Month: August 2011

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On Life, Death, and Shaking Hands with Your Ancestors

Appropriately, I’m writing this in the middle of Hurricane Irene.

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.A couple of days ago, NPR posted this quote on death by Steve Jobs. 

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

Direct ancestor/ descendants holding hands (my sons and I)

Digging a bit deeper, I was able to find that the quote came from a commencement speech Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, about a year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By now, most people probably know that Mr. Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple last week, and there has been speculation that this may tie into his past health issues. Such a close encounter with mortality would likely make any person pause and reflect on the big picture, and why it is that we ultimately share the same destination. I empathize deeply with Mr. Jobs, Christopher Hitchens, the people of Somalia and, well, everyone, since we must all one day confront the fact that our time here is finite. Death is the ultimate equalizer.

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Part 5. Humans are (Blank) -ogamous: Pair-Bonding and Romantic Love

This is the fifth part on the evolution of human mating behavior, comparing evidence for promiscuity and pair-bonding in our species. Please see the introduction here.

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“One of these days I will wake up – which I think I have done already – and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer.” (Letter from Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor)

“Emotions and motivations (are) hierarchically ordered in the brain. Fear can overcome joy, for example. Jealousy can stifle tenderness…But in this pecking order of basic and complex emotions, background feelings and powerful drives, romantic love holds a special place: close to the zenith, the pinnacle, the top. Romantic love can dominate the drive to eat and sleep. It can stifle fear, anger, or disgust. It can override one’s sense of duty to family or friends. It can even triumph over the will to live. As Keats said, ‘I could die for you.’ ” (Helen Fisher 2004: 97-8)

“Only love can leave such a mark / But only love can heal such a scar.” (Paul Hewson)

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Attempting to summarize the evolution of romantic love and pair-bonding in humans is an enormous task. This is exacerbated by many complications: the literature on these topics is vast; the term ‘pair-bond’ has been used in different ways by different primatologists in the past and is often erroneously confused with ‘monogamy’; the neurobiology of romantic love – which is not a prerequisite of pair-bonding – is complex; the question of when/if humans became pair-bonded in our evolutionary history is highly speculative; and then there is the complicating factor of culture. Furthermore, parts two through four in this series addressed ten biological traits indicating that humans have promiscuity built into us to some degree, and that monogamy, or at least lifelong monogamy, does not come easily.

Gibbons (Hylobates lar). From Wikipedia.

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