symposium on love by guggenheim public

Gulbenkian love essay

                                     Amore dal profondo

Sono un biologo, specificatamente un biologo riproduttivo, sono stato sposato due volte e sto per sposarmi una terza volta, ho avuto sei figli.
Ho cambiato molti modi di pensare la biologia riproduttiva, soprattutto col mio libro Riproduzione del 1977 ma anche con le mie ricerche cliniche e di laboratorio sugli spermatozoi nei tratti femminili, saggi su vari argomenti; dalla metamorfosi fino agli effetti materni nello sviluppo, e il mio libro sull'evoluzione umana, Il Primate Privilegiato(1989).
Recentemente, ho scritto libri e trattati/articoli col matematico Ian Stewart (scrive per la rubrica mensile di matematica dell'American Scientific), specialmente Il Collasso del Caos e Invenzioni di Realtà ma anche La Scienza del Discworld con Terry Pratchett, e un romanzo fantascientifico , Wheelers, che verrà pubblicato nell'ottobre 2000. Come ha detto l'autore di fantascienza Theodore Sturgeon della sua variegata produzione, la maggior parte, in un modo o in un'altro, rigurdava l'amore!
Questa é la mia risposta alla vostra petizione per portare il punto di vista -a-scientifico al livello delle vostre interazioni di Scultura Umana. Sistemi complessi, la magia delle loro interazioni, e i modi in cui l'uomo vive sono vengono trasformati in rapporti emozionali complesse, complicate, occasionalmente semplici , sistemi sessuali e simbiotici,come i modi in cui gli organismi biologici vengono trasformati in complessi, complicati, occasionalmente semplici rapporti evoluzioanri ed ecologici sono la mia costante delizia.
Le cosiddette spiegazioni di questi schemi che si trovano nei popolari e moderni libri di biologia e certo nei testi scolastici, ysando la teoria del gioco, parole come sfruttamento, format tipo io-vinco-e-tu-perdimi portano alla disperazione Credo che vi siano molti rapporti simbiotici nella biologia che possano essere esplicabili, cosa che può venire apprezzata se non capita accademicalmente in termini di un amore primitivo e universale , comportamento che gli organismi sviluppano perché é migliore di altri sistemi, sistemi di sfruttamento, per continuare nel futuro. Questa é una visione tipo quella di Lynn Margulis, ma da un punto di vista piuttosto diverso. Come lei, credo che Haldane e Hamilton si siano sbagliati nel radicare l'altruismo in selezione dei simili, richiami di allarme e condivisione del cibo in reciproco favore ( si dice che Haldane abbia detto che sarebbe saltato in un fiume per salvare due fratelli, o quattro cugini.....!). Anche l'atteggiamento molto più umano di John Maynard Smith, che questi esercizi conta-fagioli ci mostrano che, contro-intuitivamente, l'altruismo ;
  

   



Here's the pair to the question "Did it get there?"
Gulbenkian love essay 

                                    Love from the bottom up…

I am a biologist, specifically a reproductive biologist, and have had two marriages, am about to enter a third, have fathered six children. I have changed several ways of thinking in reproductive biology, mostly by my book Reproduction in 1977 but also by my laboratory and clinical research on spermatozoa in female tracts, essays on various topics from metamorphosis to maternal effects in development, and my book on human evolution, The Privileged Ape (1989).
Recently, I have produced books and papers with the mathematician Ian Stewart (he does the Scientific American monthly Mathematics column), especially The Collapse of Chaos and Figments of Reality – but also The Science of Discworld with Terry Pratchett, and a science-fiction novel Wheelers to be published in October 00. As the science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon said of his varied output “Most of this has been about love, one way or another!”.

