Love in question

Investigating love as a natural phenomenon means to make available this particular aspect of human life – always considered as something evanescent, impalpable and deeply subjective – to the scrutiny and understanding offered by contemporary science. The sciences of nature are modifying the intuitive concept that each one of us has of the love sentiment showing how human beings are universally tied in the phenomenon of love as well. Darwinian natural selec- tion, namely the effect of reproductive success deriving from intersexual and intrasexual competition for reproduction, emphasizes the invariants of the dynamics of falling-in-love and of sexual attraction. Natural selection is the engine that triggers the necessary changes an organism must make in order to better face the continuous challenges posed by the environment. In it, genetic, biological and cultural aspects coexist, tied together by the rhythms of evolution. Doubt exists, however, on whether this set of ties is able to entirely account for the phenomenon of human love. It seems in fact, that in humans love is a way of understanding reality and that it not only serves reproductive purposes, but social ones as well. All of this implies the necessity of considering explanatory theoretical models stemming from the modern sciences of mind, and those proposed by evolutionary psychology, in particular.