From: The Origins of Humanness in the Biology of Love by Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zöller (2008). Imprint Academic: Exeter, pp. 48-83

Let us now come directly to our central concern: us human beings. Our basic question, as we indicated at the beginning, is: “How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?” We shall answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution. We shall do this through answering two other questions to guide our reflections as we inquire into our evolutionary origin. These two questions are: ”How did humanness begin?” and “How did we become the kind of animals that we are as human beings?” Yet, let us remember that we shall be looking mainly at the emotioning, the preferences of living that guide the flow of the systemic conservation through systemic reproduction of the manner of living conserved.

Beginnings
The study and comparison of human and chimpanzee genetic constitution shows two fundamental facts. One is that the human and the chimpanzee lineages must have become separated from a common origin some time between five and six million years ago. The other is that the comparison of human and chimpanzee nucleic acids shows that these differ by less than 2 percent. But, if the above is the case, how is it that chimpanzees and humans are such different kinds of animals? Yet we can easily see that we resemble chimpanzees in many respects. Can we learn about how we are as human beings by studying chimpanzees because our genetic constitution resembles theirs? Or can we learn about chimpanzees by studying humans because of this resemblance? Before going on with these questions, let us ask: “How do we humans and chimpanzees differ in our manners of living?”

In the early 1980’s Frans de Waal published a book that he called Chimpanzee Politics, the outcome of a careful and prolonged study of a chimpanzee community of about twenty-five individuals, infants, juveniles and adults, males and females – kept in an enormous ground in a zoo in Arnheim, Holland. What Frans de Waal shows in his book, is that the inter-individual relations among adults in that chimpanzee community were mostly centered in a continuous and recurrent dynamics of domination and submission. Furthermore, he also shows that chimpanzees, whether in the big area occupied by this particular captive colony or in the wild, instrumentalize their relations by manipulating each other in the continuous struggle for domination and submission in which they live. No doubt the chimpanzee mother/child relations are relations of care, and the chimpanzee children are playful in their relations (and become more so as they associate with humans if these treat them lovingly), yet Frans de Waal’s study shows that the basic or guiding mood of a chimpanzee community is that of an ongoing dynamics of competition in relations of domination and submission among the adults that spreads through all ages when an open conflict arises.

In choosing the title Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal compares the behavior of the chimpanzees with human behavior in our Western culture. That he does so is made apparent when he quotes Aristotle saying that “man is a political animal,” equating politics with the struggle for domination and submission in a community life, as if this were the natural human manner of co-existence, and as if this manner of coexistence were social living. For Aristotle, politics was living in the city with care for the affairs of the community of citizens, but now the word “politics” mostly means the struggle for power and control of the affairs of the city community. But it is with this latter connotation that Frans de Waal speaks of ”chimpanzee politics” when comparing chimpanzee community life with human social life. We think differently from Frans de Waal in respect to human social life. We think that even though we modern human beings live greatly immersed in the dynamics of domination and submission, that is, in political struggle, we are not political animals. Indeed, we claim that human beings belong to an evolutionary history in which daily life was centered on cooperation and not on domination and submission. In other words, we claim that we human beings are not political animals because we belong to an evolutionary history in which the basic emotion or mood was love and not competition and aggression. This is a biological claim, not a philosophical one.

Not all animal relations are of the same kind because they take place in the relational dynamics of different emotions, and the emotion defines the character of the relations. Thus, we think that in the human domain, what we distinguish as work and political relations are relations of a different kind than social relations because they take place in different emotions than the emotion in which social relations take place. That this is so is apparent in our daily life, in that we expect others as well as ourselves to act or behave differently in work, political, or social relations. Thus, for example, in work relations we are in the emotion of obligation, in political relations we are in the emotion of mistrust and the desire for manipulation, whereas in social relations we are in the emotion of trust and mutual respect – that is, in love. Accordingly, we claim that the mood or emotion that constitutes social relations is love (Maturana and Verden-Zöller, 1993), and that love is the domain of those relational behaviors through which another arises as a legitimate other in co-existence with oneself.

Cooperation takes place in social relations, and not in relations of domination and submission. Social relations entail trust as well as the absence of manipulation or instrumentalization in the interpersonal relations. Indeed, social relations break down when manipulation appears. If one inquires among the members of a human community about their opinions concerning politics, one finds a fair number of persons who express their dislike of politics because they see it as a domain of manipulation and instrumentalization of human relations. In its Greek origin, politics had to do with a concern for the affairs of the community. No doubt this is still an element, but the attempt to assure a democracy, or some other desired organization of affairs, has repeatedly led to authoritative relations in which more and more instrumentalization and manipulation of human relations is accepted. Given this, Frans de Waal had no difficulty in choosing to call a book dealing with the relations of domination and submission among chimpanzees in their community life, Chimpanzee Politics.

From what Frans de Waal and others who have studied chimpanzee communities have shown, it is apparent that the basic emotion or background mood in which chimpanzee group life occurs is that proper to political life – namely, mistrust. Mistrust leads to a recurrent dynamic of manipulation of inter-individual relations which results in hidden aggressions and alliances in a struggle for domination and submission. We think, however, that what happens with us human beings is different from what happens with chimpanzees, notwithstanding that our present cultural life seems to be centered on the struggle for power, in a dynamics that is political exactly in the terms implied by Frans de Waal. And we think that what happens with us is different because the basic emotion or mood under which human community life occurs is that proper to a cooperative life – namely, love. We are saying that we think the fundament of human living is love, and that cooperation in humans arises through the pleasure of doing things together in mutual trust, not through the manipulation of relations. We do not say that love is the only emotion under which we human beings live. Of course not. Certainly, we human beings flow or can flow in our emotioning through all the emotional dimensions that we can live. But we claim that it can be argued biologically that we are the kind of beings that we are because love has been the emotion that has grounded the course of the evolutionary history that gave origin to us.

We human beings become ill at any age if we have to live a life centered in mistrust, instrumentalization, and manipulation of relations. Our children need to grow in trust, mutual care, body acceptance and cooperation, to become well-integrated individuals and social beings as they learn their bodies and the bodies of others in the generation of a social space (see Verden-Zöller in Maturana and Verden-Zöller, 1993).

