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Interesting conversation Monday night, both about the specifics of "love"/"pair bonding" and about a number of more general themes that have been revisited in multiple sessions this semester.  Some of my thoughts about the latter, trusting that others will fill in on the former.
I'm seriously intrigued by the issue of the "irreduciably subjective" and the tensions that seems to create between science as we are used to doing it/taught it, and ... science as it might need to become?  Suppose there actually is an "irreducibly subjective" element in love,  in emotion, in religion, and in many other aspects of human behavior.  Does that mean we can't do meaningful research in these realms?  Do we have to be able to clearly define "love" (etc) in advance and aspire to an "objective" way to locate it in the brain in order to do scientific research?  Or is there a way to conceive/do science that lessens the uncomfortable tension between current understandings of rigor and ... things that don't seem explorable in those terms?
On a related note, I'm also seriously intrigued by the "localizationist" presumption that we tend to bring to studies of the nervous system, and to other things as well.  Why do we think love (or language?) needs to be at a particular place in the brain, or derive from particular genes?  From my perspective, at least, one can read much of research over the past twenty or thirty years as evidence for highly distributed systems that lack simple cause/effect relationships.   Why are we having trouble accepting/teaching that?  developing ways of doing research that take account of it?  
And, along these lines, I'm intrigued as well by the recurring subject of what we teach and why and how, and its relation to peoples' responses to the readings this week.  Reading #4 was cited by far and away the most people as "best science," but was unmentioned as either "most interesting" or "learned most from."  Does it strike anyone else as noteworthy that there is a poor correlation between "best science" and "interesting" or "learned from"?  I wonder whether that has anything to do with how we currently conceive/teach science and whether it is perhaps another reason to think about alternate ways of doing so.