The Love Equation

Love is a complicated thing and finding someone who you can love and who will love you back is the first step down that desirable but complicated path. Making a romantic match is like matching two puzzle pieces when each piece is a puzzle itself. We have to consider all the complexities of each person and then only once we have a good picture of the individuals can we consider how well they would fit as a couple. But what actually determines fit? Both old wisdom and new science tell us a lot about what makes a good fit and the list is pretty long. It includes similar social and economic class, similar intelligence and physical attractiveness, similar political and religious views, difference in dominant vs. submissive, etc. These factors are a jumble, though, they all seem to help but none of them appear necessary or sufficient. Dating services work by shoving all of these factors together and then rating partners on how well they match up. This works because that’s the best service they can offer since they have a limited pool. They match you with your first, second, third, etc. best match until enough of the unmeasured factors also match up. What dating services can’t do is identify that threshold point between success and failure. To do that we need a unified framework that considers all of the factors together. This is where ecology steps in [1].

Many fish in the sea: what biodiversity theory tells us about finding love

How do we find love?

It may feel like I am jumping the gun a bit, coming back after two years and jumping straight to such a big question, but those two years have been spent doing the experiments for my PhD thesis on the evolution and ecology of species coexistence. While I generally consider my thesis work and my emotions work as two separate bodies, this series of posts on romantic love is the most natural launching point as it represents the overlap of the two. It is a great transition from my pure science to thinking about more applied questions.

And anyways, people don’t really want to know what love is. What they really want is to know how to find it! People’s drive to find love (I will focus on romantic love as that is the most complete case) is a huge industry. Actually, multiple industries, fueling match-making websites and consulting services, countless books and talk shows, therapists, speed-dating events, and billions of man-hours of gossip and conversation.

2c.ii. – Justifying love

Rationalizing emotions is not particularly socially acceptable and trying to rationalize an emotion as strong and socially important as love is potentially a dangerous endeavour.  I very much doubt I could get away with simply stating that love is the highest form of trust, acting to increase the propagation of our genes, but I do have supporting evidence.  The best arguments at my disposal are considering who we love, showing that my evolutionary model accounts for these choices, and showing how our responses to those we love correspond to what we would expect for targets of high trust in my general model of emotions. 

2c.i. A crazy little thing called Love

                What is love?  It’s a damn good question, one for which the internet simultaneously provides hundreds of answers and no answer at all.  The question is a matter of philosophy and religion, grazed by psychologists and all but abandoned by hard science.  Love is the emotion of the heart, of the soul.  It is what makes us act selflessly and often irrationally, even absurdly.  It is a gift from God or an odd by-product of culture, beautiful and all-important but beyond our explanation.  To get to the heart of it all: Love is what differentiates us from the beasts.

Well… wait, does it?  What is love really?  Can we discern its function?  And can we really say that only humans really love while everything else (e.g. I feel that my dog loves me) is simply personification?  This is the question I will attempt to answer here: what is love and why does it seem so extraordinary? So irrational? So… human?

3a. Personalities - programmed for a cave and a spear or suburbia and a credit card?

                Emotions act to simplify the world, summarizing our experiences into a few metrics.  So, for example, when you are trying to decide whether or not to eat an apple you don’t have to first recall every past experience involving apples.  Instead your emotions have already summarized each event and the results have been pooled into one value characterizing your past experiences as somewhere between very rewarding or very detrimental on average.  The general rules, such as both joy and pleasure increase trust, will remain fixed among individuals and species.  What will change are the parameters of those rules: how much weight is placed on pleasure versus trust, old versus recent experiences.  These parameters constitute our personality and while they will change overtime due to learning they must have an initial condition: our base personality, the component of our emotions most susceptible to evolution.

3. Personalities - adaptive humanity

                The model of emotions presented in 2B generalizes beyond humans to all organisms with the cognitive capacity to consider the past and the future.  However, as Robert Burns put to words in his famous poem To a Mouse, many believe that this consideration of past and future is a rare trait, bestowed on humans and maybe a select few “higher” organisms.  So let me revise, focusing on the result rather than the mechanism: any organism that learns, changing its behaviour based on past success or failure, likely uses the same cognitive processes which we experience as emotions.  They may not experience emotions in the same way as humans, but parsimony (things are more likely to change a little than a lot) suggests that in a general sense learning organisms probably have a similar experience to humans.  So, to understand the specifics of human emotions we have to move up one step to personality.  While our emotions characterize how we feel it is our personalities while characterize what we feel in a given situation.

