THE SINISTER REASON WHY PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE

These are some of the biological processes that occur as you are thrust into the early throes of love – or infatuation, it can be hard to tell which it is. Love is such a pervasive part of our humanity that art and culture is filled with references to love won and love lost. Libraries have shelves of books filled with romantic prose. "Love is not time's fool," wrote Shakespeare in sonnet 116: "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom." It seems Shakespeare was more correct than he could have known. Peer into the evolution of love in the animal kingdom and it becomes apparent that love had its beginnings long before the advent of humanity. What's more, it could have been born out of something quite sinister. Love is not time's fool The journey to love as we know it today began with sex, which was one of the first things life on Earth figured out how to do. Sex began as a way to pass on an organism's genes to the next generation. To love, life first needed a brain that could deal with emotions. It was not until a few billion years after life began that the brain began its journey to existence. At first it was only a small clump of cells. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks Fast forward to around 60 million years ago, when the first members of our family, the primates, appeared. Over millions more years of evolution, some primates would evolve ever bigger brains, eventually producing modern humans. But there was a problem. As our brains grew, our babies had to be born earlier in development. Otherwise their heads would be too big to pass through the birth canal. As a result, baby gorillas, chimps and humans are almost entirely helpless. Their parents therefore had to spend ever more time caring for them. This prolonged childhood created a new risk. In many primates today, a mother with a dependent infant is unavailable to mate until her infant is weaned. To get access to her, a male would first have to kill her child. This sort of targeted infanticide goes on in many species, including gorillas, monkeys and dolphins. This led Kit Opie of University College London in the UK and his colleagues, to propose a startling idea. Almost a third of primates form monogamous male-female relationships, and in 2013 Opie suggested that this behaviour had evolved to prevent infanticide. Infanticide has been the driving force for monogamy for 20 million years His team peered back into the family tree of primates to reconstruct how behaviours like mating and parenting changed over the course of evolution. Their analysis suggested that infanticide has been the driving force for monogamy for 20 million years, because it consistently preceded monogamy in evolution. By Melissa Hogenboom 15 February 2016 Read more here http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160212-the-unexpected-origin-of-love