It would be interesting to read the actual study, rather than a dumbed-down article like this. Whoever is reporting this is likely not a scientist, and not reporting it for scientists but for general people. Most science articles I read in the newspaper, for example, appear to be obvious research, or that which had been done 10 years ago. Before condemning the people doing the study, I would actually read what they did rather than this article geared toward the lowest common denominator.
These researchers apparently attained physical evidence (not just guessing, like one does when one is sure that sabre-tooth cats ate people, but actually have no evidence to back it up) that being prey allowed us to adapt to being sociable animals. Anyone can say it, but it can be hard to find evidence. Also, just because something "makes sense" in science doesn't mean it's true. There are things about evolution, ecology, etc. that made sense and people believed it simply because of that, and after a formal study was actually done they found out that what they believed simply wasn't true. Ample evidence must always be found in order to say anything in science - sometimes it's not a surprising conclusion, but sometimes it is.
Not to mention the fact that we are not supposed to "believe everything" these people say - I'm sorry, but science doesn't work like this. Why don't you read the actual paper and critique it seriously rather than making ridiculous sarcastic comments about a system and method you obviously don't know anything about?
But it's more complicated than that. Some scientists play the pop scientist (studying the popular T. rex and working on the Jurassic Park movies) for awhile, until they get enough public recognition (i.e. money) to be able to take almost any competent grad student who wants to work with them. I applied to 4 schools to study paleo as a grad student, and it was only this prof. who didn't use the excuse "we only have enough money for one grad student this year" or "we're not taking any new students this year." (After spending the $50 application fees, the SOBs.) My point is - now he's what you would call a "real" scientist and is furthering the field of paleo like almost no one else is, and he has several students who now have the opportunity to assist in that. It pays to play the game for a while, if your heart is in the right place.
Just curious - why do you think anti-intellectuals are "liberals"? I thought it was the other way around. All the scientists I know (and being a paleo grad student, I've attended a lot of professional meetings, including the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in 2004 which occurred during the presidential elections, so a lot of anger happening there) are very liberal, and we also have discussions during these meetings about ID (creationism) and what we can do about it as educators. I guess you'd call me a liberal because I'm pro-choice and things like that, and I'm giving a talk at my old high school on paleontology and also introducing the topics of ("controversial" to religious people) evolution, plate tectonics, and radioactive dating, because none of these are really taught in school and hey, if you're going to talk about biology and geology, these are unavoidable, as they form the backbone of these sciences.
And isn't the president's administration for the teaching of ID in schools? (shocking, I know) I don't think you can lump all liberals as being anti-intellectual, even if you know some who are, and if you're going to lump either of them as that, I'd have to go with conservatives. But then again, my parents are extrememly conservative and wanted me to get married and have kids right out of high school instead of going to college, so I may just be biased.
However, you're right about ID not being science, of course, as it only tries to fill in the gaps with God and so uses the lack of physical evidence as its basis, which is very non-scientific. We know more about evolution than we do about why gravity works (I've heard it said, but even if not, we still don't know everything about gravity), but you don't see people filling in those holes with "God did it."
Good logic - Starcraft came in a huge box, with just a couple books and 2 CDs. All this PC gaming talk has me wanting to play it again (yes, I'm that old). Anyone want to play? I really suck.:c p
Don't know anything about games, just really like Starcraft. And Spyro on PS1:c )
Have they done anything about bone loss of people in lower gravities than our own? I thought this was a big problem with astronauts. Or would that only be a problem for people who come back to Earth's gravity? Maybe staying permamently in space would be OK, though I still think broken bones would be a lot more common even in lower gravity environments.
You can't just fill in the holes of science with "God did it." No matter how much data we collect and how many hypotheses become theory, we will never have everything figured out, especially when dealing with fossils. Sticking God in anywhere only simplifies things, not explains things - it explains nothing because there is no physical evidence for God, and the absence of a perfectly transformational series of organisms does not negate evolution.
I also can't stress enough that the Cambrian Explosion probably took a lot longer than most paleontologists realize, and also that phyla (singular: phylum) are arbitrary. Looking back, we can see that the diversification was phylum-level, but at the time, how much divergence was there really between these guys? Not a hell of a lot - they were very similar, and quite unlike anything we have today. It was simply speciation, and now we recognize them as phyla only because nothing more different than them have shown up since. If all you had was an armadillo, a bat, an elephant, and a human, and nothing else, you wouldn't group them into the same class, certainly. But compared to all other organisms, they certainly are very closely related. Keep scale in mind.
