The Evolution Of Love - Review

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 1999 by Michael Acree

The Evolution of Love. By Ada Lampert. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997, 132 pages. Cloth, $49.95.

Lampert attempts a grand synthesis in this story of exceptional interest and epic scope. She begins with a full page devoted to the Big Bang theory, argues plausibly along the way for maternal love as the prototype of love, and concludes with a chapter on homosexual love. Her material is well organized and well integrated, and the range is broad enough that many readers will find something new in these pages. A notable example is the unpublished work she did some years ago showing an association between breast cancer and the experience of a difficult separation in childhood.

Among the topics which are important to Lampert's account are the relation between love and warm-bloodedness; the relation between love, handedness, and speech; the disappearance of estrus; and possible mitochondrial involvement in the genetics of homosexuality. She observes, for example, that young mammals need more intensive care than the offspring of reptiles, which lack the biological substrates of love, including milk and tears. Noting that even left-handed mothers tend to hold babies with the head near the heart, she contends that right-handedness evolved from holding babies in this orientation, and that the localization of speech in the right hemisphere followed. She also adduces more unpublished data showing a strong "correlation" (point-biserial?) between handedness and vocabulary in 4-year-olds.

It is apparent from this very brief sampling of topics--if any demonstration were needed--that the evolution of love is an imposingly large subject for such a startlingly slim volume. The book is not correspondingly dense in compensation. Lampert's approach is broad and sweeping, and JSR readers will find that they know more about some topics than is presented here. Indeed, her generalizations are often glib enough to provoke an impulse to quibble: "There is no doubt that parents love their children even more than the children love them" (p. 16). Her style is readable and even poetic, though there are times when her poetry works for me--"Evolution has turned love into a subcontractor of the sun" (p. 116)--and times when it does not: "The arid, cold, hostile, predator-infested savanna of the gushing rivers" (p. 28); "Reptiles are even fonder of precedents than lawyers" (p. 49--but then, who's fond of lawyers?).

Lampert describes herself as a "sworn-in Darwinist," but one might guess from this text that she was sworn in 30 years ago. There is no indication that she means anything by evolution other than random-mutation-plus-natural-selection. It is not obvious to me what differences the recent work of, say, Susan Oyama or Richard Lewontin might make in her account; but one might still expect someone who is Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Psychology (in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the Ruppin Institute in Israel) to speak with more sophistication on the subject of evolution. One way in which her Darwinism appears naive, if not necessarily doctrinaire in the way that a swearing-in would imply, lies in what historiographers since Butterfield refer to as Whiggishness: the belief that humans are the endpoint toward which all creation has been evolving. For example, she writes: "The second variation [in devices of suckling mothers] is the placentalia, to which we belong and which, no doubt, is the last word in this area" (p. 20). A similar biological naivete is evident in her implicit concept of life: "The DNA molecule is `alive' because it replicates itself and thus creates new life, reproducing offspring" (p. 6). As is often pointed out, by this criterion mules are not alive even though DNA molecules are.

The most serious consequence of Lampert's particular biological focus is that it blinds her to the rather obvious role of culture. In support of the point that men have less biological investment in children than women do, for example, she cites 1993 data on single-parent African-American families--quite oblivious to the fact that this pattern can be interpreted, at least in large part, in terms of unintended consequences of legislation in the past three decades. Similarly, she writes as though taboos on sexual expression were biologically based:

   The cortex does not like low sexuality and tries to suppress it.... We are
   left with the dilemma of either forgoing powerful stimulation and even
   orgasm or of feeling guilty.... We must learn to live with contradictions,
   to keep our dirty fantasies privately to ourselves, and not to express them
   openly. (p. 65)

There is a trivial sense, of course, in which politics or ethics can be considered cortical (as opposed, say, to reptilian), but it also goes without saying that very little is explained by interpreting biology so broadly. Interestingly, having declared the cortex responsible for sexual guilt, Lampert evidently felt the need to reassure us (us?) about the acceptability of oral sex and sadomasochistic fantasies.