How can the difference between the human and the chimpanzee manners of community living be explained and understood? How is it that chimpanzees did not become languaging animals like us? How can we explain the difference of intelligence between humans and chimpanzees? Before we propose an answer to these questions, we would like to remark that we do not think that we can learn about human beings studying chimpanzees, or vice versa. We think that the study of chimpanzees may expand our ability to see ourselves by opening a space for our reflections on our different manners of living. But at the same time, we think that the study of chimpanzees does not lead us to understand how is it that we humans are as we are, because we humans and chimpanzees are different kinds of animals, resulting from a different evolutionary history.

Neoteny
Animals in general, and mammals in particular, move in their relations between two extremes: one of mutual respect and mutual trust in total body acceptance in bodily nearness, and the other in a dynamics of relations of domination and submission. In mammals, the first manner of relating is usually confined to the mother/child relation and to the period of childhood or upbringing of the offspring, whereas the second is the usual manner of relation in adulthood, a period that begins in relation to the age of reproduction. The chimpanzees in their inter-individual relations in captive and wild communities resemble this standard pattern more than we human beings do. We think this indicates that the ancestor that we share with them cannot have been different from the usual mammalian form. How did the two lineages diverge?

Our proposition (and this is, of course, a speculative proposition), is that the two lineages that gave origin to us and to the chimpanzees diverged through the conservation of a different emphasis in the two basic mammalian manners of relating mentioned above. We humans are the present form, we think, of a lineage that arose defined and constituted by the conservation of the progressive expansion of the mother/child relation of mutual body acceptance, nearness, and mutual care in playfulness and total trust, in a manner that also involved the male, and progressively extended beyond the age of reproduction into the adult life in a neotenic evolutionary trend. And we think that the chimpanzees are the present of a lineage in which the whole basic mammalian pattern of inter-individual relations was mostly conserved, perhaps even in a manner that put more emphasis on the opposing relations of domination and submission along the adult life than the original one.

That we belong to a lineage, or system of lineages, with neotenic characteristics (characteristics that result from an evolutionary history of expansion of childhood beyond the period of reproduction) is, of course, well known to biologists. Indeed, biologists emphasize this by claiming that many of our human body features resemble those of chimpanzee children or babies more than those of adult chimpanzees. What we want to emphasize here now, though, is that this expansion of childhood into adulthood in the system of lineages that gave origin to us has entailed in a fundamental manner the expansion of the emotioning of the mother/child relation of mutual body acceptance and total trust into adulthood. And we also want to emphasize that the conservation of the expansion of the mother/child dynamics of love and play relations into the adult living has been the operational reference for all the body and relational changes that eventually constituted us as the kind of animals that we are as human beings.

We claim that it is as a result of this neotenic trend that we humans are cooperative animals dependent on love at all ages. The chimpanzee is not the present of a neotenic history and we think that the neoteny in the evolution of chimpanzees has not entailed the expansion of the emotioning of the mother/child relation as a central in the evolutionary shaping of their manner of living. On the contrary, the chimpanzee is, we think, the present of an evolutionary history in which adulthood has remained adulthood, or may even have been expanded into youth, as competition has been emphasized as a basic relational mood. It is chimpanzees who are in fact political animals, not us human beings.

Intelligence
If we reflect about the circumstances in daily life under which we speak of intelligence, we will notice that we do so when we refer to the consensual abilities of a human or non-human animal. Consensuality takes place as the spontaneous, coherent behavioral transformation of two or more organisms in a particular domain of coexistence as a result of their living together in recurrent and recursive interactions, and the behavioral domain that arises through consensuality is a consensual domain. Flexibility of behavior according to the circumstances of living with conservation of living is what an observer connotes when he or she speaks of intelligence, or, better, of intelligent behavior. The ability to behave adequately in a situation that an observer sees as a problem is what an observer calls problem solving. As such, problem solving is only a manner of talking by an observer about the operation of an organism in a consensual domain when he or she does not know whether the organism will behave or not behave according to what he or she considers adequate. The capacity for consensuality and plastic behavior to which we refer as we speak of intelligence differs according to the different manners of living of the different organisms. Different manners of living occur as different domains of operational structural coherences between organism and medium, and as such they entail different possibilities for intelligence as different domains of plastic behaviors.

In summary, when we speak of intelligence in daily life, we connote the capacity that an organism has to participate with others (or with the medium) in the constitution, expansion, and operation in a domain of consensual behaviors (or of plastic dynamic coherences) while under the continuous structural changes that it undergoes in its individual life (see Maturana and Guiloff, 1980). In these circumstances, what can we say about intelligence in the human and chimpanzee lineages? Let us have first an indirect approximation.

The fundamental difference between human beings and chimpanzees is not that we are rational animals and they are not. Of course we live in language and they do not. Although chimpanzees use many different sounds, movements, and gestures that an observer may recognize as operations in language as indicators of objects or of situations, their manner of living is not based in languaging. The fundamental difference, according to us, belongs to the different basic emotional dynamics (configuration of emotioning) conserved in our different lineages along our respective evolutionary histories as different manners of living that have resulted different bodyhoods and different manners of living. Different manners of living as languaging and not languaging beings characterize humans and chimpanzees as different kinds of animals. No doubt both lineages entail a history of expansion of the basic capacity of consensuality, and hence, of intelligence, but in one of them, in us, this expansion has taken place in a manner of living centered on cooperation, whereas in the other it has taken place in a manner of living centered on competition and the manipulation of relations. Yes, we human beings also can manipulate each other and in our modern patriarchal culture we do so, but our claim is that as we are cooperative animals, our evolutionary history could not have been centered on aggression and mutual manipulation.

Cooperation is a consensual activity that arises in a domain of mutual acceptance in a co- participation that is invited, not demanded. The basic grounding emotion or mood in cooperation is love, and as cooperation takes place in the pleasure of mutual acceptance, its realization occurs in play (see Maturana and Verden-Zöller, 1993), in the enjoyment of actually doing things together. As cooperation entails the pleasure of doing with the other, it is open to continuous expansion in the domain in which it takes place. In a life centered in trust, cooperation, and mutual acceptance – that is, in love, the opening for consensuality is multidimensional, and, in fact, unlimited. In mutual acceptance and in mutual trust, all situations of life become opportunities for the pleasure of doing things together – that is, for cooperation.