 

In 2b I stated the rules determining the path you follow along the emotion decision tree.  For example, if you feel trust towards a target you will go down a path leading to invest-or-request as opposed to fight-or-flight.  Whether you feel trust or disgust though is, at the very least, a product of your naïve level of trust, your past experience with the target and similar targets, and how much weight you put on different types of experiences.  While traits like your naïve level of trust or the weight you put on direct versus indirect knowledge will change over time, they must have starting values, what I will call the base personality.  It is this base personality, the genetic component (the nature in “nature vs. nurture”) which natural selection shapes.  While there are clearly differences within species (just look at the range of personalities amongst children) there are larger differences between species.  It is these differences that lead to the young of social animals being playful rather than aggressive and predators being more curious than their cautious prey.  So what is the base personality of humans and, more importantly, what factors have lead to our current state?  This is the question I will attempt to answer in this series. 

2a. Emotions: the currency of the mind

            I had a lot of trouble deciding what I would do my first real post on, but in the end it seemed natural to start with (what was supposed to be) a brief description of my views on emotions.  This seemed like a good starting point not only because this is a blog about the struggle between emotions and the idea of evolution and I summarized evolution previously but because for me it is a bit of a beginning. 
  

I didn’t know I wanted to be a biologist until I was forced to take a biology course in my first year of university.  I have a vague recollection of being in elementary school and being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.  After some though, I concluded that while I didn’t know what the job was, what I really wanted to be was someone who worked with math and animals.  Despite how perfectly that describes what I do now, as the school system began to teach me biology I quickly realized that it was a foolish goal since to work with animals you studied biology and clearly all biology is is memorizing what things are called, something I am terrible at.  This sets the stage for a brief moment in my grade 10 humanities class by clarifying that at that time I wasn’t interested in (more like actively scorning) biology, much less evolution.  We had been practicing rapid writing for some end of year exam by getting a topic and writing a few paragraphs on it in 20 minutes, after which some people would read theirs.  In the class of interest, the topic was “what is fear” and as far as I could tell the class response was unanimous, with writings focused on one idea: fear is what limits you, it’s what you must conquer.  Now maybe it was simply a product of the stories we are told growing up, maybe it is how we naturally view our emotions or maybe a being a small nerdy kid growing up had given me a more timid viewpoint than everyone else who presented but my view was very different.  To me, the natural response was that fear is your guardian angel, that which protects you and guides you from harm.  Every time I think back to that memory I am always surprised by how telling it is about where I would end up and how I would think about the world.  It is that functional way perspective on emotions, which hopefully differs at least in some way from your own so as to be interesting, that I will begin explore in this post.

            So what are emotions?  First, avoiding looking up a definition my inclination is that they are a psychological state which motivates an action to be taken.  This seems too broad though as is includes clearly physiological states such as pain, hunger, exhaustion, and stress when what I am interested in more abstract states like fear, love, and happiness (update: apparently the former are called homeostatic emotions while the latter are classic emotions).  Would it then be appropriate to say “a purely psychological state” to discriminate between the two?  To me, the real issue is temporal: the former group of states are psychological interpretations of the immediate physical condition while I will argue that the latter are predictions of future conditions.  This quality of prediction is what makes emotions interesting. Like the discussion in the last post about laws and theories the former is complete in and of itself while the precise influence of the latter is highly condition dependent: the Second Law of Thermodynamics always has the same effect regardless of conditions just as being tired always means you need rest while adaptation can be hindered by genetic drift (evolutionary changes due to random survival and/or reproduction) and trust can be overwhelmed by fear. 

Here is my functional view of emotions: they convert a large amount of cost-benefit information into a few units of emotional currency such that your conscious mind can quickly integrate and respond to it.  In the rest of this post I will strive to explain what I mean by or the importance of each part of this description.