Scott's Philosophy Notebook

From a scientific perspective, it comes down to survival of the fittest; evolution. Without compassion, empathy, and ultimately love, the human race would have died out a long time ago. There is a direct correlation between the intelligence of a species and the helplessness of its offspring at birth. As an infant clings to its mother's back over the course of its earliest years, it has the opportunity to watch and learn more. In the case of alligators or fish, they are often self-sufficient at birth, capable of launching into hunting patterns without the benefit of a parent. But as we move up on the scale of intelligence, we see bears following their mothers and emulating their hunting/gathering habits, or apes gaining the wisdom of mothers and fathers, aunts, uncles and cousins.

But this wasn't enough for us humans. We learned that multiple sexual partners resulted in disease as well as hurt feelings. Those families who cared for each other prospered. The ones with the oldest family members gained the most wisdom. The parents that worked together to raise their children had more confident children, and those children prospered. Sex became more than a method of propogation, and became an intensely bonding experience. Those early humans who didn't care about their sexual partners eventually died off.

Finally, we extended compassion to those outside our family and made friends, because two families could work together and do much more work as a team. We found it was much better to teach each other and hunt together, than to compete with each other for resources. You'd think that two friends could work together and bring in twice as much food. But what if both friends knew secrets about hunting and gathering, shared those secrets, and increased each others' skills tenfold? All of a sudden, there's twenty times the food and shelter, all because two unrelated people decided to be friends.

We sat around the campfire for thousands of years. Helpless women in the latest terms of pregnancy sat while their "husbands" provided food and drink, and warm animal skins to protect from the cold.

A hundred thousand years later, a man and a woman sit in front of the fireplace on a bearskin rug feeding chocolates to one another.

The most dilligent fathers, the ones willing to hunt well into the night and into the morning, to provide for their families, prospered greater than the lazier ones.

A hundred thousand years later, the father of his beloved family holds down two jobs.

Some say science is cold and heartless. I can't help but disagree.

Many, many human beings, male and female, are desperately trying to figure out what they're doing "wrong" with this whole dating thing. Everybody finds themselves occasionally lost in the game of love. But this is evolution in action. Humans have been "falling in love" for only a hundred thousand years. We're still new at this. We have been marrying for love only a few hundred years, and have had opposite-sex friendship bonds for about forty years. Naturally we have a few stumbling blocks to overcome!

So from my perspective, there really is no love. There is familial compassion, and lust. Lust drives couples together, while familial compassion keeps them alive.