Thread: What If We Evolved Into Love?

Originally Posted by arby

Well, I'm sure all of you are familiar with the concept of evolution and natural selection so I put forward this: What if "love" was obtained through evolution?

Simple really, back thousands of years some people would have small mutations that would make them attracted to the oppisite sex more. That would then lead to more babies from them and and over the years it would compound into something bigger like what we call "love".

Discuss[/b]

Trying to consider [[[[[[[[>

Evolution

Does love have something in common with procreation?
Love didn't evolve once and for all. Love is evolving everyday, now and here. But people dazzled by colourful, lousy trinkets hardly even perceive it.

Love, as I understand it, is equivalent to service. It is something you do, not something that one becomes.

I think that argument is trasnferrable to every single motion basically
when did we learn emotions, as I assume the first single-celled organisms didnt have them.
hate, love, sadness, shame, fustratition I assume all of these emotions were gained through the process of evolution, but then i mno scientist, i could be waaay off.

Imran

Nooooo?! You mean that love maybe is a very very usefully system to make animals reprodoce, so they don't die out?! Wow! Revolutionary!! No one ever thought of it that way.

Sarcasm.

Love is a result of evolution. Duh.

so would you say there is a gene for love?

so would you say there is a gene for love?[/b]

No their a meme for love, which has a huge selective tendecy for because it promotes mating e.t.c.

Originally Posted by Keeper

so would you say there is a gene for love?
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A whole bunch of genes. Love is the same as hunger, fear, ect. Only more fun perhaps. It are all just instincts that we have. If we didn't have love, we would have died out. We either wouldn't want to have sex, and if we did, we would let our children die.

Whose to say we would ahve died out without love, i find it entirely feasible that a speices may be taught that sex pro-creates, pro-creation is neccesary for survival.
You cant tell me that you know for certain that cockroaches love eachother?

Imran

Whose to say we would ahve died out without love, i find it entirely feasible that a speices may be taught that sex pro-creates, pro-creation is neccesary for survival.
You cant tell me that you know for certain that cockroaches love eachother?[/b]

That why it a combiantion of memes and genes. Well a cockroach is dominated by it gene and chemicals, the same chemicals that our released when humans are in love. It all just chemicals, although we humans memes come into it as well as we are more cognitily developed.

i dont bleive that answers my statemnt, that without love we could ahve survived
Can you honeslty tell me that every speieces on this planet shares this emotion of love?
Imran

I think you need a extremly advanced brain (or mind if you will) to expreience love

I think cockroches can feel lust though

So you agree, that speices have survived without the ability to feel love?
and therefore the human race could ahve asimilary surived without love and possibly we could ahve been more efficent.
As we currently have a population crisis, a lack of love would enable us to control with more ease the numbers.
Just a possibliity.
Imran

Originally Posted by imran_p

Whose to say we would ahve died out without love, i find it entirely feasible that a speices may be taught that sex pro-creates, pro-creation is neccesary for survival.
You cant tell me that you know for certain that cockroaches love eachother?

Imran
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I never said cockroaches Didn't feel love. And I bet they do, somewhat. However for the wrong reasons, keeper is wrong. It isn't as much that they don't have the intelligent mind, they just have no need for love. Like frogs, after you made 10000 babies, who gives a fuck about them? They do know lust ofcourse, otherwise they wouldn't recreate, they wouldn't live.

I am sure some lesser-intelligent animals protect their children, or stay with a single partner for a long time, what is a sing of something More then just lust.

Originally Posted by imran_p

So you agree, that speices have survived without the ability to feel love?
and therefore the human race could ahve asimilary surived without love and possibly we could ahve been more efficent.
As we currently have a population crisis, a lack of love would enable us to control with more ease the numbers.
Just a possibliity.
Imran
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Most of the time you make sense, but what the hell are you talking about? Do you think that a human baby can survive without sacrifice, time and stuff like that from it's mother? We need love, for one reasons because our children SUCK at surviving themselves. If we had no love, just lust and such, we wouldn't look much like we do now.

good point, and I conseed

I do, however, think that there love is vastly different to ours

Originally Posted by Keeper

good point, and I conseed

I do, however, think that there love is vastly different to ours
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Well, that is just because you are Christian Creationists can hardly ever accept that animals might actually not be less then us, only perhaps if you measure it by human terms like 'profit', 'body count' and such

Touche

love didnt evolve from sexual desire. animals were gladly popping out babies becuase the process of sex was fun. look at fish, or reptitles. they hardly stick around after the sex. hell, look at spiders, she'll eat you if you dont run away fast enough! it was desire and lust, not love.

love developed in animals, not from the sexual desire in one another - but in the role they play with their offspring. The more important the parents role was to the offspring, the more love the parent had. In this case, the love is shown through the parents self-sacrafice for the offspring. Whether it was going days without food so that their young ones could eat, or putting their life on the line if a predator came by. In turn, the more dependent the offspring was to their parents, the more love they would develop for them. This love in turn, was just the oppisite. While the parents love was self-sacraficing, this love that the offspring developed was selfish. A self-love that will only love something if that something loves it.

