On 12/30/2013 10:20 AM, Saul Luizaga wrote:
> You didn't get the scientific angle, and she is a PhD Anthropology
> Biologist, so probably you don't know much more than her.
>
> Social pressure? no, she demonstrated and my romantic feeling are not at
> all social pressure, are my own need for it. It can't be less tainted
> with social interaction because that's deeply interwoven in the loving
> process, so you plan to fall in love with a plant or some other
> inanimted object? Adultery is possible because is simply a capacity of
> any human being, sex for the pleasure, curiosity, novelty, reproduction,
> etc, meaningless, shallow and non-romantic but it's possible, we feel
> the attraction. I don't doubt that probably there is at least 1
> exception to the rule of falling in live of 1 person, as a brain
> anomaly, but normal brains simply can't, as demonstrated.
>
Err. They took people a) in love, b) in societies where the "assumption" 
is that you can be only in love with one person at a time, c) its 
socially, all through your life, pushed that this is the case, d) 
conveniently failed to not just include homosexuals (never mind the 
other study someone else conducted), but also excluding, I have to 
presume, people in complex relationships, with more than one partner, or 
even swingers, then... extrapolated from that the ***assumption*** that 
this is hardwired behavior, with no effects from the social environment 
effecting their brain plasticity, and concluded that you "can't fall in 
love with more than one person". Right...

This is going to be a bit long, so.. short version - Unless you can 
connect this to a specific genetic predisposition, and no one can, at 
all, the default assumption **must be**, based on current understanding 
of brain plasticity, be that a) there may be some trends in the brain 
for some things, but b) how they are expressed is entirely driven by 
learned experience, therefor, short of performing unethical experiments 
on people, there is no way to validate results based on near universal 
assumptions about relationships, and the "expected" behaviors that 
people learn to associate with them. There is, never the less, plenty of 
evidence to suggest that people can be attracted to the novelty of more 
than one person at a time, that such novelty wears off, that divorce 
rates are, ironically, often highest among people that believe in love 
as sort of primal force, driving them together (i.e., get married 
because of it), and that it will last, and well.. just a lot of 
inconsistencies between the assumptions made about it, and the reality. 
None of which undermines the research, as long as you don't presume its 
a universal, hardwired, "normal", other than simply in being the most 
common behavior observed, and especially cannot be used to justify wild 
claims about how it "evolved", never mind when. And.. it only gets worse 
when you start talking about "gender differences", like she is doing, 
and, again, assuming that they are, somehow, in no way, at all, 
influenced by a vast, overriding, and nearly universal, assumption 
"about" how men and woman are supposed to act (one is tempted, in this 
case, at the very least, to ask if she can show that such differences 
persist in cultures where men, if too many in number, have been 
"feminized", by their families, and raised as women, or if, as many 
things I have read on the subject seem to suggest is likely, those 
differences disappear).

Now.. for the kind of ranty bit...

This is why a lot of people, especially geneticists, really seriously 
have problems with much of the research done by evolutionary 
psychologists, and/or those skirting the edge of that so called field. 
Because they can't show, clearly, unbiased, and undeniably, that the 
results they come up with are ***not socialized***, instead of being 
somehow hardwired in, they are always missing data, even when its right 
under their noses. But especially if its not, and they, say.. need to 
look for data from something other than the self-selected group of 
people, which they can't show are actually normal, who involve 
themselves with such studies (how do you know, without other data that 
the results you are getting are not anomalies in the nature of those who 
are prone to join studies?) And, that is without mentioning that all 
such studies are invariably done on people with "very similar social 
ideals", such as being all Westerners, and almost certainly not, say.. 
people from obscure tribes that are not exposed to all of the social 
queues we are, from birth. Etc.

Then, having collected this data, they leap to conclusions, which, 
somehow, always seem to reflect, despite existing contra-indicative 
examples, the "existing norm". Of course, the ones doing truly useless 
work then go beyond just making assumptions that their collected data, 
and apparently results, which they can't be sure is not just reflective 
of the cultures they studied (all of which are Christian/Post Christian, 
heavily influenced by the same history, literature, assumptions about 
gender and social status, and relationships, etc., to the extent that 
you will find little or not variation in such assumptions between them), 
and try to come up with silly just so stories about how it was adaptive, 
and which caveman first invented it, and why, and when, and for what 
reason it was needed as an adaptation, etc. all, a priori, prima facie, 
ad absurdum.