The conservation of a manner of living centered in cooperation constitutes an opportunity for an unlimited and unrestricted systemic expansion of intelligence as a recursive evolutionary opening for the continuous generation of new domains of consensuality and their extension. Such expansion of intelligence also occurs in the ontogeny of individuals living in cooperation. The conservation of a manner of living immersed in competition and in the struggle for domination and submission does not negate consensuality altogether, but restricts its scope to a narrow path of coexistence in struggle and competition which, in essence, is always the same – mutual negation.

We now re-consider the question of the origin of humanness.

Humanness
When did humanness begin? We have claimed that we humans exist in language, or, more precisely, that we exist in conversations that are the braiding of languaging and emotioning. And we also maintain that humanness arose when in a lineage of bipedal primates the living in conversations began to be conserved generation after generation in the learning of the children as the manner of living that constituted and defined that lineage. When did that happen? We think that happened – and humanness began – not later than about three and a half million years ago, and we propose that it happened in the following manner.

Some 3,300,000 years ago, some small bipedal primates (Australopithecus afarensis) lived in Africa, in the north of what is now Kenya. Their height was about the height of an 8 year-old child. Judging by their body anatomy and their teeth, these primates could have been our ancestors, or very similar to them (see Johanson and Maitland, 1981, and Johanson and Shreeve, 1989). The common ancestor that we share with chimpanzees was not bipedal, but their descendants in our lineage must have become so as they became ground dwellers in the savannahs at the fringe of the forests, as they moved, conserving from generation to generation the habit of moving erect as they looked around while moving among the tall grasses. We belong to a system of lineages of primates that as ground dwellers became bipedal, whereas chimpanzees belong to a system of lineages that remained quadrupedal on the ground.

The bipedal primates of somewhat more than 3 million years ago were not hunters, or if they did hunt occasionally, their prey must have been small animals. Their teeth, very similar to ours, were those of gatherers who eat seeds, nuts, roots, insects, and the remains of animals killed by large predators. Furthermore, paleontological findings indicate that these primates lived in small groups of some five to eight individuals of both sexes and of all ages. Their brains were about a third the size of ours now, and their faces were different, more like that of a young chimpanzee.

Their hands, however, were like our hands in that they had fingers that could be fully extended and opposed to the thumb. No doubt, judging by their manner of existing as gatherers, they were capable of complex and delicate visual and finger correlations in the handling of food. But human hands are much more than instruments for manipulation – indeed, they are caressing organs. The fingers of the human hand can be extended fully as well as delicately flexed, allowing the hand as a totality to accommodate to any curved surface of the body in a caressing touch, more or less in the same manner that the tongue of other animals does. In modern human beings, hand caresses occupy the whole hand with the fingers flexing adequately to fit the caressed surface in a gentle holding touch. The hand of the chimpanzee does not do so easily because the fingers cannot be totally extended. The hand of our ancestors 3 million years ago, although not identical in its proportions to ours now, had all the characteristics of a human hand, both as a manipulating and as a caressing organ.

Let us now reconstruct the possible manner of living of our ancestors 3.3 million years ago from what we know of Australopithecus afarensis as if our ancestors were very similar to them, and compare it with our present manner of living.

1. Judging by their teeth and their size, our ancestors must have lived as gatherers, eating seeds, roots, nuts, insects, small vertebrates, and occasionally scavenging the remains of big animals killed by large predators. We modern human beings are still gatherers of seeds, nuts, roots, and fruits. Indeed, agriculture is a way of remaining a gatherer. That we are gatherers is shown also in the success of supermarkets, and in the fact that in situations of need we easily resort to gathering, and even scavenging.

2. Paleontological remains indicate that our ancestors lived in small groups of about five to eight individuals of all ages. We modern human beings feel comfortable in families of that size, and even when we form larger communities, we live in intimacy in small groups.

3. Our ancestors may have shared food as a feature of their manner of living. Food sharing takes place in the direct passing of food from one individual to another. This is not a very rare phenomenon – many animals such as birds and ants do it as a central aspect of their manner of living, but it is not common among primates. Many parent birds feed their children by depositing the food directly into their mouths. In a neotenic lineage like ours, this practice may have been a feature of the mother/child relations conserved into the post-reproductive stage as part of the trend of neotenic expansion of our lineage, and is still present in the pleasure of a mouth to mouth kiss. We modern humans share food. In some cultures women frequently pass what they are chewing directly from their mouth to the mouths of their babies, or to the mouths of old people who have lost their teeth. Our children often take food from their mouths to give it to an adult or to another child. Our food-sharing behavior is not cultural. That this is so is apparent in the just mentioned spontaneous food sharing of our little children – we have the biology of sharing animals. Our genetic constitution (our biological primary structure) does not determine what happens in us in our lifetime as individuals, because whatever happens does so in an epigenetic manner in a historical process of interactions between organism and medium. But nothing can happen in the course of our epigenesis that our genetic constitution does not permit as a possible feature of our ontogeny. We are sharing animals now; therefore, we belong to an evolutionary history that conserved food sharing as a manner of living. We do not know when this history began, but we believe that it must have been already established in our ancestors of 3 million years ago in all ages as part of the evolutionary neotenic trend of their lineage.

4. We suppose that among our ancestors of 3 million years ago, males participated in child care through loving relations in the pleasure of living together. In what manner, we do not know; perhaps playing with the children in body contact, carrying them, feeding or sharing food with them, as well as being attentive to their play without restricting them. Male gibbons nowadays do so as they participate with the females in the care of their offspring. We modern human males care for our children in the manner described above, and we do so with natural ease and spontaneous pleasure when there are no cultural injunctions to the contrary in terms of control and instrumentalization through the demand for obedience. We think that the emotional dynamic that brings human males to participate in child care is also an evolutionarily conserved feature of our neotenic trend, not a new cultural one. As such, male child care is an epigenic behavior that can be fostered or repressed. Adult male care for children in the pleasure of playing with them, is not very frequent in primates, but it sometimes occurs as a juvenile behavior, as can occasionally be seen in a zoo.

5. We modern human beings are sensual and tender animals. We caress each other, we enjoy body nearness and contact. Caresses evoke in us physiological well-being. We caress each other not only with actual touches, but also with words, with the tone of our voices, with our regard, or with what we do. All these caresses evoke in us physiological changes that constitute well-being. In us the hand is, so to speak, a caressing organ, and the touch of the hand is physiologically healing. But not only that, we enjoy all sensorial dimensions as sources of pleasure and well-being, as features of what can be called the aesthetics of living. We do not know how our ancestors behaved, but we can assume that as primates who possessed a caressing hand, and as members of a neotenic lineage, they were also sensual and tender animals that, like us, lived in the conservation of the relational configurations of caresses and mutual care in both adulthood and youth. We also think that such basic extended sensuality, with the sensorial curiosity that it brings, is part of the neotenic trend of our lineage through the conservation of the expanded sensuality involved in the extension of childhood.