The idea behind science isn't faith, it's evidence. No one says, or should say, "I believe in evolution," because it negates what we're trying to do. Yeah, scientists get their favorite hypotheses; we are human after all. But what we hypothesize is based on evidence, rather than the lack of it, which is what faith is based on. Not that I'm not a devout person myself, but there is a separation between the two. Faith helps us with many things, but will never explain how the world works. You can sit and think about the world all you want, or what God would or wouldn't have done (if you have that kind of hubris), but it is not science, and in the end explains nothing about how things work.
Theropod dinosaur - bird evolution is pretty well documented, but that's opening a whole other can of worms. You have to think of evolution as branching events, rather than linear. And these branching events can be very small at first. Also, the jump from prokaryotes to eukaryotes is also well-documented, and fascinating. Since so much of this stuff is in the fossil record, which like I said, is incomplete and can be quite biased, it is hard to pin down exactly what happened, but that's why we keep digging up stuff. I'm sure more people on here know more about dino-bird evolution than I do.
That's right, but the point is whether or not this leads to different species - it is selection. Besides, Darwin wrote and understood relatively little about the finches on the Galapagos: the research I was talking about was much more recent and is ongoing. Darwin's brilliant observation was that all these finches, with different beaks and of different sizes and morphologies, had all evolved from one common ancestor, and had speciated to fill all the open niches on the islands. The problem is that your ID site was basing their definition of species on this reproductive isolation concept alone, and that is not done anymore, at least as the only definition. Morphology plays a huge part as well, as do other features. Morphology can reproductively isolate organisms - if you were a small bug-eating finch with a small beak would you mate with a huge ground finch with a big beak? Probably not. You have to consider how the animals see themselves and one another, not just genome. They choose who to breed with, and evolution is a result of their behavior.
Unfortunately, that ID website only considers their own misconstrued definition of reproductive isolation as evidence for speciation. Reproductive isolation doesn't mean animals that cannot interbreed if artificially inseminated - it has never meant that, even when first proposed. It defines species as those that do not freely interbreed with others, and this has nothing to do with genome. Some insects are reproductively isolated, and are considered as separate species, simply because the shape of the genital organs do not coincide, even though if artifically inseminated, yeah, they probably could produce viable offspring. Polar bears and Grizzly bears, if artifically inseminated, also produce viable offspring. But the question is - do they in nature? No. No one would say that Polar and Grizzly bears are the same species - they are morphologically very distinct.
Besides, that definition of speciation is also losing favor with many biologists, since it cannot be tested in the fossil record, and because of the polar bear/Grizzly bear phenomenon. One of the fundamental questions in biology is "what is a species?" and so far that has not really been answered by anyone, though many hypotheses, not just that of reproductive isolation, exist.
It's things like this that make me sure that IDers read an "intro to Evolution" textbook, or maybe even a middle school biology text, and then try to spread their knowledge. A lot has happened in this field since the Biological Species Definition was proposed (I believe over 50 years ago). This type of "evidence" is seriously outdated and is the reason why IDers have so far not been seen as scientists by the rest of us.
Jeez, I don't even know where to begin. I guess go to Google Scholar and type in Cambrian Explosion or taphonomy and try to access articles by the journals Paleobiology, Journal of Paleontology, or any taphonomy or geology journal, or search in university library collections. Or if you haven't done so already, any textbook on Evolution, Taphonomy or Historical Geology might help. Currently I'm reading Paleobiology II by Briggs and Crowther and that is excellent. It's always a good idea to keep up a knowledge base. Good luck.
Darwin never came up with a "tree of life", that was Linnaeus and no one follows that anymore anyway. I think BobTheLawyer said it better than I could. If you want to see macroevolution in action, read The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner - very good book. Most biologists don't decouple micro- and macro- evolution, that might be an ID aspect in itself. There really is no difference, and yes, both can be seen. A toad will never turn into a walrus, no scientist will ever say it can.
