love
Love as an Evolutionary Adaptation
Submitted by atuttle on Fri, 05/02/2008 - 3:21pm.
By its very nature, love is an irrational and capricious
emotion. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines love twelve different ways
(thirteen if you count the tennis term), and there have been countless attempts
made by poets, musicians, philosophers, and literary figures to distill and
define the essence of this powerful emotion.
At first thought, love appears to be too complex and ambiguous to define
in a scientific manner. As Professor Le
mentioned, social scientists do not attempt to operationalize complex emotions
like love in their entirety. For example, by demonstrating love-directed
behavior in one instance is a study able to be generalized to other
The Science of Love
Submitted by Amelia on Sat, 04/26/2008 - 3:21pm.
“Why do we fall in love?” is a
widespread question in society. From the popularity of this question, and the lack of
sufficient research to answer it, our presentation topic was created. We felt that this topic involved all aspects
of the NBS concentration (and what it stands for), and would lead to an
interesting, informative, and thought-provoking discussion stemming from the
many un-answered questions of love. The
first half of our presentation offered current evidence for why, and how,
people may fall in love. While there are numerous theories that attempt to
answer the question of why we fall in love, evolutionary theory seems to point