As we look at this speculative but plausible reconstruction of the relational features of the life of our ancestors of over 3 million years ago and compare it with our own in the present (neglecting the particularities of how we do what we do), we discover that our manner of living and theirs must have been the same, save in one respect – namely, language and the features of the body associated with it. If our ancestors were as we suggest, how did language arise?

Humanness and Languaging
To the extent that language is a manner of living in coordinations of coordinations of consensual behaviors, nearness of co-existence in doing many things together is necessary for language to arise. At the same time, for nearness of co-existence to occur as a relational background in which languaging could arise spontaneously in the recursion of doing things together, it must be permanent, or recurrent and sufficiently prolonged. What can we say now about what may have been the biological fundaments for such nearness in the origin of our lineage as languaging primates?

Judging by the brain capacity of the skull of Australopithecus afarensis (about 450 cc), the brain of our ancestors 3 million years ago must have been larger than the brain of a domestic dog. Indeed, it must have been about the size of the brain of a chimpanzee. Dogs do not live in language among themselves or with us, but when we live with them in some stable nearness in intimacy and in the proper flow of recurrent interactions, we can live languaging circumstances with them, in which they participate in a more or less extended episodic manner. So the brain size of a dog allows it to enter with us in consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behaviors.

But for that to happen to a dog living with us, or for that to happen between any pair of animals, certain emotioning (or configuration of relational dynamics) is necessary. That is, the emotioning must be such that the frequent and recurrent interactions that take place between those animals should constitute a domain of coordinations of behavior in which recursive consensual coordinations of coordinations of behavior may arise. Furthermore, a special emotioning must also take place in the living together in coordinations of consensual behaviors so that the occasional episodes of languaging lived may become a manner of living that is conserved as a matter of course in the spontaneous learning of the offspring, with the result that a lineage defined by a coexistence in language begins. According to us, since love is the only emotional dynamics that gives rise to a living together in the close and sensual nearness in which a prolonged living together in recursive consensual coordinations of doings can take place for the pleasure of it, that emotioning must be love.

What we in fact propose is that languaging must have begun as a manner of living that has been conserved generation after generation in the spontaneous learning of children more than 3 million years ago, and we think that it began among our ancestors as a simple result of their living together in small groups as gatherers who shared food in love in the intimacy of tenderness and sensuality. Moreover, we maintain that living in languaging arose not because it was necessary, or in any way advantageous, but merely as a result of this manner of living together. Certainly, we do not mean that there were not occasions of dispute or of anger and quarrel, but we claim that aggression and mistrust cannot have been the basic mood of co-existence in our ancestors. And we claim so because if that had been the case, the manner of living in recursive consensual coordinations of behavior that living in language is could not have arisen, because there would not have been the space of intimate and stable cooperative coexistence that makes such a living possible.

Why do we think that languaging as a manner of living should have begun at least 3 million years ago and not later? Simply because of the number of generations that we think was required for the establishment and conservation of an epigenic dynamics that produced and secured through genetic co-option the conservation of all the anatomical and physiological changes associated with languaging as we now live it in speech.

Languaging as a manner of daily living in consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behavior can in fact take place in many different manners. In us, languaging takes place mostly through speech, so it must have involved sound production by mouth in correlation with coordinations of behavior from very early in this history. Let us recall that a lineage begins in the recursive reproductive conservation of a manner of living; let us also recall that the reproductive conservation of a manner of living is systemic and not genetically determined, even though it entails the systemic conservation of the genetic constitution of the initial organic structure that makes possible the epigenetic realization of the manner of living conserved. To reformulate in dynamic terms what we have just said:

Due to the systemic nature of the phenomena of reproduction and heredity, two intertwined processes take place in the establishment and conservation of a lineage:

1. The genetic changes that take place along the history of a lineage become continuously co-opted into the realization and conservation of the manner of living (ontogenic phenotype) that defines the lineage, and follow a general course channeled as a historical trend of genetic change by the systemic realization and conservation of that manner of living.

2. At the same time, a lineage is conserved only as long as the genetic conditions and the conditions of the medium that permit the realization of the epigenetic course that makes possible the realization of the manner of living that defines it, are conserved systemically generation after generation.

There is no doubt that the systemic conservation of the manner of living that defines a lineage requires a structural fundament in the organism and in the medium. In the organism this fundament is a genetic constitution that makes it possible that the individual members of the lineage may realize in their epigenesis the manner of living of the lineage while sliding through a medium – conserving organization and adaptation as long as the medium, that is also arising and changing with them, has the structure that permits that to happen. Furthermore, the possibility that the offspring of a lineage may give origin at any particular historical moment to a new manner of living as a variation on the manner of living of their parents, arises in the epigenetic interplay of the independent structural variabilities of the new organisms and the circumstances of the medium in which they happen to be at that particular historical moment (see Appendices 2 and 3). In other words, the reproductive conservation of a manner of living involves the conservation of both the genetic constitution and the features of the medium that make it possible. That is, and we repeat because this is a basic notion, the reproductive conservation generation after generation of a manner of living does not occur as a genetically determined process precisely because the manner of living conserved in a lineage arises epigenetically. And this happens when the particular configuration of dynamic relations between an organism and the medium that constitutes the epigenetic realization of the manner of living conserved repeats generation after generation through the realization of that very same manner of living. Such is, of course, the systemic dynamics of reproductive conservation of an ontogenic phenotype, or manner of living.
In summary, the reproduction of an organic identity entails the reproduction of both the genetic constitution and the medium that makes possible its epigenetic realization. In general terms: when, in the ecological history of the biosphere, conditions arise in the interplay between organisms and medium for the epigenetic realization of a new manner of living in the successive reproduction of some organisms, and the new manner of living begins to be reproductively conserved systemically, a new lineage arises. Such a lineage lasts as long as the relation between the changing genetic conditions of the organisms and the changing structure of the medium remains such that the systemic conditions that make possible the realization of the ontogenic phenotype of the lineage are conserved. In that process, organism and medium change together congruently as integral coherent systemic components of a changing biosphere.

