Survival of the loveliest?

[pankaaj]

and here's some interesting fact on love

1. serotonin level in lovers and OCD patients are similar(40% lower than normal), suggesting a similarity between falling in love and mental illness
2. freud thought that choice of lover is influenced by unrequitted wish to bed your mother/father
3. jung thought that passion is driven by some kind of collective unconciousness
4. evolutionary physiologist thought that we tend to see as attractive, and thereby choose as mate, people who look healthy
5. experiment shows that women tend to prefer the scent of man with the most different genotype from her own, therefore increasing chance of robust offsprings
6. dopamine is associated with heightened passion
7. passion usually ends in 4 years- the period of time needed to raise a child through infancy(probably as a result of our neurons being desensitized)

Thanks for giving so many facts . I was not knowing all of them.

[2810712]

There is an hot dicussion going on.Let me tell what I think about love.Love is a character evolved during evolution and hence seen in various degrees.It increases as the organism gets complex.We can differntiate the love seen between parents and children with the love between a male and a female.The first one is for the survival of the offspring that experiences it.We can clearly see that lower organisms might not have such a bond and higher organisms do.The second one is very well seen in most species and the reason for its presence is to reproduce.The one that attracts most can pass its genes to the offspring for example Black mane in the case of lions.The is also a bond between the family,the same species.The reason for this to exist is for the species to survive.I really donot know about True Love and donot believe in such a thing.Love is something very wrongly understood by people which is seen in customs,religion,etc.

that was really a thoughtful...

strong bonding / attraction(mental and physical attraction) and specificity re two imp. results/chara of love...

And as DG has said the bond bet parents and children leads to more chances of survival of their own children and the bond between a male and a female would increase the chance of reproducing in most cases [ till both are alive]... as the female and male both are specific about their reproductive partner... so the both will wait for each other for reproduction...

So without completely defining love we can still predict its effect on poppulation by just considering important chara.s of love...


lust would have strong attraction [ physical] but specificity would be alot lesser...
Without specificity nobody will wait for a specific partner and thus only 'lustwise' selection will occur... and those with less 'lust' producing ability will be kept from reproducing... but when love exists... both will wait for each other and reproduce when environment permits...

But see , when it comes to love ... there is no general criterion... each person has different 'loveliest' ... yes, the most ''sexiest' also differes among people...but the differences are less... while the difference between the most loveliest are comparitively larger...


So, those who love each other are most loveliest for each other and have greated chances of making their lines survive... so all those most loveliests survive!


2. freud thought that choice of lover is influenced by unrequitted wish to bed your mother/father
This is a very bad kind of wording used first of all. But it actually directs us to a psychological explanation of why we've our most sexiest person different from the others...

The organism decides upon which is most male or female from how is the male or female that affects him most... mostly the most effecting male and females are our parents ... so we asign most female/maleness to those which resemble to our parents [ mentally + physically] to be most female or male... and obviously we feel the most feminine or masculine individual as most sexiest!

[The importance to mental and physical chara. while selecting the most sexiest differes as per the thinking of the person.]

& more than one male or female can also be 'most effecting' for the developing child at a time... so siblings or children living in same environment may not have 'most sexiest's identiacal as whom they get most effected by, differs among them as per their thinking [and thinking of siblings may not be similar ].


Lot of good info here... thanks


hrushikesh

[AstusAleator]

Don't forget that most of the statements you guys are making are about humans, not animals in general.
Humans define many forms of love:
-brotherly (familial) love
-fraternal (friend) love
-spousal (lust-mating) love
-deist (God) love
-anthropomorphic (animal-human) love

I'm sure we could come up with many more. For example I love mountains and streams. I also love fruit. I love the wind and I love the stars.

So I guess the question is why do we use this word "love" to describe how we feel about so many different thing? And then why do we attempt to define "true love" (which is what I think the subject of this discussion is centering around).


It's harder to see some evolutionary patterns in humans than in animals. Is there more to "love" than simple selection?
We have Donald Trump marrying a supermodel, but then we have Billy-Joe, who was born with 8 toes, marrying his cousin Bobby-Sue. So maybe there are some discernable patterns, BUT how common are those actual occurences?
It's quite obvious that attraction plays a large part in human behavior and sexual selection (keenly capitalized on by commercialism) but is it (anymore) a driving evolutionary force?

PS, there was a thread about human evolution. I wish it hadn't died

[David George]

I think Love is a mere feeling to ensure that many things do happen ie.Reproduction,friendship,etc.It is also very well seen in animals as much as in humans do.Also when the no. of females decrease in a population Dominant males become aggresive and the competiton for mating increases and so many more females die due to aggressive copulation.

[Khaiy]

I think Love is a mere feeling to ensure that many things do happen ie.Reproduction,friendship,etc.It is also very well seen in animals as much as in humans do.Also when the no. of females decrease in a population Dominant males become aggresive and the competiton for mating increases and so many more females die due to aggressive copulation.

That doesn't sound much like love to me... but maybe I'm just old fashioned

[AstusAleator]

David,
I find your use of the word "mere" very interesting. Does it indicate a lack of interest or is your mind just made up? If love is "merely" a survival mechanism, then where did the idea of "true love" come from? And I'm not just talking about the basic definition of "true love" I'm talking about the Romeo and Juliet "true love" (remember they both commit suicide)

[David George]

I don't know about Romeo and Juliet that much but I think that the frequency of Love was more in them.These are only rare cases.Even in India I read that two young lovers commited suicide after writing a letter with their own blood.But I do accept that I do lack interest in love.But I know that couples live happily upto a certain period and then break up this is common.So there are different frequencies for love.

[pankaaj]

So it proves that love is a mechanism of evolution to some extent!
But the concept of TRUE LOVE as the examples suggest leads to extinction!
[So can evolution leads to extinction

Just jocking yaar

But if u apply it in mathematics it wil be true! Isn't it?

[David George]

Evolution can lead to Extinction.If an animal evolves a negative character to that environment it will lead to extinction.Example The evolution of saber like teeth in smilodon.

[2810712]

LOve is the mechanism of securing partner and better progeny devlopement in advanced organisms that has naturally selected due to its above advantages...and the love-making species will survive till love is benificial...&
If no strain of organism is able to have the chances to breed with their beloved...the love-making species will soon get extinct...as love corresponds to specificity for reproduction also...
Specificity will also reduce the recombination due while zygote formation...
Love is a way to give ur whole potential for the boosting the strains produced by reproduction of u and ur beloved...

hrushikesh