Using the self-sacraficing, and self-love between a parent and a child we can see how other types of love develop. Among the offspring that grow up with their sisters and brothers, you develop friendship - a type of love that is a mix of both self-sacrafice and self-love. This friendship can show itself later in the animals life, even when it is no longer with its sisters or brothers.

We can see this with our own pets. Since a lot of us have pets that come from a litter, not only are they capable of developing a sort of animal-human friendship with us, they can develop a friendship with eachother. I think it is worthwhile to note how important this introduction of friendship-love is. As it has almost nothing to do with mating or taking care of the next generation *species survival*. Its the result of an animal having a brain large enough to understand, above all things, lonliness.

Now, if you combine friendship with lust, you get romance. But I dont think thats how a more sexual love developed. Becuase there are a lot of animals that show devoted life long friendships, while showing nothing but base lust for the oppisite sex. Our own pets for example!! In fact, there aren't a whole lot of animals that mate for life.

Animals that do mate for life generally show : love for their offspring : an ability to develop friendship.. . . The last two things are how LONG they have to take care of their offspring compared to how many years they can bare offspring, and if the father is actually important to the develop of the offspring. Since the father is literally going to be sticking around for YEARS, it would be hell if the father and mother didnt get a long. So it makes sense if the two develop a friendship. And there you have the romantic love, which not many animals seem to enjoy.

I do want to point out something very important in the develop of love in higher, intelligent animals. At no point was it ever about sex. I repeat, love is not about sex. I repeat, LOVE IS NOT ABOUT SEX. Always remember, that the first true love to develop in animals was the self-sacrifice of a mother. Since romance is just lust without friendship, love in its own right has always been a platonic experience.

I dont think we can evolve into love, but I think we can evolve into beings of love, but only when we understand what it truly is. And that comes from understanding that our sexuality and our love developed seperately. I think this is important, as a lot of people seem to think that their sexual orientation dictates their love orientation, when there is no evidence to point to this.

Originally Posted by Neruo

I never said cockroaches Didn't feel love. And I bet they do, somewhat. However for the wrong reasons, keeper is wrong. It isn't as much that they don't have the intelligent mind, they just have no need for love. Like frogs, after you made 10000 babies, who gives a fuck about them? They do know lust ofcourse, otherwise they wouldn't recreate, they wouldn't live.

I am sure some lesser-intelligent animals protect their children, or stay with a single partner for a long time, what is a sing of something More then just lust.
Most of the time you make sense, but what the hell are you talking about? Do you think that a human baby can survive without sacrifice, time and stuff like that from it's mother? We need love, for one reasons because our children SUCK at surviving themselves. If we had no love, just lust and such, we wouldn't look much like we do now.
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I didnt explain myself, i eman love in husband-wife sense
without that couples wouldnt be ragging all the tym
and I suppose that would lead to a less densly populated world.
Imran

I think love is just another made up human concept or emotion. It's there to help justify why we need to stay alive, to reproduce and care for our offspring so they survive. Every animal does this to the extenct they need to be successful. Humans sort of use love to express their desire to just do basic survival stuff.

Hmm, aren't emotions just responses to certain situations we learn as we grow up? And then enhanced by culture and stuff.

Originally Posted by imran_p

I didnt explain myself, i eman love in husband-wife sense
without that couples wouldnt be ragging all the tym
and I suppose that would lead to a less densly populated world.
Imran
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In 'the wild' it never is bad for the survival of your species to have a lot of offspring. I actually think humans are evolved in a way that makes us stay with our child for some time, but that men always keep an 'open mind' about other women. The more genes you spread, the more of 'you' will be out there.

-

Anyhows, Juraora or something: At the point of 'friendship-love' you seem to forget that, like monkeys, humans are social Group animals. We aren't solitary hunters. If humans didn't like to stay together in groups, we would have died out, pretty hard hunting a mammoth Alone without huge fangs.

Originally Posted by Neruo

Anyhows, Juraora or something: At the point of 'friendship-love' you seem to forget that, like monkeys, humans are social Group animals. We aren't solitary hunters. If humans didn't like to stay together in groups, we would have died out, pretty hard hunting a mammoth Alone without huge fangs.
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I didnt forget that at all, but what was it in my post that implied that?

Originally Posted by juroara

I didnt forget that at all, but what was it in my post that implied that?
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lol I don't know. I think I just read half your post. I don't recall.

Point being: You seem to way over-romanticize love. I do totally agree that love is just an process to keep offspring alive. But it is also just a thing to keep social bonds in order, and we totally evolved into it. Love Is a process of evolution, If you believe in evolution.