This is my response to your plea to bring the - a - scientific viewpoint to your Human Sculpture interactions. Complex systems, the magic of their interactions, and the ways in which human lives are drawn into complex, complicated, occasionally simple emotional relationships – sexual and symbiotic systems, the ways in which biological organisms are drawn into complex, complicated, occasionally simple evolutionary and ecological relationships – are my abiding delight.
So-called “explanations” of these patterns, in modern “pop” biology books and indeed in student textbooks, using game theory, words like exploitation, I-win-so-you-lose formats drive me to despair. I do not believe that such “bean-counting”, pretending that qualitative phenomena can be made more explicable by putting imaginary numbers in (to models like Prisoner’s Dilemma Games, where choice of prize and penalty rates are crucial to outcome), tells us about the biology; it is, however, eminently examinable! I think that there are many symbiotic relationships in biology which are explicable – which can be appreciated if not understood academically – in terms of a primitive and universal love behaviour which organisms evolve because it is better than other systems, exploitative systems, at continuing into the future. This is a view like that of Lynn Margulis, but from a quite different viewpoint.
Like her, I believe that Haldane and Hamilton were mistaken in rooting altruism in “kin selection”, alarm calling and food sharing in reciprocal favours – quantitative favours.
(Haldane was supposed to have said that he would “…jump into the river to save two siblings, or four cousins,…”!). Even John Maynard Smith’s much more humane stance, that these bean-counting exercises show us that, counter-intuitively, altruism will evolve in Darwinian systems are, I feel sure, based in reproductive theory which is too naïve. This argument is all too often based in concepts like ESS’s (“Evolutionary Stable Strategies”) which have no real exemplars in the natural world but can only work in computers. Games of Prisoner’s Dilemma, set up to show specific pay-offs, fail to convince me; even iterated games cheat on biology in a thousand ways. I explain some of the same problems, but I lean heavily on real biological examples, running by agreed biological rules, and using commitment, especially over-commitment (Nesse 1999), to attain biological success.

To do this I must teach some reproductive biology, I’m afraid. Four topics: real reproductive arithmetic (The Grim Sower); contradictions between adaptations for growing up and for reproducing (living versus loving); privilege (what parents give to offspring); and the reproduction of culture as biology (the various Make-a-Human-Being kits in different human cultures) are necessary to sit my argument upon. Love, for me, arises at the intersection of these topics and as soon as it is identified as a major evolutionary force, spreads, ramifies throughout biology and into nearly all of the interactions of people with each other. But before we can have this flowering we must prepare the soil and plant the seeds.

There is a real problem in teaching the first example, because we would all much sooner think about love than about death.
All of the natural history programmes you enjoy so much on television show mating, cuddly babies, and all the positive side of sexual reproduction in mammals and birds – even in reptiles, fishes, some photogenic invertebrates like mantis shrimps and cuttlefish. The animals we are shown as juveniles “…grow up and reproduce in their turn.” (this is so often the phrase used in the “voice-over”, and I wince each time I hear it).
Sorry, but it ain’t so, and we have to face this: very nearly all sexually- produced creatures fail to breed. A breeding female starling in the English Midlands lays about 16 eggs in her life, on average (2-5 in a nest, several years of breeding) but the number of starlings stays much the same from year to year. This means, inevitably, that two parents in this generation, on average, produce two parents in the next generation. So fourteen baby starlings die, mostly by suffocation complicated by digestion (something eats them… that’s what makes food chains), for each two that breed. Our female frogs lay about 10,000 eggs in their lives, and only two survive to breed; a female codfish, on average, lays forty million eggs and (if she were exquisitely well calibrated!) 39, 999, 998 die for each two that breed. It is against this background that we should look at surviving and breeding adaptations.

It is not difficult to see that animals frequently require opposite solutions for surviving, feeding, escaping from predators as compared with finding mates, copulating, investing in offspring. Here are some examples. Colouring: camouflage is a good idea for hiding from prey and predator, but your mate must be able to find you. Similarly with sound: it’s a good idea to keep quiet – unless there are special mating calls. Food utilisation: while growing up, invest in getting bigger and stronger quicker, but breeding females should divert food to yolk or milk, and breeding males should use their energy to get and hold territories against other males, for example. While growing up, avoid your peers because they compete for food and you can catch diseases from them, they might call the attention of predators to you (unless you’re in a herd or shoal, getting protection from sheer numbers – but many of you then starve…); but to breed sexually, you must meet at least one congener, even if briefly. Avoid body fluids of your congeners like the plague – they are likely to carry a plague; but when breeding, donating and receiving body fluids is dangerous (most wild animals have a high incidence of venereal infections) but necessary. Probably because of these contradictions, many animals separate the special breeding behaviour from the vegetative behaviour: sometimes, as in bees and wolves, only a tiny proportion of all animals breeds, and the others feed them; other animals have special breeding seasons when they don’t feed, and stoke up during the rest of the year. Mouth–brooding fishes can’t feed when they’re carrying babies, lactating female mammals can’t get out to the shops much and usually rely on their mates (or, like bears, on stored food). Parent birds feeding chicks are usually starving themselves.
The point here is that all these animals have specially- wired alternative behaviour to do with breeding, often requiring the reversal of just those tricks which enabled them to survive to breed.
Furthermore, being those organisms that have come through when nearly all their siblings haven’t, the breeders have usually got plenty of food reserves, and can clear vegetative hurdles without problems. They have survived the cut–throat competition, have achieved adulthood and can relax vegetatively – although they frequently have to face sexual competition of quite different kinds.