No one ever said that evolution is easy - there's a reason why it's usually a 400 level class, and I recently took a class actually entitled Macroevolution that is graduate level. This stuff takes intense knowledge about both biology and geology, something I am just beginning, but most people who speak like macroevolution "doesn't add up" probably aren't studying the details. And like I said, the Cambrian Explosion might be taphonomic, rather than biological. It could have been more gradual than anyone thought. Studying the fossil record requires geology, not just biology, and taphonomic (preservational or depositional) bias is a big part of that. Also, there were plenty of critters around before the Cambrian explosion - the Burgess shale fauna for one, and shelly faunas after that. It wasn't as big of an explosion as we previously thought.
Ah, good point. To a biologist the Cambrian "Explosion" is a big deal. However, to a geologist, the culmination of lots of diverse critters in basically one rock formation can be taphonomic, and have lots of bias. This is a big debate in paleontology - is this sudden diversity real, or a product of an imperfect fossil record that can time-average (make look like it came from the same time, when actually millions of years can be represented) fossils? Unfortunately, (like I said elsewhere in the comments) we haven't been studying evolution long enough to see big changes; most of this info comes from the fossil record, however we have observed speciation and can see the beginnings of macroevolution, if not macroevolution itself, in insects and birds, among others. It just takes intense observation of one population for decades or longer, and few studies have done that yet.
This kind of example is unfortunately the only one people can really see and record within a lifetime of research. We've been studying evolution for so short a time that "macroevolutionary" changes haven't really been observed yet - much of that info is from the (albeit incomplete) fossil record, which records millions of years of change. People have seen organisms diverge to the point of becoming reproductively isolated (easy to monitor in insects and birds) and to many biologists this is considered speciation, and is "macroevolution" happening before our eyes. Usually this takes so many generations to happen, and it is somewhat gradual even if you are a punctuated equilibriumist, that it is difficult for us to observe it.
Also, even the tiniest DNA alteration can make a huge different in the morphology of the critter - some singular genes control very important and large features. One gene regulates digit length, for example, and in humans it is activated early on, but in bats it is activated much later, allowing a structure on which wings may also grow if selected for. So mutations can be huge.
"New attributes and organs" don't really happen - evolution is regulated and limited by what an organism already has. Features that appear new always have an origin in the ancestor, and have been altered to prehaps have a new function.
Has there ever been an example of bringing in a non-endemic species for a purpose and it not becoming a major problem? I feel bad for New Zealand, which does not have any native mammals (except for a couple bats) and so all niches were filled by diverse bird species, which are now suffering (several have gone extinct) from introduced cats, dogs, pigs, etc. Have we ever had a success in this? You'd think we'd learn by now.
"Their legs got longer because of the environment favored it, no one debates that stuff like this has and does happen."
Dude, that's called evolution. Macroevolution is one aspect of it, and neither micro- nor macroevolution are completely understood. And yeah, I would think ID doesn't acknowledge microevolution. Most evolutionists, however, do not see the two as being separate, fundamentally distinct phenomena - many see macro as being lots of steps of micro added up over time. And a toad turning into a walrus is a pretty ridiculous example. Even in macroevolution there are transformational morphologies, even if the fossil record doesn't always reveal them.
I probably agree with you, ackthpt, but I'm not sure I understand. I'm not a sociologist, and I was trying to be general and just mention that our society is very complicated to learn, and with primates, this requires lots of interactions with relatives and friends (of varying ranks) to help the offspring learn everything they need to learn to function as adults. I agree that TV is crap, but I guess I was imagining a more "primitive" culture than that which raises its kids with television. And I agree that our society is hostile to the raising of offspring - raising kids is looked at as lowly work rather than the backbone of ours or any culture. I'm not sure what the fundamental difference between our culture and that of most primates is, however - your point about TV and other questionable ways of learning is a very good one.
Well, it's way more complicated than that. A lot of times the female leaves the male to do all the work (obvious: seahorses), and sometimes they both leave (sea turtles), or they both stay - humans aren't quite the only monogamous couples (but nearly), though we're not entirely monogamous either (how many people only have sex with their spouse and never with anyone else until the spouse dies? That's considered monogamy - only some birds really do this, very few mammals if any). But with humans, and some other animals, both parents being around apparently leads to greater survival of the offspring (agreeing with TripMaster Monkey), which may be a result of the complexity of our society as well, though of course an entire community helps in raising a child as well, little different from most primate societies, with their complex social hierarchies. I also wonder if since we can see this in the brain we can tell if other animals seem to feel romantic love as well.
I especially like the chocolate cake reference. Mmmmm...
