What is Love? An Evolutionary Perspective
“Love is when you throw away a red shell in Mario Kart to protect your boyfriend.”
This is something my girlfriend said to me as we were sitting playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Switch one lazy afternoon. She obviously intended this in the most facetious way possible, but after a couple more races and when my fingers began to tire from mashing the controller buttons, I began to realise the interesting truth behind this pithy statement.
Love at it’s core is about one thing: self-sacrifice. When we think of maternal love, we imagine a mother sacrificing her body for the protection of her child as the world comes crashing down. When we think of love for our country, we see young men and women heading off to war for the defense of one’s nation, even at the cost of their own future livelihood. When we think of brotherly love, we picture one bro sacrificing his shot with a girl for the sake of another bro.
And if you really think about it, self-sacrifice should be one of the most exceedingly rare qualities in all humans. As creatures whose traits have been honed by millenia of natural selection and attrition, it is hard to imagine self-sacrificing altruism as one of the predominant traits of our species. It is implausible that our ancestors would have lived long enough to pass on their genetic material had their actions not been self-servient and selfish. This is an indelible fact of life. There is thus something incongruous between our species and love. Philosophers have long grappled with this notion, with Plato having described love as a ‘madness’ and a ‘serious mental disease’, and the ineffably sagacious Jamaican philosopher Bob Marley seems to be in assent, characterising love as a conscious choice of suffering.
Yet love, in all its self-sacrificial glory, exists. Love is as ubiquitous as the human species itself, and it remains all-powerful even amidst its biological adversaries. Why is this?
One may argue that humans, the sole proprietors of the higher mental faculties of cognition and reason, can override the impulses of their ‘lizard brain’. Why must we be selfish, when we can reason that sometimes self-sacrifice can benefit the common good, which bears greater utilitarian value than mere self-preservation? Why must we be slaves to inherent impulses towards greed and avarice, when we rationalise that the alternative may bear greater fruit?
But I personally find this argument wanting. We can observe self-sacrificial behaviours across the whole spectrum of animals. Have you ever seen an ant colony working in concert to move a giant cockroach carcass into its den, even at the cost of individual lives? Have you ever witnessed a mother dog fiercely protecting her pups, even in the face of an insurmountable foe?
“The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
This suggests to me one thing: that love is in fact profoundly essential as an evolutionary trait, rather than contrary to our existence. At some point, the evolutionary process realised that if we are to survive in this cold, heartless world, we are going to have to ally ourselves unconditionally to something greater than ourselves. We will have to find identity in our social groups, in our friendship circles, in our significant others, and in our families.
That is why we must lean into love. Not because it is self-serving, but because it is the only thing that lets us see beyond ourselves, and to understand our society as higher order. It ensures that we will never have to walk through this world alone, and that we can live in service of something greater.