But, seriously... No one can think of any case, personally or otherwise, 
in which this presumptions isn't not just incorrect, but logically 
incoherent? The brain doesn't deal in binaries, but in spectrum. While 
one relationship can "dampen" another, or even itself, in the same way 
that the eyes adjust to light that is always there, by ignoring it, or 
sound that isn't important, by ignoring it, or things that are otherwise 
constant, by reducing their influences, over time, or even the first 
time you taste something is tangibly better, or worse, than all other 
experiences of it, the only consistent reality here is that, "novelty 
wins over continuous experience", in all cases. So.. How can you be 
wired to only react to "one" novel relationship at a time? To claim that 
there is something unique, or even stupider, permanent, about such 
novelty, especially with "love" is, again, inconsistent with the 
evidence of the ridiculous number of people that fall out of it, as well 
as the idea that you would be unable to pursue more than one such 
experience at a time.

Mind you, it would be harder to do, so it would probably be mentally 
easier, in the short term to concentrate entirely on one new obsession, 
over others, but.. what happens when its no longer novel? And, sure, 
some people might be better able to deal with more than one such 
"novelty" at a time, than others.

But.. the idea that its impossible, or worse, that it therefor marks 
something uniquely human (which, for those doing these sorts of studies 
always seems to be, "Justifies our presuppositions about normal, long 
term, relationships, and proves that the ones that F it up are the 
abnormal ones.." 60% divorce rate (I think the statistic is), among 
people that actually believe this nonsense means its "normal", and such 
assumptions are justified? Right.... Pull the other one, its got bells on.)

Note: I don't disbelieve the study, I just think its rather like 
examining the, "normal behavior of wild dogs", i.e., those not trained 
to act a certain way, from puppy hood, by studying trained police dogs. 
You data is useless outside of the context of the overall culture, 
social statuses, and conditions of the subjects. To show it to be 
correct, you need to.. well, find some way to step outside of the box 
you are stuck in. And, its damn near impossible to do that, at all, in a 
world where 99% of the population has **all** been exposed to the same 
basic, generalized, assumptions about how relationships are supposed to 
work, and the brains of said subjects are able to show sufficient 
plasticity to consider both, say, atheism, and religions as making 
sense, or US Republican policy, and the writings of Karl Marx are both 
"sound", given the right upbringing. Yet, we are supposed to presume 
that adults, who spent their entire lives in a culture where one man + 
one women is considered the norm, getting pissed off at each other about 
just having tea with someone of the wrong sex, without telling your 
girlfriend/boyfriend (or, even if you do tell them), etc., plus TV, and 
books, and movie, etc.. None of this can, itself, change the wiring of 
the brain, and its behavior when "falling in love", so we are to, thus, 
presume that its "supposed to be" that way, "is" that way, in all cases, 
and "isn't just a cultural artifact", why exactly?

Maybe they, "found a gene for it"? lol

Sorry.. just, every time one of these studies comes out I groan. You 
can't separate, at least ethically, people from what is, due to the 
spread of certain ideas, all over the place, people's "behavior", from 
the "culture", yet, these studies always seem to bloody assume you can 
do that, because its "the way the brain works", even if they can't show, 
clearly, how you get from the genetics, to the behavior. And, even when 
you can, you get stupid things like the whole oxitocin thing, where 
someone is touting is as the "chemical of love", even as someone else is 
pointing out that it crops up in every single instance from mere 
friendships, to deciding you really like a certain flavor of ice cream. 
Maybe a 100 years, or 200, or something, we can give a definitive claim 
about these things, in the context of the whole species, but the result 
is already, based on the problems actual geneticists are having pinning 
anything down to such absolutes, instead of just, "This is within the 
range of possible behaviors, but almost all of it is, on some level 
driven by learning.", going to be vastly more complex, and make a whole 
mess of "experts" on human behavior look like complete rubes.

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