When such a systemic process happens, the manner of living systemically conserved generation after generation necessarily co-opts in its structural dynamics any variation (genetically and otherwise) compatible with the realization of the manner of living conserved. Furthermore, as a lineage is established, a trend arises as a systemic constraint for the diversification of the future lineages as an operational canalization for the genetic and non-genetic variations that may be conserved. Such a process is a historical process, and as such has a unidirectionality that in living systems always entails the conservation of a constellation of coherent changes that go together through many generations. One can say that the ontogenic phenotype conserved in a lineage canalizes the genetic drift of the lineage in a dynamics of recursive co-option of all genetic variations that do not deny it.

We think that this must have happened in our evolutionary history in relation to the changes that have taken place in the brain, in the larynx, in the face, in the respiratory dynamics, in the structure of the neck, and so forth, of our ancestors, as well as in their manner of living together, while their being speech languaging animals became systemically conserved generation after generation through their living as speech-languaging animals. That is, according to us, such changes and transformation must have been the result of an evolutionary trend constituted by the conservation of a manner of living in conversations through sound productions in a background of intimacy in the biology of love. Furthermore, we think that the transformation of the bodyhood of our ancestors into our present integrated bodyhood of languaging humans, cannot have taken place in a few generations. The greatest part of the genetic system (95% or more, perhaps,) is involved in the regulatory dynamics of epigenesis, and thus its operation is open in each organism to a continuous epigenic modulation by the flow of the systemic realization of its ontogenic phenotype. As a result, most genetic changes in a lineage, which necessarily must affect the domain of the regulatory dynamics, are open to be systemically co-opted for the conservation or change of the manner of living that defines the lineage. Accordingly, we think that this is how the genetic change follows the conservation of the ontogenic phenotype, and not the reverse. Finally, it is because we think that the continuous accommodation of the genetic system to the systemic conservation of a manner of living is a process that involves
genetic co-option in the domain of genetic regulation of the epigenesis of morphogenesis, that we think that our history of languaging primates must be of at least 3 million years (perhaps more than some 300,000 generations).

Reproduction and Heredity
The question about genetic (DNA) or non-genetic determination of the phenomenon of heredity is not a trivial one. Our claim is that the phenomenon of heredity is a systemic rather than a genetic or molecular one. We do not deny the participation of DNA in giving long-run stability to biological phenomena and lineages as well as in determining the range of possible variations in the epigenetic process. Nothing can happen in the life history of an organism that is not permitted or made possible by its genetic constitution, but at the same time nothing is determined (or, more precisely, predetermined) in the life history of an organism by its genetic constitution, because every feature in it arises in an epigenic process. Furthermore, as all biologists know, the phenotype obscures the genotype in the epigenetic process because, in fact, many different genotypes can give rise to the same ontogenic phenotype. However, not all biologists are fully aware that epigenesis is a systemic process of mutual structural modulation that involves both the organism and the medium over the life span of the organism. And we biologists are not always aware of this because in our modern inclination to reductionistic thinking, we frequently see the organism as if it were interacting with a preexisting and already specified medium that contains it, or we make it disappear altogether in the enhancement of the genes.

The fundamental point in what we say here is our claim that the characteristics of an organism arise in a systemic dynamics through the recurrent and recursive interactions of the organism and the medium, in a process in which both the organism and the medium change together congruently, and not in a manner caused or predetermined by the genetic constitution of the organism or by the structure of the medium. Accordingly, we claim that:

1. Heredity occurs as a systemic process;

2. The process of evolution follows a course led by the systemic conservation of changes in the manner of living or the organisms, and not a course led by the genetic variations, even though these are always involved;

3. Evolutionary genetic change occurs as a genetic drift, and the course of the genetic drift in a lineage is channeled by the systemic conservation of the manner of living that defines the lineage; and

4. The systemic conservation of a manner of living co-opts any genetic and epigenetic variation that does not interfere with it.

Thus, evolution as a process of constitution, diversification, and extinction of lineages is not a process of improvement of the manner of living, or of progress in any particular or general sense, but it is a continuous changing present that arises in the continuous systemic conservation of the realization of the living. In evolution nothing happens because it is necessary, advantageous, or desirable. Indeed, a particular epigenic course until then optional in a lineage that begins to be systemically conserved as a manner of living in a new lineage, may become not optional but necessary in the conservation of the constitution of the new lineage through genetic constraints after several generations only to the extent that the manner of living conserved may have channeled the genetic drift of the lineage and the changes of the medium in the facilitation of the realization of that manner of living. As a result, after a certain number of generations, nothing of the medium or of the manner of living that defines the new lineage can be easily removed or altered without destroying the organisms of the lineage. Such alterations would destroy or distort the systemic coherences of the realization of the organisms that had been established along the history of the lineage. In other words, it is because of the systemic coherent changes that occur in the organism and medium in the evolutionary process, that it appears to a casual observer as if the features that define a lineage had initially arisen because they were necessary, or because they constituted an improvement for the survival of the members of the lineage.

Thus, although languaging is now essential for human existence because it now constitutes human existence in a medium that has arisen through languaging, languaging did not arise, nor was it conserved, because it was initially in any sense necessary for the survival of our ancestors. Episodes of languaging must have been happening first occasionally and then frequently in the predecessors of our lineage, until languaging began to be conserved as a matter of course in the learning of their children in a systemic inheritance. When that happened, a new manner of living and a whole new system of lineages began in a process that co-opted all genetic variations in the conservation of living in language through living in languaging. Languaging now seems essential to us, and it is in fact essential for our human living, because everything has changed in our lives around the systemic conservation of our living in language.

But how is it that living in language did not happen in the chimpanzee lineage? How is it that our ancestors lived as they lived, and languaging arose and was conserved as a manner of living? How was our lineage established in the conservation of a life lived in conversations?

