February 26, 2013

swimming against deadines

but stumbling across ahas & clicks & wanting to share:

the following is some hefty; some validation and axing all at once.

Robert Kurzban, in his evolutionary psychology blog (a great place to crawl through interesting), recently posted about the evolutionary purpose of love--which is something i've considered, quite.  i want some answers, damnit.  i post some of his original writing, here, but you can find the entire essay at the link below.  but now, pulled from "LOVE":


"...limerence causes a certain amount of failure to engage with reality, seeing hope for the possibility of a relationship where a more dispassionate appraisal would suggest there is little, or none."

and, assuming the emotion of love has evolved to function as a commitment device: 

"... suppose love does, in fact, cause someone to stay with their current mate even when a better option comes along. If love has this effect on decision making, then the benefits of signaling commitment would have to be relatively large to offset these potential costs.  Still, to the extent feelings of love genuinely foreclose alternative options in the service of signaling commitment, a potentially treacherous tradeoff is being made. The details, of course, ought to matter. How likely is a better alternative to come along? If one does, how much better is the alternative likely to be? Love’s loyalty makes the most sense in a world in which the next best option is only marginally better than the status quo. Does love look so peculiar to us in part because of the modern world’s greater vocabulary of possible lovers? In ancestral environments, if the variance were lower, then commitment might have constituted a potentially less costly tradeoff."

and finally: 

"...what are we to make of the impact of the detritus of love denied, when happily ever after eludes us?  That is, if love is a commitment device, when love passes out of reach, why does it persist and torment – causing both Romeo and Juliet to endure the greatest of all fitness costs –  rather than gracefully simply fading away? The agony of unrequited love, so paralyzingly horrible, seems absurdly counterproductive, in addition to, from the point of view of the unsuccessful suitor, transcendentally painful. As an adaptive matter, it would seem that the right response to doomed courtship is resuming the search; the worst response is lover’s leap, the course favored by so many. Even those who have resisted paying the ultimate price when their favored mate proves out of reach, the aftermath of rejection seems to pose enormous costs in the form of withdrawal from life’s other pursuits. The dejection of the spurned appears as painful as it is unproductive. If there is a crueler burden with which we have been saddled by evolution than the agony of a broken heart, it is hard to imagine what it might be."

 *****

sigh. 
anyway, the essay can be found here:  epjournal.net/blog/2013/02/love/