Love
Is a Servant of Genes, As It Is
Human Passions, Infidelity,
Violence, Hate, Homicide
Science seems to rejoice in destroying our illusions and
dreams. Galileo has retired us and the Earth from the centre
of the Universe, diminishing Earth and its inhabitants to a
small blue dot lost between billions of suns and planets. In
the same line, Darwin showed that we aren’t the beings
created to the image of God we thought we were, but just
mere animals, descendents of other species, involved in the
cruel struggle of surviving.
Until now our love has always appeared protected from such
attacks of science. Our loves, as our concepts of beauty and
ugliness, our religions, our artistic tastes, or our goods
and evils, are areas mainly created by our minds, linked to
our values, apart from science.
But that’s not the vision of some modern evolutionary
psychology and biology, at least concerning love. To some
scientists there is no mystery or greatness in love. Love is
connected to the mechanisms of passion, and these mechanisms
are basically servants of the genes.
There are genes inciting us to infidelity (mainly male
infidelity), to sexual obsession and violence, to hates,
vindictive spirits and even homicides and wars (today’s
Amazonian Indians, such as the Yanomano, still make wars to
kidnap women)…
Why? Why do genes incite such conducts? Because through
infidelity or the kidnapping of women, or sexual obsession,
or homicides and crimes, the genes of the winner are
transmitted (and the loser’s genes are not). In the natural
struggle for surviving anything is good as long as it serves
the main goal. Genes have no ethics. .
In the genes’ view, our body is but a vehicle at their
service. Genes do not worry about good, or about our
well-being and the survival of the individual whose body
they inhabit. They are only «interested» in themselves, and
in propagating. That’s their blind logic.
When genes activate some chemical substances of the human
brain to make a mother or a father love their children, and
to feel pleasure and become addicted to that, they are only
defending their interests, or rather, defending the copies
of themselves present in the bodies of the couple’s sons.
Once more, science contradicts our dreams of being more then
mere animals, above the mechanical grounds of life. In this
view, love has nothing to do with the transcendent, the
romantic or the divine, and appears as a blind mechanism
serving genes and their propagation.
A horrible view? See
Love
and the interests of Genes
Books, Films,
Cultural Stuff on Love,
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