In my 1977 book, called very arrogantly just “Reproduction”, I expanded the usage of our word privilege to include all those things that parents give up in their own lives to help their children. Not only expensive schools and better books and reading-glasses for the privileged child, but yolk and milk and even the food supplies in the seeds of cereals; we subvert these away from the chick, the calf, the wheat, barley and corn offspring to our own use. (Don’t worry, it all turns out happily, we’re not going to be this gloomy, or solemn, all the way through.) It is very clear, as soon as you think about this as part of the offspring’s hereditary (not genetic) endowment, that different parents endow all their offspring more or less well, and that the different offspring of the same parents also differ in their endowment. In Britain we say “As alike as peas in a pod!”; they’re not, the ones at the end are much smaller, deprived, as are the mouse and pig embryos at the tip and base of the uterus. Which offspring get the goods, and which receive less than their due, is not to do with the genetics of that egg or seed before it is fertilised. After fertilisation, there are some well-documented cases where paternal genes demand more from the mother for this embryo. But, in general, the variation in privilege is not correlated with the particular combination of gene variants that that embryo or seed has received. Nevertheless we must believe that, in general and overall, those embryos given the bigger box to stand on will win out over their contemporaries – even their siblings – and contribute more to the future. On average, these will be from those parents with most in hand, who have cleared the vegetative hurdles with most to spare and can afford to be most generous to their own offspring. “To them that hath shall be given…”.

So the series I presented above - starling, frog, cod - should be seen as progressively less privileged. Biologists used to arrange organisms on a scale from K-strategists, who invest lots in each offspring, to r- strategists who cast out millions of offspring with little provision for each: cod is at the r end, starling is K (modern biologists have a many-dimensional classification, see for example Einum and Fleming 2000). Birds and mammals (as well as many other animals from earwigs to mouth-brooding cichlid fishes to alligators) give a lot of care to their young as well as supplying them with yolk and milk. Again, it’s probably a good idea to have parents who can afford to be generous – these have been the most successful ancestors, bye and large, and their lineages have progressively increased the privilege of offspring. Birds and mammals are the most obviously privileged, K-strategist animals, and their privilege continues at least up to fledging in birds, weaning or leaving the nest in mammals.

We should distinguish two kinds of provision of privilege. Gnus and guinea-pigs keep their babies inside as long as possible, and release what are effectively little adults, able to recognise grass to eat and predators to avoid almost from birth – ostriches do that too. In contrast, rats, otters, and especially primates have very dependent babies, which require much interaction with mother (at least) to learn the ways of their worlds.
They have invented a new heredity, which is not merely quantitative (How much yolk? Is this mummy-mouse teat as productive as that one?) but qualitative (This is the way we break up prey animals… This is the alarm cry for snakes…).
Information, rather than just material, now passes from mother to offspring, and we have invented culture. Wild dogs, meercats, possibly dolphins and parrots, but especially primates like baboons have a rich social heredity that is learned by the juveniles and passed on in their turn.

Do note that this is not mere intelligence. Many animal lineages have produced relatively intelligent species, from cephalopod molluscs producing octopuses and cuttlefish to stomatopod crustaceans producing the mantis shrimps, and many others. While it is possible to produce rudimentary consciousness in some of these by inventing reciprocal games (my experience with octopuses and mantis shrimps is related in Figments of Reality), they have not been selected for many generations for the ability to learn from their own species. Rats, cats, dogs (and possibly some parrots – see Pepperburg 2000), and especially the social primates exhibit this different kind of learning, honed by generations of dependence on it – they seem to like it, to revel in it. In the wild they not only show intelligence, their social groups have a kind of communal extelligence which interacts with, instructs, the intelligence of the progeny in each generation (Stewart and Cohen 1997).

And here we come close to the origins of human loving, because human groups are pre-eminently extelligent, because humans are primarily The Privileged Ape. Human cultures transmit most of their accumulating cultural capital – primarily language, but then knowledge of agriculture and other technologies, myths and legends, mores and courtesies, as a broad stream of information from most of the previous generation to this
and future ones: “Our echoes roll from soul to soul, and grow forever and forever…”.

