Customer Reviews

The Evolution of Love

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.