Biology of Trust and Nearness
Trust and nearness constitute intimacy as the fundament for doing things together in the pleasure of doing them with another. And doing things together in the pleasure of doing them with another, constitutes cooperation. Finally, intimacy – the pleasure and joy of trust and nearness in play in total mutual body acceptance – has its origin in the mother/child relation and its expansion in neoteny.
We humans belong to a neotenic lineage, a lineage defined by the transgenerational conservation of the progressive expansion of childhood characteristics into adulthood. As a result of this process, reproduction in us humans now takes place, so to say, in the middle of infancy. Yet as neoteny occurs in evolution, it is not infancy or childhood proper that is conserved or expanded. Rather, some features of the child’s body development and emotional dynamics are extended, so that the tasks of the adult life are progressively realized in the members of the evolving lineage by individuals who retain more and more infantile relational characteristics.

We think that in us this process of neoteny entails the conservation into adulthood of the relational dynamics of love proper to the mother/child and to the child/child relations in the mammalian basic emotioning. Love, as we have said already, is the domain of those behaviors through which an other arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself. Love means or entails mutual trust in total body acceptance with no manipulation or instrumentalization of the relations. These relational features are central in the mother/child relation. Manipulation and instrumentalization of another are attempts to control the behavior of the other by illegitimate means; they are manners of aggression and denial of the other and thus entail a different emotion than love. And when the manipulated being becomes emotionally aware of this, mistrust and anger arise.

Modern human beings are love dependent animals at all ages, and we think that this is so because love as a feature of adult life has been conserved in our lineage as a neotenic feature. Of course, we do not say that we humans are unique in being loving animals. Certainly not. Indeed, mammals in general are loving animals at their infancy, and we humans in our loving behavior can relate and evoke loving behavior practically with all vertebrates, at least during their childhood, but also in their adulthood. What we say is that we are peculiar in that our evolutionary history is centered in the biology of love as a basic feature of our manner of living in a way that has expanded through our whole life span. But we think that there is more.

We think that in the conservation and expansion of the emotioning of the mother/child relation in the neotenic history of our lineage, and prior to the beginning of the conservation of language as a manner of living, there was a transformation of sexuality in our female ancestors. In the course of this history, the short annual period of female desire for and enjoyment of body contact and sexual intercourse expanded and became continuous. At what historical moment did this happen? We do not know, but we think that its happening had a fundamental consequence that made the origin of language and its conservation as a manner of living possible. Such a happening separated sexual intercourse from reproduction for our ancestors, allowing sex as the domain of acceptance and enjoyment of body contact in general, and genital intercourse in particular, to operate as an expanded source of pleasure and stability in the formation of interpersonal relations, particularly in couples and small families.

Sexuality as a source of joy and pleasure in the nearness of the body of a particular other gives permanence to the close relations between the members of a couple or of a small group. And as the expansion of the female sexuality expands the joy of nearness, it creates a possibility for the enjoyment of doing things together in the pleasure of mutual acceptance through the conservation of that nearness. Accordingly, we think that the expansion of female sexuality as part of the neotenic trend of our lineage created a space of stable intimacy, pleasure, and trust around her, in a dynamics of mutual acceptance and enjoyment of recurrent body contact that drew together females, males, and children in small families of a cooperative living together.

Sexuality does not entail only sexual intercourse; it includes, in greater or lesser degrees, all aspects of body acceptance in total trust and in the enjoyment of body nearness and contact, regardless of the sex of the participants. Thus, sexuality is involved in platonic friendship, in friendly embraces, in the acceptance and enjoyment of the nearness of another, implying in each situation different dimensions of body mutual acceptance in nearness and contact than those involved in genital sexual coupling, regardless of whether these are heterosexual or homosexual. Accordingly, what we say is that the expansion of the sexuality of the females of our ancestors is peculiar because as it occurred, and the females became as continuously interested and desirous of sexual nearness and genital intercourse as the males, a domain of coexistence appeared in which living together in small intimate groups became a permanent source of pleasure, of joy in the company of the other, and of playfulness around the realization of the chores of daily life in cooperation and not in competition.

Neoteny entails also the expansion beyond the reproductive age into adulthood of features of the mother/child relation such as sensuality and tenderness. Sensuality entails sensorial expansion and openness to see, touch, hear, smell, whereas tenderness has to do with the behavior of care in relation to others, a typical although not exclusive mammalian mother/child behavioral feature. A mammalian mother (and in fact, all animal adults when they care for their offspring) senses more when with children. This is easily observable in a female cat with kittens as she is ready to see, hear, touch and smell what she would not see, hear, touch, or smell, if she were not mothering. A female cat with kittens is also ready to protect her kittens, to let them climb on her body, or to lie on the ground so that the kittens can nurse. When one sees these behaviors, one easily says that the cat is behaving with tenderness. The same is obviously apparent in a hen with chicks. This emotional appreciation is not a projection of our own emotioning; it is a distinction of the relational domain in which these animals are.

We claim that the neotenic trend in our lineage resulted in an expansion of the mother/child relations of body acceptance, sensuality and tenderness into the adulthood of our ancestors as relational features of their daily life. And we also claim that those features have been conserved in our lineage, and are still present in us in our daily behavior at all ages, unless we deny them specifically through some ad hoc rational argument, or through some mishandling of the emotional upbringing of our children. Furthermore, we think, as we said above, that the expansion of female sexuality as part of the conservation of the neotenic trend in our lineage resulted in the intertwining of sensuality, tenderness, and sexuality that gave, and still gives, stability to family coexistence. The expansion of female sexuality constituted the joy in doing things together in cooperation as a manner of living cultivated and conserved generation after generation in the learning of children.

Cooperation is doing things together in love, in trust and mutual acceptance, in the pleasure of the doing together. As such cooperation constitutes a relational space completely different from that in which relations of domination, submission and competition, take place. In other words, we use the word “cooperation” in daily life to refer to doing things together for an explicit or implicit common purpose in a space of full behavioral freedom, in trust, and in implicit or explicit mutual acceptance. Cooperation does not take place in a space of demands, mistrust, and control. Moreover, cooperation constitutes a relational space in which intelligence is spontaneously opened to continuous expansion without effort, as a simple result of love as the very emotioning that makes it possible as a manner of living. Finally, we think that it is only in the relational space of intimacy, in the acceptance of the
body nearness of the other in cooperation, where living in language could arise, and in fact arose. Language could only arise in such a relational space, because it is only closeness in mutual acceptance and intimacy that makes it possible for occasional coordinations of consensual coordinations of behavior to begin to be conserved as a manner of living together. And we think that such a space of stable intimacy in love and cooperation was created in our lineage by the expansion of the sexuality of the females, as it opened a space for the expansion of sexuality in general.