Slashdot Mirror
It would be interesting to read the actual study, rather than a dumbed-down article like this. Whoever is reporting this is likely not a scientist, and not reporting it for scientists but for general people. Most science articles I read in the newspaper, for example, appear to be obvious research, or that which had been done 10 years ago. Before condemning the people doing the study, I would actually read what they did rather than this article geared toward the lowest common denominator.
These researchers apparently attained physical evidence (not just guessing, like one does when one is sure that sabre-tooth cats ate people, but actually have no evidence to back it up) that being prey allowed us to adapt to being sociable animals. Anyone can say it, but it can be hard to find evidence. Also, just because something "makes sense" in science doesn't mean it's true. There are things about evolution, ecology, etc. that made sense and people believed it simply because of that, and after a formal study was actually done they found out that what they believed simply wasn't true. Ample evidence must always be found in order to say anything in science - sometimes it's not a surprising conclusion, but sometimes it is.
Not to mention the fact that we are not supposed to "believe everything" these people say - I'm sorry, but science doesn't work like this. Why don't you read the actual paper and critique it seriously rather than making ridiculous sarcastic comments about a system and method you obviously don't know anything about?
But it's more complicated than that. Some scientists play the pop scientist (studying the popular T. rex and working on the Jurassic Park movies) for awhile, until they get enough public recognition (i.e. money) to be able to take almost any competent grad student who wants to work with them. I applied to 4 schools to study paleo as a grad student, and it was only this prof. who didn't use the excuse "we only have enough money for one grad student this year" or "we're not taking any new students this year." (After spending the $50 application fees, the SOBs.) My point is - now he's what you would call a "real" scientist and is furthering the field of paleo like almost no one else is, and he has several students who now have the opportunity to assist in that. It pays to play the game for a while, if your heart is in the right place.
Just curious - why do you think anti-intellectuals are "liberals"? I thought it was the other way around. All the scientists I know (and being a paleo grad student, I've attended a lot of professional meetings, including the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in 2004 which occurred during the presidential elections, so a lot of anger happening there) are very liberal, and we also have discussions during these meetings about ID (creationism) and what we can do about it as educators. I guess you'd call me a liberal because I'm pro-choice and things like that, and I'm giving a talk at my old high school on paleontology and also introducing the topics of ("controversial" to religious people) evolution, plate tectonics, and radioactive dating, because none of these are really taught in school and hey, if you're going to talk about biology and geology, these are unavoidable, as they form the backbone of these sciences.
And isn't the president's administration for the teaching of ID in schools? (shocking, I know) I don't think you can lump all liberals as being anti-intellectual, even if you know some who are, and if you're going to lump either of them as that, I'd have to go with conservatives. But then again, my parents are extrememly conservative and wanted me to get married and have kids right out of high school instead of going to college, so I may just be biased.
However, you're right about ID not being science, of course, as it only tries to fill in the gaps with God and so uses the lack of physical evidence as its basis, which is very non-scientific. We know more about evolution than we do about why gravity works (I've heard it said, but even if not, we still don't know everything about gravity), but you don't see people filling in those holes with "God did it."
Good logic - Starcraft came in a huge box, with just a couple books and 2 CDs. All this PC gaming talk has me wanting to play it again (yes, I'm that old). Anyone want to play? I really suck. :c p
:c )
Don't know anything about games, just really like Starcraft. And Spyro on PS1
Have they done anything about bone loss of people in lower gravities than our own? I thought this was a big problem with astronauts. Or would that only be a problem for people who come back to Earth's gravity? Maybe staying permamently in space would be OK, though I still think broken bones would be a lot more common even in lower gravity environments.
/wondering about something I know nothing about
You can't just fill in the holes of science with "God did it." No matter how much data we collect and how many hypotheses become theory, we will never have everything figured out, especially when dealing with fossils. Sticking God in anywhere only simplifies things, not explains things - it explains nothing because there is no physical evidence for God, and the absence of a perfectly transformational series of organisms does not negate evolution.
I also can't stress enough that the Cambrian Explosion probably took a lot longer than most paleontologists realize, and also that phyla (singular: phylum) are arbitrary. Looking back, we can see that the diversification was phylum-level, but at the time, how much divergence was there really between these guys? Not a hell of a lot - they were very similar, and quite unlike anything we have today. It was simply speciation, and now we recognize them as phyla only because nothing more different than them have shown up since. If all you had was an armadillo, a bat, an elephant, and a human, and nothing else, you wouldn't group them into the same class, certainly. But compared to all other organisms, they certainly are very closely related. Keep scale in mind.
