Love

Love, romantic love – the thing, i don’t understand (until now).

I understand brood care: Protection of the offspring. I understand Sex: Learning of the Race. I understand courtship: Males charging, females submitting because of the Control of the Gene.

Everything you can see in animals.

Like spite and altruism, love – between man and woman – can’t be found in chimps. They are good mothers and sometimes even male chimps care for some lonely youngsters, but they are not really well known as the romantic lovers, because to multiply you don’t need love. Rape does it “as well” as the brute domination of females of many lower species (or human cultures) show.

But i remember dogs – the difference between sympathy and sex. I guess it was Konrad Lorenz observing an undying friendship between a male and a female dog, living together all the time...

as long as there wasn’t the time of rut. Then the female had to obey the law of the gene and to mate with the man choosed by the genes. But afterwards – she came back.

And of course...

i remember Konrad Lorenz and his graylag gooses, i remember parrots who are told to live together forever and who deeply mourn about the loss of the other – both really intelligent birds.

And there is the fact of the most intelligent birds (crows and ravens), some more intelligent as three-year-old human children – who are monogamous.

With brains just as big as nuts crows are able to use traffic lights – to open nuts. Do you know that? The Crow puts a nut on a crosswalk during the red phase, hops away at yellow and comes back at red to eat the nut, opened by the cars during the green phase.

Wow – i love that. It’s an absolutely great demonstration of how active processing works.

And it’s a great demonstration that intelligence doesn’t depend on big brains but (i bet) on the ability of brains to develop and maintain standing waves, for which it may be more important to be well intertwined (remember the bigger brains of the Neandertal people?) So it might be that birds living in a 3D-world simply are more apt to understand dynamics (information) than apes and their successors.

And the social intelligence of gooses, parrots, crows and raven shows something like love – love between man and woman.

So it seems as if this special kind of love has something to do with high intelligence and social behavior, supported by the fact, that the hominid males are (as far as i know) the only male mammals able to live in social groups and that spite and altruism, the emotions to protect justice and therefore the wellbeing of the group, are a “late invention” of hominids, (nearly) not to be seen before the human species.

Fine.

But why love? What’s the evolutionary advantage of romantic love, of a love between man and woman for a whole life?

An advantage, temporary monogamy wouldn’t provide?

Is it just because of the high intelligence of active processing, based on individual experience and so creating unique individuals with individual demands and individual needs and individual wishes, so that a bottom-up creation of a lasting couple is as special as the individuals themselves?

But where’s the evolutionary advantage of lasting couples?

The education of children? No, not really plausible. Yes, human children are all “premature births” because of the big brain, they have to be educated and protected for many years. But as Bachofen suggested: to care for the children you don’t need fathers, mother-brothers do the job as well – and brothers never divorce. Would fit very well to the observation that humankind didn’t know about fatherhood before agriculture and livestock breeding. So why should male persons care for children without a reason to do so? Look at those men of our days able to repudiate a child they had pretended to “love” for years – as soon as they learn that the genes of the child are not “made” by themselves.

Triggered love? IF Genes of the child are from me THEN switch on “love” ELSE switch off “love”?

That’s not the true meaning of love.

No, actually, mother-brothers are the better social choice for mothers who just want to care for their children.

Next try: Mothers. They have to love because it is the payment of Mother Nature for the brood care. Why? Because brute force doesn’t work together with high intelligence. Remember the pleasure principle? So it might be that the pattern of love in women isn’t quite precise and therefore able to include male adults – but why should male adults love them back? Ever watched pubescent boys treating their mothers, ever thought about the reasons for initiation rites, the social “cutting the cord”? No, this ansatz doesn’t work either.

Philemon and Baucis.

So where’s the evolutionary advantage of an everlasting love?