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While this is true, the interviewee Anne Machin clarifies that she is referring to the phenomenon of romantic love (Ἔρως). That said, I find it interesting tha

While this is true, the interviewee Anne Machin clarifies that she is referring to the phenomenon of romantic love (Ἔρως). That said, I find it interesting that there is no mention of the phenomenon of same-sex romance. This exception alone would seem to fly in the face of the notion that romantic love can be conceptually-modeled as a mere epiphenomenon of genetic sovereignty and autonomy. I guess the counter would be that this lies outside the boundaries of ordinary romantic love and therefore should be taxonomically-distinct? Who knows. These gene-centered theories of evolution require quite a bit of ad hoc rationalization, speculation and routine defiance of folk phenomenology.

hirundo 5y ago
> This exception alone would seem to fly in the face of the notion that romantic love can be conceptually-modeled as a mere epiphenomenon of genetic sovereignty and autonomy. Biologically romantic love between same sex partners is more or less equivalent to love with an infertile partner. Such love doesn't have to mean that there has been evolutionary pressure for such feelings to those particular partners. It could just mean that there has been strong evolutionary pressure to support the feeling of love, but the genetic mechanisms for identifying a fertile partner of the complimentary sex is imperfect. If it works often enough that sufficient babies are produced those false positives are tolerable. This can be thought of as similar to disease resistance. When someone young dies from a disease it isn't evidence that we are evolved to die from the disease, just that our biology has limitations. Of course we can't rule out that homosexual and other infertile relationships have evolutionary advantages. See e.g. John Maynard Smith's "sneaky fuckers strategy".
- Connor_Creegan 5y ago
  >Biologically romantic love between same sex partners is more or less equivalent to love with an infertile partner. I am uncertain as to the intention of the adjective "biologically" is in this sentence, but it seems to me that to maintain the above thesis consistently in the face of counter-evidence you would have to reduce vast portions of the conscious decision-making matrix to the epiphenomena of a genetic teleology. Infertility is typically not an acknowledged fact prior to romantic engagement, while same-sex attracted persons go to great lengths to hide their romantic pursuits from others. Unless we are assuming a highly-restrictive helpless spectator theory of consciousness, dismissing the difference between these two sets of phenomena as reducible to some kind widespread of lack of discretion is quite the hypothetical leap. It seems far more parsimonious and practical to assume either a multi-level or meme/concept-centered model when attempting to explain something as abstract, private and irreplicable as romantic love.
  - hirundo 5y ago
    > you would have to reduce vast portions of the conscious decision-making matrix to the epiphenomena of a genetic teleology. You have put your finger directly on the issue. How could it be possible for sequences of amino acids to influence our emotional reactions to particular classes of stimuli in the real world? Whatever influence there is must come from long and tortuously complex and unreliable chains of causation. Those amino acids cannot simply encode a virility detector in our neural nets. Your skepticism of the connection is quite reasonable. And yet we keep finding examples of the connection. Like the funny reaction of cats to cucumbers in all of those youtube videos. Something biological and not social makes many cats fear a certain class of shapes. Somehow, that emotional and physical response is genetically encoded. Something similar is at work with romantic love. Like a cat fears a snake-shaped blob, a human is aroused by a mate-shaped blob or smell. That arousal in turn influences our emotions, notoriously blinding us to other inputs. Our emotions are written on the dirtiest slates imaginable, scribbled on over and over for billions of generations.
    - Connor_Creegan 5y ago
      I don't really doubt the connection, I doubt the reduction. There is no reason to isolate the phylogenetic march as the primary efficient cause of its own change through time in opposition to the claim that it is a register of that change. There are other possible explanations for innate aptic structures than a genetic determinism which ultimately requires us to accept a theory of consciousness as simply a passive witness to unceasing, out-of-control volitional states.
      - hirundo 5y ago
        That's why the topic is a political football. The scope of that volition is a constraint on the scope of effective governance, particularly as fueled by blame.
ravi-delia 5y ago
I'd expect that your brain has to figure out who it's attracted to. The fact that on the order of 90% of the population reports themselves as straight (surely some closeted and bisexual folks in straight relationships included in that number, but it's probably not too far off) suggests that evolution has largely organized us well for reproduction, but obviously isn't perfect. I mean, when I find men attractive it's often for the same reasons straight women do, modulo individual differences in type. That being said, I suspect you're right that evolution is much more constrained than evo-psych explanations give it credit for (though I wonder what a non-gene-centered theory of evolution would look like!). There are only 20,000 genes or so, and most of them are just simple recipes for necessary proteins. Obviously evolution does a lot with a little, but it still strains credibility to suggest that every aspect of human behavior is so well controlled by so few genes.