The idea behind science isn't faith, it's evidence. No one says, or should say, "I believe in evolution," because it negates what we're trying to do. Yeah, scientists get their favorite hypotheses; we are human after all. But what we hypothesize is based on evidence, rather than the lack of it, which is what faith is based on. Not that I'm not a devout person myself, but there is a separation between the two. Faith helps us with many things, but will never explain how the world works. You can sit and think about the world all you want, or what God would or wouldn't have done (if you have that kind of hubris), but it is not science, and in the end explains nothing about how things work.
Theropod dinosaur - bird evolution is pretty well documented, but that's opening a whole other can of worms. You have to think of evolution as branching events, rather than linear. And these branching events can be very small at first. Also, the jump from prokaryotes to eukaryotes is also well-documented, and fascinating. Since so much of this stuff is in the fossil record, which like I said, is incomplete and can be quite biased, it is hard to pin down exactly what happened, but that's why we keep digging up stuff. I'm sure more people on here know more about dino-bird evolution than I do.
That's right, but the point is whether or not this leads to different species - it is selection. Besides, Darwin wrote and understood relatively little about the finches on the Galapagos: the research I was talking about was much more recent and is ongoing. Darwin's brilliant observation was that all these finches, with different beaks and of different sizes and morphologies, had all evolved from one common ancestor, and had speciated to fill all the open niches on the islands. The problem is that your ID site was basing their definition of species on this reproductive isolation concept alone, and that is not done anymore, at least as the only definition. Morphology plays a huge part as well, as do other features. Morphology can reproductively isolate organisms - if you were a small bug-eating finch with a small beak would you mate with a huge ground finch with a big beak? Probably not. You have to consider how the animals see themselves and one another, not just genome. They choose who to breed with, and evolution is a result of their behavior.
Unfortunately, that ID website only considers their own misconstrued definition of reproductive isolation as evidence for speciation. Reproductive isolation doesn't mean animals that cannot interbreed if artificially inseminated - it has never meant that, even when first proposed. It defines species as those that do not freely interbreed with others, and this has nothing to do with genome. Some insects are reproductively isolated, and are considered as separate species, simply because the shape of the genital organs do not coincide, even though if artifically inseminated, yeah, they probably could produce viable offspring. Polar bears and Grizzly bears, if artifically inseminated, also produce viable offspring. But the question is - do they in nature? No. No one would say that Polar and Grizzly bears are the same species - they are morphologically very distinct.
Besides, that definition of speciation is also losing favor with many biologists, since it cannot be tested in the fossil record, and because of the polar bear/Grizzly bear phenomenon. One of the fundamental questions in biology is "what is a species?" and so far that has not really been answered by anyone, though many hypotheses, not just that of reproductive isolation, exist.
It's things like this that make me sure that IDers read an "intro to Evolution" textbook, or maybe even a middle school biology text, and then try to spread their knowledge. A lot has happened in this field since the Biological Species Definition was proposed (I believe over 50 years ago). This type of "evidence" is seriously outdated and is the reason why IDers have so far not been seen as scientists by the rest of us.
Jeez, I don't even know where to begin. I guess go to Google Scholar and type in Cambrian Explosion or taphonomy and try to access articles by the journals Paleobiology, Journal of Paleontology, or any taphonomy or geology journal, or search in university library collections. Or if you haven't done so already, any textbook on Evolution, Taphonomy or Historical Geology might help. Currently I'm reading Paleobiology II by Briggs and Crowther and that is excellent. It's always a good idea to keep up a knowledge base. Good luck.
If that were true the word "evolution" would be allowed in schools.
Darwin never came up with a "tree of life", that was Linnaeus and no one follows that anymore anyway. I think BobTheLawyer said it better than I could. If you want to see macroevolution in action, read The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner - very good book. Most biologists don't decouple micro- and macro- evolution, that might be an ID aspect in itself. There really is no difference, and yes, both can be seen. A toad will never turn into a walrus, no scientist will ever say it can.