Furthermore, we think that as the sexuality of the female expanded within the neotenic trend of the lineage, the sexuality of the male expanded as well in the domains of tenderness and sensuality, and female and male became co-participants in these dimensions. Male and female constituted each other in sensuality, tenderness and sexuality through participating in sensuality, tenderness, and sexuality. In this process they became systemic partners in living in cooperation, each one becoming a systemic participant in the conservation of sexuality as a source of pleasure and playfulness with the other (playfulness as the joy of doing in the joy living, see Maturana and Verden-Zöller, 1993). Indeed, we think that it must have been male/female playfulness in the neotenic trend that permitted and conserved the progressive expansion of female sexuality that made living in language possible. These are not romantic claims; it is enough to observe ourselves in our relations of friendship to see love undistorted by cultural injunctions or recommendations.

In the lineage that gave origin to the chimpanzees, things must have been different precisely because there was little expansion of neoteny after their lineage and ours separated some 6 million years ago, or because neoteny did not become the trend that defined their lineage. And we think that due to the absence of a neotenic trend there was not an expansion of the mother/child love relation into adulthood. Furthermore, we also think that due to the absence of such a neotenic trend, as well as due to the conservation of intense relations of domination and submission in the adult life of the members of the lineage that gave origin to chimpanzees, the members of that lineage never developed in their living together the degree of intimacy and permanence of the interpersonal relations in a coexistence that would have made it possible for them to live in cooperation and eventually to fully adopt languaging as a manner of living. When Frans de Waal talks in his writings about “chimpanzee politics,” he directly refers to the life of chimpanzees as a manner of living centered in the struggle for domination and submission. In summary, we think that as chimpanzee remained political animals centered in the struggle for domination and submission in their adult life, they could not live enough recursive intimacy for languaging and living in conversations to become their manner of living.

Cooperative versus Political Living
We consider that we human beings are cooperative, not political animals, and we think so because cooperation is a central feature of the human manner of living. According to Frans de Waal and other observers, chimpanzees cooperate in aggression. Of course, operational mutual trust is basic for doing things together in aggression, and cooperation in aggression lasts as long as operational mutual trust lasts. But when mutual trust is not the fundamental mood that guides coexistence, cooperation is necessarily transitory, and doing things together becomes a feature of the political dynamics of the relations founded on circumstantial alliances, constituting a background of hypocrisy, as happens with chimpanzees.

We humans, of course, also participate in political alliances, but, we claim, not as a feature proper to the manner of living that made us humans. We think that political alliances have become a central feature of our cultural living in our European tradition only during the last 10,000 years since the origin of patriarchy. Indeed, we humans make political alliances fully aware that they are essentially transitory and not trustful because they are manipulative of the interpersonal relations as they occur outside love. That is, we know as we make them that coordinated actions based on political alliances, or any alliances based on coincidence of interests, are in themselves transitory and not to be trusted precisely because they are not based on love. Alliances do not have the permanence of a mutual acceptance rooted in a social manner of living, and they are not social actions, they are political actions. Thus, although we humans make political alliances, political alliances are not our fundamental form of coexistence. In us cooperation as a manner of living is essentially a daily life feature of a coexistence constituted on a basis of permanent mutual trust that stands on the conservation of love as the fundament for social living.

Intelligence and Cooperation
In our present patriarchal culture one usually speaks of intelligence in technical and professional domains as consisting of the ability to solve problems. Similarly, one speaks of cooperation as if it consisted of synergistic activities, regardless of the emotions involved. We, the authors, think differently. We think that if we attend to how we use the word intelligence in daily non-professional life, we see that we use it to refer to situations or circumstances in which a human or a non-human animal participates in a domain of consensual behaviors, either in one already established, or in the constitution of a new one. Thus, for example, if you take a kitten to your home, and you see that she easily learns where to deposit her feces, where you give her food, and how to sleep with you, you would probably say that she is very intelligent. The same would be true with a person.

With the word “cooperation” there is also a difference in its use in daily life and in more technical circumstances. In daily life we use the word “cooperation” in a manner that implies the emotioning of mutual acceptance and pleasure in doing things together, and not merely a coincidence of activity for increased effectiveness. It is in the way we use the words “intelligence” and “cooperation” in daily life, that we use these words in the present essay.

As we have said earlier, both political and cooperative living entail consensuality, but they do so differently. In a daily life lived as a political coexistence there is a restriction of attention to the domain of the struggle for domination and submission. This restriction of attention to competition in any circumstance constitutes a systemic dynamics that channels the possibility for the evolutionary expansion of intelligence into a narrow path. Cooperative coexistence, on the contrary, expands the attention of those that live together in it to all possible domains of coexistence in self respect and mutual acceptance. Thus, cooperation constitutes a systemic daily dynamics that is the foundation for a systemic evolutionary trend of expansion and conservation of intelligence. Let us not forget that emotions are lived in their realization and constitute systemic dynamics for their conservation.

The difference in brain size between chimpanzees (around 450 cc) and humans (around 1500 cc), with all the inner differences that such difference entails, is, according to us, the result of these two basically different manners of community living. One, the human manner of living, is fundamentally social in the conservation of cooperation and consensuality without restrictions, and constitutes the basis for an evolutionary trend of systemic expansion of intelligence during the whole life span. The other, the chimpanzee manner of living, is fundamentally political in the conservation of competition and the struggle for domination and submission, and constitutes the basis for an evolutionary trend of systemic restriction of intelligence to the narrow domain possible in competition in adult life. So, we think that the increase in brain size in the evolutionary history of our lineage is the consequence of the systemic reproductive conservation of a manner of living in cooperation rather than in competition and aggression. We modern human beings have a languaging, loving, and cooperative brain, so to speak, because we belong to a lineage in which languaging, cooperation, and love were systemically conserved in an evolutionary trend in which all genetic variations were systemically co-opted in the conservation and expansion of that manner of living.

Conservation of the Human Lineage
We think that the expansion of female sexuality in association with the neotenic trend of the human lineage has been fundamental for the constitution of the small cooperative groups or small families in which languaging arose and began to be conserved spontaneously, generation after generation, as a manner of living in the learning of the children as they lived in intimate sensuality, tenderness, and care. Sexuality, tenderness, and sensuality, constituted in our origin and still constitute today, the fundamental relational dimensions on which rests the permanence of a family as a space of living together in cooperation and consensuality (see Appendix 7).

