> The human mating act is not love.
> Animals do mate - and the urge of the male to mate with the female is a
> strong one. As the human is an animal thus the urge in the human male to
> mate is a strong urge.
> But this has nothing to do with "love".
>
The Sexual Brain
Romance is biology. It serves the biology of reproduction. It is
etched into the biology of the brain. Differences between men and
women reveal the brain's basic relation to romance in interests,
aptitudes, and desires. Such differences loom large because they
confront us every day, appear in all societies, and are astonishingly
resistant to change.
In a Seinfeld episode entitled "The Voice," Jerry, portraying a crazed
lover overcome by romantic love, runs among the pigeons that are
courting furiously even as they scatter before him. The cooing of
pigeons is a cinematic cliche used to summon up associations of young
love in springtime. In reality, pigeons are indeed a romantic lot,
falling in love and sticking together through thick and thin.
Take, for example, the ringdove, a close relative of the domestic
pigeon, which has a distinctive black ring around the back of its
neck. Students of courtship behavior in ringdoves have found that the
per- sistent cooing of the male is not nearly as inane as it might
first seem. In fact, the strutting of the male and his cooing call as
he chases a female is an obligatory feature of the complex chain of
events in the reproduction of this species. If the female is not
vigorously courted by the male, she will not move on to the successive
phases of reproduction: selection of a nest site, nest building,
copulation, laying eggs, and incubation. After a day or two of
courting, the female shows signs of interest toward the persistent
male. She flips her wings in a distinctive way and begins to approach
the male. Careful research has shown that male courtship produces a
chemical response that can be measured in the blood of the female.
Once the nest site has been selected, the male occupies it and
produces a different call, known as the nest coo. When the female
begins emitting her own nest coo, showing that she is ready to start
building the nest, the male stops cooing and begins to collect nest
material that the female then arranges. Reproduction in the ringdove
is like a complex dance in which the actions of one partner affect the
biology, and hence the behavior, of the other.'
To emphasize the biological basis of sex differences in psychology and
behavior is not the same as endorsing sex-role stereotypes any more
than an anthropologist who studies head hunting is inviting people to
go out and shrink heads. Yet, the existence of sex-typed adaptations
in the brains of men and women implies that the ideal of a society in
which gender does not matter is (a) not possible and (b) most likely
contrary to the happiness of both men and women. We know this because
of the harrowing life stories of people whose sex was reassigned in
early life, condemning them to live the life of a woman while
possessing the brain of a man. Exclusive homosexuality, which
evidently has a biological basis for women as well as men, provides
further evidence that sex roles are partially present in the brain at
birth.
The Science of Romance - by Nigel Barber
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573929700/