No one ever said that evolution is easy - there's a reason why it's usually a 400 level class, and I recently took a class actually entitled Macroevolution that is graduate level. This stuff takes intense knowledge about both biology and geology, something I am just beginning, but most people who speak like macroevolution "doesn't add up" probably aren't studying the details. And like I said, the Cambrian Explosion might be taphonomic, rather than biological. It could have been more gradual than anyone thought. Studying the fossil record requires geology, not just biology, and taphonomic (preservational or depositional) bias is a big part of that. Also, there were plenty of critters around before the Cambrian explosion - the Burgess shale fauna for one, and shelly faunas after that. It wasn't as big of an explosion as we previously thought.
Ah, good point. To a biologist the Cambrian "Explosion" is a big deal. However, to a geologist, the culmination of lots of diverse critters in basically one rock formation can be taphonomic, and have lots of bias. This is a big debate in paleontology - is this sudden diversity real, or a product of an imperfect fossil record that can time-average (make look like it came from the same time, when actually millions of years can be represented) fossils? Unfortunately, (like I said elsewhere in the comments) we haven't been studying evolution long enough to see big changes; most of this info comes from the fossil record, however we have observed speciation and can see the beginnings of macroevolution, if not macroevolution itself, in insects and birds, among others. It just takes intense observation of one population for decades or longer, and few studies have done that yet.
This kind of example is unfortunately the only one people can really see and record within a lifetime of research. We've been studying evolution for so short a time that "macroevolutionary" changes haven't really been observed yet - much of that info is from the (albeit incomplete) fossil record, which records millions of years of change. People have seen organisms diverge to the point of becoming reproductively isolated (easy to monitor in insects and birds) and to many biologists this is considered speciation, and is "macroevolution" happening before our eyes. Usually this takes so many generations to happen, and it is somewhat gradual even if you are a punctuated equilibriumist, that it is difficult for us to observe it.
Also, even the tiniest DNA alteration can make a huge different in the morphology of the critter - some singular genes control very important and large features. One gene regulates digit length, for example, and in humans it is activated early on, but in bats it is activated much later, allowing a structure on which wings may also grow if selected for. So mutations can be huge.
"New attributes and organs" don't really happen - evolution is regulated and limited by what an organism already has. Features that appear new always have an origin in the ancestor, and have been altered to prehaps have a new function.
Has there ever been an example of bringing in a non-endemic species for a purpose and it not becoming a major problem? I feel bad for New Zealand, which does not have any native mammals (except for a couple bats) and so all niches were filled by diverse bird species, which are now suffering (several have gone extinct) from introduced cats, dogs, pigs, etc. Have we ever had a success in this? You'd think we'd learn by now.
"Their legs got longer because of the environment favored it, no one debates that stuff like this has and does happen." Dude, that's called evolution. Macroevolution is one aspect of it, and neither micro- nor macroevolution are completely understood. And yeah, I would think ID doesn't acknowledge microevolution. Most evolutionists, however, do not see the two as being separate, fundamentally distinct phenomena - many see macro as being lots of steps of micro added up over time. And a toad turning into a walrus is a pretty ridiculous example. Even in macroevolution there are transformational morphologies, even if the fossil record doesn't always reveal them.
I probably agree with you, ackthpt, but I'm not sure I understand. I'm not a sociologist, and I was trying to be general and just mention that our society is very complicated to learn, and with primates, this requires lots of interactions with relatives and friends (of varying ranks) to help the offspring learn everything they need to learn to function as adults. I agree that TV is crap, but I guess I was imagining a more "primitive" culture than that which raises its kids with television. And I agree that our society is hostile to the raising of offspring - raising kids is looked at as lowly work rather than the backbone of ours or any culture. I'm not sure what the fundamental difference between our culture and that of most primates is, however - your point about TV and other questionable ways of learning is a very good one.
Well, it's way more complicated than that. A lot of times the female leaves the male to do all the work (obvious: seahorses), and sometimes they both leave (sea turtles), or they both stay - humans aren't quite the only monogamous couples (but nearly), though we're not entirely monogamous either (how many people only have sex with their spouse and never with anyone else until the spouse dies? That's considered monogamy - only some birds really do this, very few mammals if any). But with humans, and some other animals, both parents being around apparently leads to greater survival of the offspring (agreeing with TripMaster Monkey), which may be a result of the complexity of our society as well, though of course an entire community helps in raising a child as well, little different from most primate societies, with their complex social hierarchies. I also wonder if since we can see this in the brain we can tell if other animals seem to feel romantic love as well. I especially like the chocolate cake reference. Mmmmm...