Note how little of what we – our extelligence – programmes into each child is actually overt information. Language learning is primary for all humans, and we have special brain regions which need organising by this learning if we are to use language. But the nursery language is very far from a coherent message–to– offspring, it communicates affection as much as message. And nursery myths and stories imbue the child with affective adjectives: “sly” is the fox in Western tales, “wise” is the owl; but for the Inuit the fox is “brave” and “fast”, the hero of their stories but the villain in ours. The fox is an icon, with no relation to the real biological fox; it is how we learn “sly” and “cunning” (Shepherd ). Just as kitten’s eyes must receive retinal images for the first few days after they open, for the brain circuits for later seeing to be established, so human children seem to need this vast but inchoate cultural input to be effective, affective beings. Think of it: no one would recommend programming a computer with the kind of nonsense scribble that we all enjoyed as children. Cuddly toys, from Teddy Bears to Wombles, inhabit all western nurseries. Why?
How do we become rational beings after this poor beginning? Perhaps rationality is not what it’s about.

Recent scientific models of the brain are far from the older “bucket to be filled” educational images. We now know that the brain, like the body, has many different organs within it, specialised in different directions (Her and Him, The Adapted Brain). Although the auditory cortex can apparently be persuaded to organise into columns like the visual cortex if the optic nerves are encouraged to grow into it (Nature ), the normal human brain has pre-organised regions with some striking, apparently built-in prejudices in all human cultures (these are not “genetic programmes” - they presumably wouldn’t be there without some input to organise them, like language or kitten’s vision). We all, even Eskimos, seem to prefer landscapes like the African savannah when comparisons are flashed up on screens; we all rather like sea-shores and swimming, which raises questions about whether there was a period when we lived on the sea-shore and were indeed somewhat aquatic.

But above all, we are all daft about babies. We see this as absolutely natural, of course, because our brains are all wired to do it. However, even in the context of our immediate relatives the chimpanzees, this is madly obsessional. When chimps have intergroup fights (“warfare”, according to Jane Goodall) they kill and eat the captured babies of the rival group apparently without the qualms we experience even thinking about it. Other primates, the langurs, have males who regularly kill the babies of previous dominant males, and all the animals then eat them. Lions do this too. Indeed, many kinds of female mammals have a “trial” first pregnancy, and regularly eat their first litter. Many female mammals will, of course, accept replacement babies – even of a different species – if their own babies have been removed, but this is very different from our obsession with babies, baby-shapes, “cuddly” toys.
Film makers exploit this: the later Mickey Mouse converged on to the outline of a two-year-old child, as did ET! We are “turned on” by all baby mammals – dogs and cats exploit this by becoming more and more juvenile-looking as they become domesticated – from goats to lions, even by baby birds, reptiles, even by tadpoles! Clearly, loving and protecting our own babies is very good, very biological, very Darwin.
But why should we find our neighbour’s babies attractive, babies of other human kinds even more attractive? Why should we buy dog food for our puppies and put up with the parasitism of kittens, taking privilege from our own children? My answer in The Privileged Ape was a kind-of genetic one: surviving babies should be adopted because they have shown themselves resistant to local diseases and should be good mates for your own progeny – your grandchildren will be survivors too. I now think that a better answer (both may be “true”, whatever that means…) is the one that leads to love.

Some ants make slaves of other ants (instead of killing and eating them).
This can only happen because those ants have lost (if they ever had) ways of distinguishing “us” from “them”. Nearly all of the lives of most of these ants does not include meeting strange ants, so the discrimination has atrophied, and been lost. Some people make slaves of other peoples (instead of killing them). This can only happen because “they” are seen as potentially part of “our” culture.
Perhaps originally the australopithecines were like modern himpanzees, warfare between small groups resulted in the deaths of the losers. However, the very success of our extelligence has had a remarkable side-effect – nearly everyone we see, nearly all the things that concern us are part of our in-group – as in an ant colony. So, paradoxically, distinguishing “us” from “them” becomes less and less important as our growing culture makes most of our interactions internal to the group. An adaptation like “protect any child you see” becomes as good a maxim as “protect your own children at the expense of others”. When most of the environment becomes “our” environment, generalised inclusion of all children – including our symbiotic animals in agriculture, our mouser cats and our protective dogs, becomes a good rule-of-thumb. It makes slavery possible, but then extension of our extelligence makes emancipation mandatory.

