 Wysłany: Pią 3:43, 01 Kwi 2011 Temat postu: Air Max 2011 Shoes Book Excerpt - Why We Love The |
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| Like today's common chimps and bonobos, our first forebears must have lived in communities, often consisting of eighty to a hundred males and females. They slept high in the forest canopy, arose after dawn, and descended to the jungle floor to wander well-worn trails in their mutual home range. Members must have met and mixed singly or in small parties, eating and socializing intensely. These human ancestors knew who was family, friend, and foe. And they chattered among themselves with at
Love in the Trees The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever, With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one another’s being mingle:-- Why not I with thine? Palm trees, fig trees, wild pear trees, mahogany trees, evergreen trees, trees, trees,Air Max 2011 Shoes, and more trees carpeted East Africa 8 million years ago. Here lived the last of our forest-dwelling ancestors. Anthropologists have little direct evidence of their daily lives. But our first forebears probably lived much as modern chimpanzees do. We share over 98 percent of our DNA with these creatures. "Common" chimps and their smaller chimp relatives called bonobos still live in what is left of that primal African environment. And chimps display many traits that our common ancestor most likely shared. How did we come to court and love the way we do? Bad Bull didn't shower Tia with poetry to prove he was king of elephants. Skipper found his little beaver mate one spring evening; he didn't sing rock 'n' roll songs to a thousand assembled female beavers to impress them first. Misha fell in love with Maria the moment Maria wagged her doggy tail and invited him to play. All animals have mating preferences. And most have evolved courtship plumage of one kind or another to dazzle their would-be lovers. But no creatures except human beings parade about with such extravagant displays as sonnets and skydiving. But Miller never tells us when, where, or why human beings evolved these special talents. And I have not explained how our species transformed from creatures who felt a temporary attraction for a "special" individual into men and women who are willing to die for "him" or "her." Something happened deep in time to produce the human drive to love. “Love’s Philosophy” As psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues, many of our exceptional human traits, such as our ornate language skills,Nike Air Max 90 Boot, our affinity for all kinds of sports, our religious fervor, our humor and moral virtue, are too ornate, too metabolically expensive, and too useless in the struggle for existence to have evolved merely so we could survive another day. They must have emerged, at least in part, to help us court and win the mating game. Why We Love: The Evolution of Romantic Love Moreover, I have proposed that along with all the magnificent courtship ornaments that we flaunt to persuade prospective mates, men and women have also evolved a specific brain network to respond to these traits: the circuitry for romantic love. This passion, a developed form of animal attraction, emerged to drive each of us to choose from among these myriad courtship displays,Air Max 2011 Shoes, prefer a specific individual, and begin the primordial mating dance exclusively with "him" or "her." "I seem to have loved you in numberless forms / numberless times, / In life after life, in age after age forever . . . / Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end / in you, / The love of all man's days both past and forever." Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore sensed that his passion for a woman had come across the eons from a mind built long ago. Indeed, we carry embedded in our brains the whole history of our species, all the circuits that our forebears built as they sang and danced and shared their wisdom and their food to impress their lovers and their friends, then passionately fell in love with "him" or "her." Percy Bysshe Shelley |
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