Month: September 2013

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Flexible Love, at Any Age

The New York Times runs a series of short videos titled “Modern Love” (does David Bowie know about this?). The latest installation is narrated by a 71 year-old woman who describes the experience of falling in love at her age, comparing it to her younger days. She talks about differences in preparing for dates, perceptions of the concept of ‘soulmates,’ the sense of urgency, jealousy, ephemerality of life and relationships, and the pain of loss. Pretty thorough for a 2 minute video.   

To me, the most interesting part is that love really can strike at any age, illustrating the gap between proximate and evolutionary levels. Evolutionary hypotheses for the origin of pair-bonding (and love) often highlight some function related to reproduction. Robin Dunbar  summarized four possibilities: 

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Part 13: Humans are (Blank)-ogamous: Is Monogamy ‘Natural?’

This is part of a series 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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(Left) My paternal grandparents with my father as a toddler. (Right) Their 50th anniversary.

Left: My paternal grandparents with my father as a toddler. Right: their 50th wedding anniversary (it’s the best picture I could find).

Are humans naturally monogamous? Oprah Winfrey says ‘no.’That settles it, then. Maybe.

Oprah (she needs no last name) was a guest on a morning talk show, and the topic of discussion was two recent articles on the origins of monogamy in mammals (Lukas & Clutton-Brock, 2013) and another specifically on primates (Opie et al, 2013). Both articles are impressive for their large databases and attention to detail. The first looked at 2545 species of mammals while the Opie article examined 230 primate species.[1]

Both studies focused specifically on social, rather than sexual, monogamy. This distinction is important because sexual exclusivity was not what was being measured here. Rather, social monogamy was defined by both studies as simply living in breeding pairs. The Lukas & Clutton-Brock paper added that in social monogamy the pair shared a common territory, and “associate with each other for more than one breeding season” (p. 526).

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Thought Experiment on Sex, Food, & Privacy

From Matt Ridley’s book “The Origins of Virtue”  (1997: 87-88):

Imagine if sex were an activity normally carried out communally and publicly, but eating was something done secretly and privately. There is no particular reason why the world could not be organized that way, so that it seemed positively odd to want to have sex alone and rather shameful to be caught eating in public. No reason except human nature. It is simply part of our make-up that food is communal and sex is private. It is so deeply ingrained in the human mind that the reverse is unthinkably weird. The bizarre notion, beloved of various historians, that sexual privacy was a cultural invention of medieval Christendom, has long been exploded. All over the world, whatever god people worship, and however many or few clothes they wear in public, sex is a secret act to be done quietly when everybody else is asleep or out in the fields in the daytime where nobody can see. It is a universal human characteristic. Eating food, on the other hand, is just as universally a communal activity.”

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