There may, for most human cultures, have been an intermediate phase in which puberty rites (for example, but there were other systematic behaviours too) excluded those juveniles who could not identify with tribal mores. In general, puberty rituals select the obedient, the child who is more frightened of the imagined future than of the actual pain he (usually a “he”) is about to suffer. By setting up and selecting for imagined punishments we have selected ourselves for obedience to authority (Cohen 1989). This “privilege” evolutionary story is in some ways more successful than the intellectual, rational one which leads to Homo sapiens (“wise man…”). That story starts “Once upon a time there was a nerve cell…”, goes on “Then it got some friends…”, continues “head ends and brains…” and climaxes “… and then we got Einstein!”.
The privilege story explains Eichmann too. But it’s very equivocal about democracy.

By selecting all of the members of our tribal group by the same rituals, we immerse ourselves in a common culture which, for tribal societies (like the pretend-Orthodox Jewish one I grew up in, in London’s East End) has every behaviour either mandatory or forbidden. Primitive monotheism was a spiritual externalisation of the one-culture extelligence (Abraham was the myth-figure who did it for me). Our culture saw the goyim around us as definitely “other”. However, as the extelligence takes in more and more of the world of each person, we are trained to see human commonality around us. We learn to make ourselves more flexible, to appreciate more of the technical and the human world around us. Some of us are lucky enough to become teachers, and take the responsibility for extending our love to many students. We even learn to see other cultures as “the same as ours”, not the inimical other. I believe the resemblance to our diffuse cuddly–child–love is not accidental, but a parallel extension of our realisation of more and more of the world partaking of the nature of our world.

Now the synthesis, to try it out on you. We have, like all animals, special behaviour and special feelings about mate- attraction and mating and breeding, different from the ordinary maintenance-of-life (“vegetative” in biology-speak) feeding and finding shelter. We have brought this suite of pleasurable feelings into our love-for-children, our love-for- relatives, our love-for-cultural-group so that the pleasure we are selected to feel in these relationships reinforces them, makes us inclined to sacrifice feeding opportunities (or whatever other vegetative activities) for the good feelings these activities excite in us. Most of us soon learn that these reinforcements can be extended further, not only stroking cats and walking the dog, cuddling our children and mates, but taking pride in our football team, our country, our humanity.
Some of us go further, achieving that joy by appreciation of the human context in space and time. We joy in Earth’s variety of life, we regret and attempt to ameliorate our destruction of the environment. We appreciate our “civilised” context, which exchanges deaths of children for menstrual periods (most of our female ancestors alternated pregnancy and lactation). We realise that the environment was our context until very recently, but that the very success of our extelligence makes us the most important context for Earth’s environment.
We must manage it, extend our love to it.
We joy in that ancestral fish who came out of the water and whose lineage made the land vertebrates; we treasure our airway-crossing-our-foodway and remember that fish each time we cough. We wonder at that fish’s anatomy, which mixed up its excretory and reproductive systems and made sex a “dirty” business for its extelligent descendants. We have dirty books, more interesting novels because of that concatenation of organ systems in that crucial ancestor (other fishes in those seas had different anatomies…). We marvel at dinosaurs, at the meteorite impact that gave mammals their best chance at learning-in-the-nest (trial and, for the first time, non-fatal error!) and that started our extelligence. We even marvel at, and extend our love to, our descendants in imagined futures.
I think we do that because of our biological history, the brain organs we have selected for during our long history of intelligence and then extelligence. The loss of vegetative security which love engenders, and the joy it brings as we extend it further and further, are the strongest motivators of all of us people.

Love is what we are, now.

Jack Cohen

REFERENCES

COHEN, J. (1989) The Privileged Ape; cultural capital in the making of Man. 'Frontiers of Thought' series (ed. V. Serebriakoff). Carnforth, Lancs: Parthenon Press.

COHEN, J. AND STEWART, I. (1994) The Collapse of Chaos; simple laws in a complex world New York: Penguin, Viking

EINUM, S AND FLEMING I A (2000) Highly fecund mothers sacrifice offspring survival to maximize fitness. Nature 405 565-7

NESSE, R. (1999) Tangled up in blue: the rocky road to relationships. Science and Spirit Magazine 10 32…46

PEPPERBURG, I (2000) The Alex Story

1999 PRATCHETT, T, STEWART, I AND COHEN, J The Science of Discworld. Ebury Press

SHEPARD, P (1986?) Thinking Animals

1997 STEWART, I and COHEN, J.. Figments of Reality; the origins of the curious mind Cambridge University Press.

2000 STEWART, I and COHEN, J. Wheelers. (Time-Warner. In press, expected Oct 2000)