Love and Survival │ How Love Makes Us Human with Dr Anna Machin
Why do we fall in love?
What’s love, anyway?
Find out why and how nature has programmed us to love and be attracted to each other.
Anthropologist Anna Machin explains which aspects of love and attraction are hard-wired into our brains by nature, and why we can blame (some of) our misbehaviour in relationships on biology. She also gives us a glimpse of what the future of love might look like.
More on the science behind this video:
Dr Anna Machin’s website https://annamachin.com/
Dr Anna Machin’s blog https://annamachin.com/blog/
Is love real? Oxford Sparks Facebook Live with Dr Anna Machin https://www.oxfordsparks.ox.ac.uk/fil...
Why we fall in love: HealthHackers interview with Anna Machin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gImKH...
This series was produced with our partner Pint of Science! Find out more: www.pintofscience.com
What if we told you that you fell in love only to survive? Thanks evolution.
Welcome to our new series, find out how love connects us to each other and where our search for love might take us in the future. To love is to survive.
Humans have to cooperate to subsist, to learn and to raise very dependent children. In the world in which we evolved, we needed to cooperate to hunt, to locate sources of water and to learn the skills of tool production and shelter construction. Today, we still have to cooperate albeit at a distance. If you think of the number of people who are involved in getting your food order to your front door, then we still cooperate. Humans also have so much to learn to operate in our social and technological world, and it's not an efficient way to do it by trial and error. Therefore, humans have to learn from each other. And if I were to tell you that we are the only species that actively teaches each other, you might understand how important it is.
We also have to cooperate to raise our very dependent children. Because of a combination of bipedality, walking on two legs, and a narrowed pelvis, we have to be born before we're ready, and that means we're very dependent when we are born. And that means it takes two parents to raise us, so cooperation is essential to our survival. But you see, people lie, and they cheat and they steal, and we have to be really, really good at spotting them, so we've had to develop a big cognitive architecture to enable us to do that. Also, we exist in a hierarchy like a lot of primates, there are some at the top, some at the bottom, and some squeezed in the middle. And we have to spend a lot of time monitoring everybody else in the hierarchy just to make sure that they're not going to pinch our space. We also have to spend a lot of time competing for resources and coordinating our behaviour. It would be much easier if we could just live on an island on our own and then we could wake up in the morning and do exactly what we wanted to do. But we have to coordinate with each other's needs.
And finally, the hardest cooperation of all is the cooperation between the sexes. And this is basically because we're trading different currencies. So, women want help with childcare, whereas men want to have the next opportunity to mate with the female. These are different currencies, and therefore to calculate that exchange rate takes a lot of cognitive brain power.
So, what has evolution come up with to motivate us to start relationships and then reward us for sticking in them? Evolution has come up with love. Love is biological bribery to motivate and reward us for starting and then continuing our survival-critical relationships with lovers, family, friends and children. To love is to survive, but how exactly does nature motivate us?
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Bye for now!
