The Myth of the Evolution of the Rejection of Love in New Scientist

New Scientist carried an article called “Dumped” in its 14 February 2004 edition. The article dealt with various experiments that had been performed on people who had fallen in love and separated. Emotions such as anger, hatred and disappointment in people suffering the pains of love and data from brain scans of the subjects were interpreted from an evolutionist perspective. The researchers who evaluated the harm and benefits to the organism of the depression suffered by such people all adopted the same approach to the subject. They had adopted evolution as a dogma and produced evolutionary fairy tales in such a way as to adapt the data they obtained from experiments and observations to fit this dogmatic perspective.

This article exposes this prejudiced view of New Scientist, for which purpose it will be sufficient to consider the preconception that pervades the text as a whole from the following statements:

Why did our ancestors evolve brain links that enable us to hate the one we cherish? Rage is not good for your health: it elevates blood pressure, places stress on the heart and suppresses the immune system. So love hatred must have evolved to solve some crucial reproductive problems. (our emphasis)

Let us now consider the perspective behind the statements in that extract from New Scientist. The way the question is posed in the first sentence shows that the links in the brain that turn love into rage are regarded as indisputably the work of evolution. To explain in brief, the question is not put in terms of “could these links have developed by means of evolution?” and the text makes do with suggesting why so-called evolution, treated as a dogma, might have come about, and consists solely of speculation based on imagination. At one point reference is made to harm (the harm that rage inflicts on health), following which the claim is made that the problem posed by this harm could have been resolved by evolution. This, in fact, is not a scientific explanation but an unrealistic tale. Such unrealistic tales are not scientific theses which can be tested and repeated, and for that reason they are of no more scientific value than children’s fairy tales.

It is obvious there is no practical obstacle to the production of such tales. An evolutionist can easily come up with an evolutionary story about any biological structure or form of behaviour that brings with it any form of benefit to any organism.

We hope that our analysis will help our readers identify the logic underlying the production of these tales. We recommend the New Scientist management to reconsider their devotion to materialism, and hope they realise that their support for the theory of evolution is all in vain.