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.