The Evolution of Love [Hardcover]

Ada Lampert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0275959074 | ISBN-13: 978-0275959074

Lampert presents the story of love: when, why, and how love became a central experience of humans. Assuming that our world is built of matter, she states that evolution is the change of this matter, according to the supreme criterion of success in offspring reproduction. Love evolved because of its contribution to reproduction. It first appeared in the mothers of mammals, who used the body's proximity as a main adaptation. Human love expands its borders to include the relationships between women and men, friends, and even nonhuman subjects. Lampert describes motherhood as the source of the genetic, hormonal, brain, and behavioral changes that we call love. In the sexual stage, love enters both as a way to select a partner and as a bonding force. Sexuality is built upon ancient layers of early forms of life, before humanity, and includes strong elements of aggression which interrupt our ability to experience a peaceful sexual life. Maternal love and sexual love combine in the evolution of the family. Lampert also examines homosexual love as a way to look at the fascinating process of growing sexual identity and behavior in an individual. Written in a style suited to any educated person, Lampert uses current scientific knowledge on the brain, hormones, the nervous system, ethology, psychology, and even modern physics to make her case. This book will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is an excellent addition to the "Human Evolution, Behavior and Intelligence" series. Highly recommended.”–Choice

“The book...does a great deal to sensitize the reader to the importance of biological factors in the evolution of love....The book should appeal to a wide range of readers within the natural and social sciences because of its broad integrative base.”–American Journal of Human Biology

“Lampert's material is well organized and well integrated, and the range is broad enough that many readers will find something new in these pages....Her style is readable and even poetic.”–The Journal of Sex Research

“This is an intriguing book, rich in exciting ideas and information. The author elegantly guides the reader on a tour of the many facets of love and its roots in our evolutionary history. Dr. Lampert does not hesitate to explore such diverse topics as gender differences in parent-child attachment, sexual fantasies, pornography, and romance within a unifying framework of evolutionary theory. This is a brave and imaginative book, likely to provoke great interest and debate about why and who we love.”–Dr. Neil Malamuth, Professor of Psychology and Communication Chair, Department of Communication University of California at Los Angeles

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Hebrew

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Praeger Publishers (September 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0275959074
• ISBN-13: 978-0275959074
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,401,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, bold and clear, the book is a must., October 4, 1998

By 

Batya Gur([e-mail]) (Jrusalem, ISRAEL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Evolution of Love (Hardcover)

Understanding the evolutionary paradox of extinction versus love, is one of the exciting results follows reading in this bold, clear and entertaining book. Completely innocent of any scientific flamboyance, free from trying to impress us by unnecessary treasures of knowledge, the author presents issues that have been occupied human beings from time immemorial. She uses such a direct, simple tone, that one often forgets how brave she is, and how much freedom of thought, authonomy of mind, were needed for creating, formulating and consolidating her ideas. The basic claim, optimistic although she refrains of any aspiration to foster hopes, is simply that the talents of loving and of being loved, are genetically inherited, not in any creature but in mammals, whose most dramatic contribution to life on earth was the amazing new care for the helpless infant : parenthood. Later on more kinds of love evolved. Witty, humoristic all the way, she shows how evolution shaped our mate selection. There she elaborates also on the incest taboo and adds an extremely interesting note on the Oedipus` complex of Freud. Most illustrative are the chapters discussing the loving brain and its evolutionary shaped repertoire of sexual behaviors, bewildering each of us. The chapter on homosexuality is used to clear how all humans are actually twin-folded and how complicated and vulnerable is the process of establishing sexual, gender identity. Reading this book is a must.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars exceptionally simplistic and unoriginal, July 7, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Evolution of Love (Hardcover)

This book is a great disappointment -- nothing but warmed over sociobiology with very little to say about the connection of love to other drives and affects; virtually nothing about the neurobiology of love that is not widely known among intelligent lay readers; and very little intelligent even about the subjective experience of different forms of love...The book is only 115 pages -- essentially a long and uninformative magazine article. I feel as the money I spent was taken from me.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a clear winner, September 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Evolution of Love (Hardcover)

I have just read "The Evolution of Love" by Ada Lampert and I am genuinly impressed. She maintains a consistent touch throughout: an attractive lightness of style, a thorough familiarity with the pertinent literature, and a nice penchant for pulling things together theoretically. the latter is probably the book`s greatest strenngth since she theorizes with an intuitive elan one rarely sees in popularized books. she can do so because she is not a reporter visiting someone else`s field, but an ensconced scientist with an original mind. I am going to use this book with my class at the University of Chicago. All in all this book is a clear winner.