act the way we do? Evo-psych gives some ways of possibly answering that. How we got here is largely independent of where we want to go from here.

> There is no contradiction or dilema for me. I do not feel oppressed by society or morals or biology.

I honestly don't know what the rest of your comment has anything to do with any of what the article is talking about. When did the article bring up any contradictions?

> And by the way, divorce is more normalized than ever and divorce rates are falling in the developed world.

I think people are dealing with the issue on the other end, by just not getting married in the first place.

Some people, sure, but I'm willing to bet it's not because they want to to more easily dump the other person. Most of them, at least.

Why else would you avoid marriage, then?

Avoiding getting your assets stripped?

That feels like a variation on "they want to more easily dump the other person."

The other person could dump you and still result in loss of assets.

This is about romantic love for reproduction. I feel like a lot of top comments in HN are from people who didn't read the article these days

Surely love has functional meaning, just like all sensations and feelings. Love is one of the most powerful feelings that can bring joy or so much sorrow for some.

Do the biochemical aspects of love matter that much? When it is no longer functional, sure.

Besides, all pleasurable feelings/sensations are "bribes".

Really funny how we make separations about male vs female dating strategy, and they are right to a great degree, but both men and women share a lot of DNA, I don't know if there are many male specific genes.

Sure, all animals are the same and just a few different hormones make a huge difference (male vs female gorilla?) but not to that extent in humans.

Men can be manipulated too when they fall inlove, I wish the article talked about that.

Re: sharing DNA. That's like saying why does this same binary behave differently depending on configuration: in other words, non sequitur. It is normal: some female fish is 10x larger than male fish.

But there's no need to look into fish or gorillas, as a child I was very different than today.

Hormones, neurotransmitters, all make a big difference, sure.

But humans do not show such a pronounced dimorphism and human minds are extremely complex things, surely the brains/minds of male/female share a lot more than they differ on average.

There are outliers -- like a man pumped with testosterone, a leader's brain flooded with dopamine, an adrenaline junkie, a nymphomaniac and so on, but these are outliers.

My problem is people who take the "men produce billions and billions of sperm and women ovulate once a month, therefore men and women are completely different" -- that's a tendency sure, and there are differences and different drives, but not to the extent people interpret them to be.

> and there are differences and different drives, but not to the extent people interpret them to be.

Do you have any meaningful data that backs those claims up? I mean, first of all - "not to the extent people interpret them to be" - which people, more precisely, and what's that extent? And secondly, how do you know that it's not to that extent?

Don't want to be pedantic here, but we could be rambling on about how "people say this, but it's actually like that" all day long - show me the numbers, how they were obtained, and your interpretation of them and we can discuss, something like [1], hopefully.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Some counterpoints to consider ..

You can get very large differences in computer systems just by flipping one single bit.

Anecdata is not the opposite of anecdata.

But this is all conjecture, if we seek to understand reality instead of just what we imagine, then we need to empirically measure reality.

You are 100% right. The OP is textbook biological reductionism. This "love scientist" is not promoting science but instead passing off her pet theories as the final word on a nearly universal human experience that takes dramatically different forms across time and culture.

> The OP is textbook biological reductionism

And is that wrong? Of course we're reducible down to biological impulses in the end. Part of understanding higher level cultural phenomena is understanding our biological interactions, how they were historically shaped by our evolutionary past, and how those adaptations affect us in a drastically different modern context.

Certainly sounds a lot more scientific than, say, dismissing all the research as "biological reductionism."

The reductionism is the attempt to generalize incomplete biological understandings to the high level systems of which biology is the basis. This ignores the complex interactions and properties that emerge at various points between the two domains. It's as misguided as saying that computers aren't digital because the underlying electromagnetism is analog.

The article would be fine if it recognized that it was speaking in trends and generalities. But the information is presented as universal and individually applicable. For example:

> But a lot of women, in particular, find it hard to accept that they are still looking for a protector and a provider.

No doubt women find it hard to accept someone lecturing them on their preferences without allowing them any individuality.

The idea that searching for a protector is adaptive seems reasonable enough. The fallacy is thinking it must therefore apply unconditionally to every individual person and culture. Individual behavior does not always adhere to what is adaptive and there is no reason to think there aren't other adaptations that may interact with, override or invert this "provider seeking" behavior on an individual basis.

The diverse spectrum of human sexuality and romantic disposition is completely at odds with the simplistic view presented in the article. The system is too complex to understand in a few generalities.

> Part of understanding higher level cultural phenomena is understanding our biological interactions

I think It's more often part of an anti-understanding of higher level cultural phenomenon. My observation is that people who strongly believe in reducing love to chemicals or atoms are intellectualizing an area of their life where they do not feel capable, confident or in control. These beliefs then inhibit personal growth and an understanding of others. In the last couple of decades I have seen dozens of men and a handful of women grow out of reductionist beliefs.

> The article would be fine if it recognized that it was speaking in trends and generalities. But the information is presented as universal and individually applicable.

I agree. I assume that's just the journalist doing a bad job of getting the nuance across.

> No doubt women find it hard to accept someone lecturing them on their preferences without allowing them any individuality.

At the same time, we humans are notorious for rationalizing nice sounding, preferable reasons for why we engage in certain actions. I don't have the context on these personal discussions, of course, but perhaps those women were indeed acting in ways that were more congruent than not with the evo-psych explanation espoused here.

> The diverse spectrum of human sexuality and romantic disposition is completely at odds with the simplistic view presented in the article. The system is too complex to understand in a few generalities.

I agree with the complexity. Again, I assume that much of it is just the usual pop-science article being a pop-science article. Perhaps I assume wrongly.

