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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biology of romantic love | 3/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_of_romantic_love | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:53:39.742070+00:00 | kb-cron |
Although the exact moment during human evolution is unknown, modern romantic love is usually believed to have evolved either during or after the time of bipedalism. The earliest hominid found with extensive evidence of bipedalism (and some evidence of pair bonding) is Ardipithecus ramidus, from about 4.4 million years ago, although it may also be the case that bipedalism is older than this. It has been proposed that monogamous pair bonding (which is rare among mammals) evolved during this time, because walking bipedally requires mothers to carry infants in their arms or on their hip, instead of on their backs. With their hands occupied, mothers would be more vulnerable, requiring additional help for food and protection from males of the species (hence, husbands or fathers). A different selection pressure which has been proposed is the evolution of infant altriciality (immaturity and helplessness) and large brain size at birth, which occurred around 2 million years ago. At this time, brain size became so large that a fully-developed infant's head could not fit through the mother's pelvic birth canal (known as the obstetricial dilemma), requiring the infant to be born early and underdeveloped in comparison to other species. This would have also placed a greater burden on mothers, and made paternal support more valuable. Due to the general scarcity of evidence, it is still also possible that romantic love (or a precursor to it) predated bipedalism and altriciality, possibly originating in a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, 5–8 million years ago. While chimpanzees primarily mate opportunistically, some of their rarer reproductive strategies have features reminiscent of romantic love (involving mate guarding, and a more-than-fleeting association). One assumption behind hypotheses based on fossil evidence is that less sexual dimorphism in body mass (i.e., similarity) is indicative of monogamy, but the comparative similarity between the sexes in human body mass occurred as recently as 500,000 years ago. This suggests that there may have been multiple steps in the evolution of human pair bonding, and romantic love may have evolved during any of these periods.
=== Courtship attraction ===
Helen Fisher's theory is that romantic love (which she considers distinct from attachment) is a motivation system for choosing and focusing energy on a preferred mating partner. According to Fisher, this brain system evolved for mammalian mate choice, also called "courtship attraction". In this phenomenon, a preferred mating partner is chosen based on a display of physical traits (such as a peacock's tail feathers) or other behaviors. For humans, Fisher also includes the attraction to personality traits and other characteristics in her mate choice theory. In most species, courtship attraction is as brief as lasting only minutes, hours, days, or weeks, but intense romantic love can last much longer in humans. Fisher believes that during the timeline of human evolution, mammalian courtship attraction may have become prolonged and intensified as pair bonding evolved, eventually becoming the phenomenon of romantic love today. A critique of Fisher's theory published by Adam Bode holds that courtship attraction only encompasses love at first sight attraction or a crush, and the core components of romantic love (including the intense attraction and obsessive thoughts, in addition to attachment) evolved as a co-option of mother-infant bonding. A study on love at first sight found that, even though people reporting the experience retrospectively will recall features resembling passionate love ("constant thoughts about the person and the desire to be with [them]"), people reporting love at first sight currently after just meeting the potential partner only report neutral scores (neither agreeing nor disagreeing) on a romantic love measure that includes a passion component. Some authors have speculated that the remembered account of falling in love at first sight (with high passion) is often actually a memory confabulation. Furthermore, the study found that the experience of love at first sight was related to the physical attractiveness of the potential partner. This led the researchers to conclude that love at first sight is actually a strong initial attraction, rather than resembling the state of being in love. Bode argues this more closely resembles the concept of courtship attraction, and can be considered a separate system from core romantic love components. Courtship attraction shares similar behaviors with romantic love in humans, and both involve activation of dopaminergic reward circuits. Courtship attraction may be characterized by dopamine, oxytocin and opioid activity, but little is known about it because existing studies were not designed to target it.