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Wil Franklin's picture

Non-human Love - An oxymoron or emergent property already known

Love as a steady/robust state or more beneficial set of relationships is provocative and compelling. It may seem at first that I wish to shed the primacy of human love as a first mover or significant shaper of our world, but quite the opposite. I think what Paul is suggesting brings into sharp focus the good, use and power of love. If I am correctly interpreting Paul, love need not be a particularly human phenomenon.  I think of single celled organisms of which there are many, and compare that to all the multicellular organisms.  In biological evolutionary terms, cells do not love each other, but when in stable/mutually beneficial association they persist over time. With more time they can become something more. Like love, these association can and are quite dynamic and complex – cells interacting to form tissues, tissues interacting to become tissue systems, systems interacting with each other to form bodies and onward and upward in nested hierarchical complexity.  Love just may be another new particularly stable/robust arrangement of agents that is not only beneficial to the individual agents, but may prove to be a stable new agent that other new forms will emerge from.  Seeking love you will create anew.  Not that big of a leap if you ask me.

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