I do think however that overall, this is a research direction worth pursuing. There's a diverse spectrum of human sexuality and romantic dispositions, but what are some of the common driving forces in the background across time and culture? Why are some romantic experiences (e.g. an unreasonable crush on a specific person that fades over time) so common in the general population, and why do these experiences happen and play out in these common ways?

> I think It's more often part of an anti-understanding of higher level cultural phenomenon.

Quite possible, but IMO we shouldn't let popular misunderstandings of science detract from the actual scientific inquiry taking place. A lot of woo spiritualists have repurposed popular misconceptions of quantum mechanics for their own ends, but that doesn't detract from the legitimacy of actual quantum physicists.

> Quite possible, but IMO we shouldn't let popular misunderstandings of science detract from the actual scientific inquiry taking place.

The idea that articles like this are science is a popular misunderstanding of science. The article is not a scientific work. It's a pop science piece where an individual scientist promotes her personal philosophies on love to a public audience. Her beliefs may integrate individual scientific facts but that does not make them scientific in themselves.

> Why are some romantic experiences (e.g. an unreasonable crush on a specific person that fades over time) so common in the general population, and why do these experiences happen and play out in these common ways?

Let's say you're feeling anxious before an important exam. Someone notices your anxiety and asks you why you're feeling that way. So you provide a detailed explanation of the neurochemical signalling cascade involved in an acute anxiety response and say that is why you are feeling anxious. Does this answer the question? In a very literal way it does. But it's a useless and incomplete answer. "I'm feeling anxious because I have an important exam coming up" is in many senses more useful and accurate.

Our biology is shaped and acted on by our environment which includes many psychosocial factors. Culture and individual experience are biopsychosocial. Biology is to human behavior what electromagnetism is to computing. You can't build an understanding by considering only the lowest level details.

> The article is not a scientific work.

I never said it was. I said it was pop science — in other words, a highly mangled portrayal of scientific work, made fit for public consumption.

> It's a pop science piece where an individual scientist promotes her personal philosophies on love to a public audience. Her beliefs may integrate individual scientific facts but that does not make them scientific in themselves.

She’s promoting the theory that she believes best fits the data. Assuming she’s not one of those scientists who fakes her data, that is very much a part of regular scientific discourse. Her theory may very well be wrong, but that doesn’t mean she’s not being scientific.

Again, I am assuming that the claims she’s making are backed by actual data that she’s reviewed. Have you reviewed her work and found that this is not in fact the case? If so, I’ll cede that to you.

> You can't build an understanding by considering only the lowest level details.

No, but abstractions are leaky. You can’t build a full understanding without ignoring the lower level details either, which is what she certainly seems to be doing.

As an example,

> "I'm feeling anxious because I have an important exam coming up" is in many senses more useful and accurate.

If someone notices that you’re always anxious, this is likely just your brain rationalizing the exam being the main or most important cause of your anxiety. On its own, it’s a perfectly plausible explanation. But in reality, how good of a predictor is the presence of an exam for your mental state?

How good of a predictor for mating preferences is this evo-psych theory? I’m sure the women the author mentioned here have a unique reason for every man they passed on, but were those men by and large bad protectors and low earners? If so, those unique reasons for rejection sound more like post-hoc rationalizations than “real” reasons, and the cause of such biases deserve to be looked into further to ascertain the magnitude of biological or cultural influences.

Unfortunately, as we both note, it’s a pop sci article that doesn’t contain that much information about the methodology or the results. I’m just saying, just as I can’t draw strong conclusions that it’s true based on this article itself, I don’t believe you can draw strong conclusions that it’s bunk and “not science,” either.

Biological reductionism is different from just simply science. There is a lot above love that we simply can't explain at the level of neurotransmitters because our understanding of such high level functions is highly incomplete. Trying to say that there is nothing more to it that the incomplete understanding we have is reductionism.

> on a nearly universal human experience

Love is not a nearly universal human experience. Love is a whole lot of concepts and emotions and experiences that are highly dependent on the cultural context.

That's one of the points of the article.

It's quite the opposite. Culture is mentioned three times in the article and each mention is to point out that culture doesn't make a difference to the supposed immutable evolutionary truths.

> It's at best uninformative, at worst nonsensical to try to reduce all of this to interaction found in sexual interaction / reproduction.

Understanding doesn't have to lead to disenchantment. Getting yourself into the frame of mind where you feel the wonder of things is worthwhile for topics like this, science and religion.

Disenchantment is a choice and it comes from saying "X is `just' Y." We don't have to minimize things when people point out their aspects.

Well-said.

Airplanes are relatively straightforward machines. Computers just do trivial math and logic very fast. Listening to Bach in a cathedral is just hearing metal tubes vibrating air in an artificial cave.

But if you've never stopped and wondered that you're "partaking in the miracle of human flight"[1] or that the block of metal and sand in your desk lets you see loved ones across time and space, or that countless people worked for ages so you could experience the music and art in that building, well you're missing out.

Humans are lucky that we experience both understanding and awe.

[1] https://youtu.be/b3dYS7PcAG4 (CW:LCK)

Part of the problem you are having is the English word love is an overloaded term.

Or maybe just word love is so vague and general and used in so many unrelated contexts that it's not useful when people attept to explain anything.

And whenever somebody talks about something useful they discovered using word love, arguments like yours crop up.

>one's nation, one's profession, even God

Those are cases of institutions hijacking the mechanism of love.

If someone wanted to bulldoze your home town to build a nuclear reactor, you'd be upset, right? That said, there are different sorts of love. The Greeks had many words for it. We're impoverished in that regard.

If such institutions have successfully hijacked love pretty much universally for much of human history, then it's worth saying they're connected.

Depends on what you consider history. Written history? Sure, writing is the DNA of memes; but humans have been around for much longer before these parasites learned to exploit our sociality.

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