Matt Groening and Nietzsche don’t have a great deal in common, other than being the originators of my favourite quotes on love (see boxes). As they pointed out, love can cause incredible suffering, and robs people of their rationality (indeed it’s been described as a mental illness; sufferers exhibit brain patterns similar to those seen in drug addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder). How could something so destructive persist for so long, when, for example, bower birds manage perfectly well under the Warren Beatty school of drive-by shagging?
Other than country music, another significant thing separates us from chimps: we walk upright. This is pretty useful, as it allows us to carry things more easily and run faster, as well as saving us money on shoes. However, the evolution of this involved a few anatomical changes, including pelvis shrinkage. This means human babies have to come out a little prematurely; like the average Christmas turkey, they’d need another three months in the oven to be cooked properly. As a result, babies are fairly weak and soft-headed at birth, which makes them totally dependent; a state in which they remain for their first five years. This makes human childcare incredibly demanding, and it is ideally a two person job.
In most species which do not ‘pair bond’, the woman is left to look after the children. The explanation, by the perverse logic of evolutionary psychology, is that the amount parents care for their children is proportional to the resources they’ve invested in them; as, supposedly, animals see life as a contest to have as many children as possible at least cost. Generally the woman’s contribution is far greater, either in the form of a fair-sized and nutrient-heavy egg or loan of the valuable real-estate that is the womb (in comparison, the sperm donation is spare change (warning: this is a metaphor, and in reality, when tramps ask for spare change, they mean of the monetary variety)). Thus, the male is far more likely to run off after fertilization; this is particularly true of humans, where the foetus tends to follow its mother around.
As childcare, like bullying or incest, ideally takes two people, it is not surprising that women evolved the capacity to fall in love, as anything which made them able to tolerate the father for long enough for the child to grow up would be a great advantage. However, the man’s reason for settling down is not so clear; having set up shop, why does he stick around to manage it rather than setting up franchises in other wombs?
You’ll be relieved to know that the answer is marginally related to breasts: when a child is breastfeeding, it interferes with the woman’s chemical balance, meaning she can’t get pregnant until the baby’s weaned. In chimps, when ditched mothers find a new spouse, he often will kill the mother’s existing infant, as he wants to make one of his own. This probably wasn’t too rare in early humans, meaning males had a powerful evolutionary incentive to stay put; love is the mind-altering substance which makes them want to do this.
You may think it is heinous to explain love as the result of evolution, and insist that, say, humans have a soul and love must always remain a beautiful mystery. However, scientists aren’t usually so poetic in their outlook, and indeed, some recently managed to isolate the chemical involved in the process of falling in love: dopamine, the brain’s own ‘cocaine’ (love is indeed a drug, but not one you can buy on street corners).
The prairie vole is perhaps the most romantic of rodents- once they pair up, they do so for life, and if their partner dies, 80 percent of the time they live out the rest of their days as a widower. Scientists studying these animals found huge amounts of dopamine being released when they pair up. Rather cruelly, I feel, they then gave these normally incredibly faithful animals dopamine inhibitors, which made them temporarily no-longer in love, and the poor voles cheated on their partners .
So there we have it; another example of science spoiling the mystery of something wonderful, and corrupting small rodents in the process - Richard Gere would be proud.
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