hirundo 5y ago

> This exception alone would seem to fly in the face of the notion that romantic love can be conceptually-modeled as a mere epiphenomenon of genetic sovereignty and autonomy. Biologically romantic love between same sex partners is more or less equivalent to love with an infertile partner. Such love doesn't have to mean that there has been evolutionary pressure for such feelings to those particular partners. It could just mean that there has been strong evolutionary pressure to support the feeling of love, but the genetic mechanisms for identifying a fertile partner of the complimentary sex is imperfect. If it works often enough that sufficient babies are produced those false positives are tolerable. This can be thought of as similar to disease resistance. When someone young dies from a disease it isn't evidence that we are evolved to die from the disease, just that our biology has limitations. Of course we can't rule out that homosexual and other infertile relationships have evolutionary advantages. See e.g. John Maynard Smith's "sneaky fuckers strategy".

Connor_Creegan 5y ago
>Biologically romantic love between same sex partners is more or less equivalent to love with an infertile partner. I am uncertain as to the intention of the adjective "biologically" is in this sentence, but it seems to me that to maintain the above thesis consistently in the face of counter-evidence you would have to reduce vast portions of the conscious decision-making matrix to the epiphenomena of a genetic teleology. Infertility is typically not an acknowledged fact prior to romantic engagement, while same-sex attracted persons go to great lengths to hide their romantic pursuits from others. Unless we are assuming a highly-restrictive helpless spectator theory of consciousness, dismissing the difference between these two sets of phenomena as reducible to some kind widespread of lack of discretion is quite the hypothetical leap. It seems far more parsimonious and practical to assume either a multi-level or meme/concept-centered model when attempting to explain something as abstract, private and irreplicable as romantic love.
- hirundo 5y ago
  > you would have to reduce vast portions of the conscious decision-making matrix to the epiphenomena of a genetic teleology. You have put your finger directly on the issue. How could it be possible for sequences of amino acids to influence our emotional reactions to particular classes of stimuli in the real world? Whatever influence there is must come from long and tortuously complex and unreliable chains of causation. Those amino acids cannot simply encode a virility detector in our neural nets. Your skepticism of the connection is quite reasonable. And yet we keep finding examples of the connection. Like the funny reaction of cats to cucumbers in all of those youtube videos. Something biological and not social makes many cats fear a certain class of shapes. Somehow, that emotional and physical response is genetically encoded. Something similar is at work with romantic love. Like a cat fears a snake-shaped blob, a human is aroused by a mate-shaped blob or smell. That arousal in turn influences our emotions, notoriously blinding us to other inputs. Our emotions are written on the dirtiest slates imaginable, scribbled on over and over for billions of generations.
  - Connor_Creegan 5y ago
    I don't really doubt the connection, I doubt the reduction. There is no reason to isolate the phylogenetic march as the primary efficient cause of its own change through time in opposition to the claim that it is a register of that change. There are other possible explanations for innate aptic structures than a genetic determinism which ultimately requires us to accept a theory of consciousness as simply a passive witness to unceasing, out-of-control volitional states.
    - hirundo 5y ago
      That's why the topic is a political football. The scope of that volition is a constraint on the scope of effective governance, particularly as fueled by blame.

ravi-delia 5y ago

I'd expect that your brain has to figure out who it's attracted to. The fact that on the order of 90% of the population reports themselves as straight (surely some closeted and bisexual folks in straight relationships included in that number, but it's probably not too far off) suggests that evolution has largely organized us well for reproduction, but obviously isn't perfect. I mean, when I find men attractive it's often for the same reasons straight women do, modulo individual differences in type. That being said, I suspect you're right that evolution is much more constrained than evo-psych explanations give it credit for (though I wonder what a non-gene-centered theory of evolution would look like!). There are only 20,000 genes or so, and most of them are just simple recipes for necessary proteins. Obviously evolution does a lot with a little, but it still strains credibility to suggest that every aspect of human behavior is so well controlled by so few genes.