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First kiss dates back 21M years
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: First kiss dates back 21M years
#32I assume kissing comes from a parent chewing up food and then transferring it to the baby. This is innate “caring” behavior. Similarly, mammary glands are for providing milk/nutrition. These get associated with primal needs and therefore the amygdala, and so is associated with strong emotion.
I think it’s a lot simpler. It’s touching parts of the body that have a lot of nerve endings. Lips, fingers and hands, genitals, noses etc.
Re: First kiss dates back 21M years
#33Kissing is so weird. You can make up a thousand just-so stories. You can imagine it meant totally different things through time and across cultures. For me it just seems like yet another culturally-defined signal of intimacy. Like showing ankles or chests or saying this or that. Seems to me trying to make everything some hard wired evolutionary thing is a dead end.
No, kisses tingle, even completely emotionless ones. Lips have a lot of nerve endings.
Re: First kiss dates back 21M years
#34Kissing is so weird. You can make up a thousand just-so stories. You can imagine it meant totally different things through time and across cultures. For me it just seems like yet another culturally-defined signal of intimacy. Like showing ankles or chests or saying this or that. Seems to me trying to make everything some hard wired evolutionary thing is a dead end.
Do hunter gatherers kiss near-universally? I think that would answer the question of whether it is nature or nurture.
I’m allowing for it to be suppressed at times by culture, but I would expect the instinctive behavior to win the majority of the time unless the instinctive behavior is somehow harmful in an environment different from the organism’s classic environment.
Re: First kiss dates back 21M years
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather kiss my dog, whom I love, over a random person that I have little in common with. Is that somehow weird to you?
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Insufficiently analytical take.
Dogs are a special case. Humans are part of their soil, the soil they evolved in. They must have features (physical, behavioral) to manipulate humans into treating them like part of the group.
Think of the environment dogs evolved in. Small homogenous groups of humans. They aren’t even human, and humans still treated them as part of the in group, while at the same time killing people outside of their clan who looked and acted almost exactly like they did, certainly well within the bounds of what would today be a single nation or region within a nation.
Dogs and empathy towards them are totally compatible with human xenophobia or whatever we call it, there is no contradiction or hypocrisy here.
Re: First kiss dates back 21M years
#36Kissing is so weird. You can make up a thousand just-so stories. You can imagine it meant totally different things through time and across cultures. For me it just seems like yet another culturally-defined signal of intimacy. Like showing ankles or chests or saying this or that. Seems to me trying to make everything some hard wired evolutionary thing is a dead end.
The researchers found a common ancestor of many different species that all conduct non-functional kissing. The surprising thing about the research is that it specifically implies kissing is not cultural!