Two weeks ago, Barack Obama's impending inauguration was filling 18-year-old me with a "now-I've-seen-everything" smugness. Not so fast, came forth a message from the scientific world, equally smug. How about a real, honest-to-goodness love potion?
According to a recent article in The New York Times ("Anti-love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss," Jan. 12), a researcher at Emory University has published findings about the chemical reactions behind love that could provide the basis for formulating a love drug in the near future. Evolution has devised a "cocktail of ancient neuropeptides," that encourage long-term relationships between lovers, the researcher, neuroscientist Larry Young, told the Times. These naturally occurring substances, particularly oxytocin in females and vasopressin in males, have already been reproduced artificially. Package them with ancillary substances and voil, you have yourself a love potion, based not on voodoo or magic, but on cold, hard, scientific fact.
I was genuinely amazed by the discovery. If science expected me to greet this fairy-tale-made reality with enthusiasm, though, it miscalculated. How sad to find out, just weeks before Valentine's Day, that the mystery of love has been solved, the equation reduced to no more than "a biochemical chain of events" that scientists can explain step-by-step. How depressing that a couple squirts of oxytocin up the nose are all it takes to enhance feelings of trust and empathy. Suddenly, love, that most acclaimed emotion, is merely an agent of evolution, similar to aerobic respiration or the opposable thumb.
So what are we to do in the face of this information? Cancel Valentine's Day dinner reservations and forget this silly, old-fashioned love thing? Now that we know the secret, can we just skip all the embarrassing, sappy formalities of courtship and get right down to impregnating one another? (Perhaps Dartmouth students are prescient in their rejection of dating.) Even if we wanted to cling to the rituals of love, could we really appreciate that sweet love letter or eagerly proffered bouquet of roses, knowing they were was prompted by a certain interaction in the brain that released a stream of feel-good neuropeptides?
I'm annoyed with science for putting us in this position -- forced to question whether our feelings have any genuine meaning. It's just as bad as the ancients' habit of attributing love to a fickle goddess who, with a single, well-aimed arrow directed by her son, could inflame an innocent human with all-consuming passion. Both explanations take love out of our control, and, in relieving us of responsibility for our emotions, relieve those emotions of meaning.
I now understand a little better why the science of evolution is so threatening to creationists, who, unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans, believe that how we live and love is not predestined by God, but that our actions still have a higher meaning and purpose. Evolution, which contradicts the Bible's creation story, at first may seem to leave no room for a meaningful life. If humans evolved from apes in a scientifically documented chain of events, how can we claim to be anything more than animals? If it was not God, but chance natural selection, that brought us here, how does life have any meaning beyond propagating our race? These are questions humanity has struggled with since Darwin first published his theory of evolution, but over time, many of us have accepted the fact that our origins likely lie in a primordial stew, instead of the Garden of Eden. We've created our own meaning, whether by adapting our understanding of God to the discoveries of science, or by seeing that there is something meaningful in loving and caring for our friends and families.
In the end, I think we'll be able to do the same with love. Even if it is just chemicals that constitute our romantic feelings, love is still the basis for many of life's most powerful moments. I don't think the knowledge that oxytocin is a big part of the reason two people can look at one another with eyes full of love on their 50th wedding anniversary can lessen the beauty of their bond, nor detract from the meaning that bond gave their lives.
Science will continue to open doors, shouting like a gleeful four-year-old, "Look what I can do." At the same time, I believe that we will continue to rise to the challenge, defining our lives for ourselves as science strips away external sources of meaning.