As we have indicated in another section of this essay, it is by the unidirectional restriction of viable variability brought about by the systemic conservation of a manner of living that a trend arises in the conservation of genetic and non-genetic changes in a lineage, or in a system of lineages. This is apparent in the transformation of the bodies of the members of our lineage in relation to the conservation of the human manner of living that began with the living in languaging. It is also apparent in the transformation of the baby’s and mother ’s bodies under the conservation of the spontaneous sensual, tender, and playful behavior of the mother and baby in the joy of mutual touching and caressing. Accordingly, we think that the present form of the human body (its physiology, its anatomy, its genetics, and the emotional dynamics that come with these) is the result of an uninterrupted evolutionary history of coherent successive changes that have occurred in an uninterrupted trend defined by the conservation of a manner of living in conversations of tenderness and mutual care that channeled the genetic drift of the lineage. Moreover, we also think that this must have occurred as a feature of the phylogenic drift of a single family, or in a small network of inbreeding families. In such a history, the expansion of female sexuality must have created the intimacy and the fundament for the dynamics of systemic conservation of a close and permanent living together in an enjoyable coexistence that made possible both the living together in language and cooperation and the expansion of intelligence in the expansion of cooperative consensuality. No doubt that from the perspective of
our present cultural living in a culture of domination and submission, mistrust and control, aggression, competition, political manipulations, abuse and wars, the claim that we modern human beings are the present of a biological history centered in love, trust, and cooperation seems preposterous and definitively wrong. And it seems so because we usually look at all biological process as if they had to take place according to our cultural emotioning. But if we look at the basic emotioning that brings joy and happiness in healthy human beings, we find love in its simplicity as the domain of those relational behaviors through which another arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with us.

There is no doubt that in the history of the Homo lineage to which we modern human beings belong, many branches must have arisen as variations around the conservation of a living in language that have taken a different course than ours. The fact that those lineages became extinct does not alter the validity of what we say, but it reveals that they went in different evolutionary courses than our lineage through the systemic conservation, perhaps, of conversations that did not conserve the biology of love and intimacy. We say this because we think that it is the conservation of living in language in the biology of love and intimacy that made us human beings.

In other words, we think that what was central in the constitution and survival of the primate lineage that resulted in humanity as we live it now was the conservation of love as the grounding emotion for coexistence in small family groups. This is why we think that the proper denomination of our Homo lineage from its beginning in the conservation of living in language to the present that we now live, should be Homo sapiens-amans (Bunnell, 1997). In this denomination the expression sapiens refers to living in language, and the expression amans refers to the basic emotion under which the lineage has been conserved. And we write Homo sapiens-amans, binding sapiens and amans with a hyphen, because we think that in the human origin languaging and emotioning were connected; love was the emotion that made possible the space of intimacy and permanence in living in the pleasure of doing things together in which languaging could arise as a manner of living conserved from generation to generation in the learning of the children.

Once living in language had begun to be conserved in our Homo sapiens-amans lineage, it became possible for other languaging lineages in which love progressively diminished its presence as a basic emotion to branch off from it. We think that initially those lineages did not and could not persist for long precisely because as love as the grounding emotion of daily living diminished in them, the group was unable to survive ecological disasters. The members of those lineages could not form stable communities with the kind of inner emotional coherence that could lead to the expansion and conservation of the intuition and understanding that result in the necessary cooperation to overcome such disasters.

Yet, when in the course of the evolutionary history our lineage of Homo sapiens-amans reached an expanded capacity for the manipulation of nature and for the argumentative justification, denial, or hiding of sentiments, other emotions such as arrogance and aggression could begin to be successfully conserved in daily living. When arrogance or aggression occurred occasionally, without being conserved from generation to generation in the learning of the children, its happening was historically irrelevant for the conservation of our condition as loving human beings. However we think that due to some particular circumstance of daily living in our ancestors some twelve thousand years ago, arrogance and aggression began to be nurtured in the learning of the children and became systematically conserved from one generation to the next as a manner of living. As that happened the relational dynamics entailed by these emotions replaced love as the relational grounding of group coexistence thus giving rise to a new cultural lineage centered on mistrust, control, domination and submission, appropriation and discrimination; namely the patriarchal culture that most humanity lives today

No doubt there are similarities between our behavior and the behavior of chimpanzees, and some of these similarities clearly correspond to primate features conserved in both of us from our common ancestors. However, other similarities, such as current political living, we think, are a recent (about 10,000 years, perhaps, in our European history) result of a cultural approach in our daily living as patriarchal beings to the political manner of living of the chimpanzees, which has a much longer biological history (4 or 5 million years, perhaps) of conservation of the struggle for domination and submission in adult life. Indeed, in the last seven or more thousand years of history in central Europe, life has progressively become more and more political through the increasing instrumentalization of all relations that our patriarchal coexistence in the dynamics domination, submission, and competition unavoidably brings forth (see the section on Patriarchy). What sort of consequences can this have in our biology? What consequences can this have in our physiology, anatomy, and genetics?

Ethics
Why and how is it that we modern human beings care about the consequences of our actions? Biology does not care. The cosmos does not care. We are the present of a cosmic and biological history that courses without aim, goal, or project. We have happened and nothing in the history that gave origin to us was necessary. We are a result of an evolutionary drift, not the product of a design or of a purpose. But as the kind of animals that we are as a result of such a history, we care, we have ethical concerns, we see our doings, and we care for their consequences to others or to the biosphere. According to us, this is so because we are loving animals. Love is not good or bad in itself, it is only the relational domain in which social life, trust, cooperation, and the expansion of intelligent behavior take place.

Ethical concerns, responsibility, and freedom, exist only in the domain of love as we live as languaging animals. Ethical concerns, responsibility, and freedom arise only as one sees the other and oneself, as well as the consequences of one’s actions on the other or on oneself, and acts according to whether one wants or does not want those consequences. In other words, to have ethical concerns, to be responsible, to be free, one must see the other and oneself in his or her legitimacy. That is, one
must operate as a languaging being in the biology of seeing the other as a legitimate other, which is the biology of love. Ethical concerns appear in the biosphere with human existence in language, and they either take place or not; if ethical concerns take place, ethical behaviors can take place.

Language is not a system of symbolic communications, language is a manner of living together in a flow of consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations of behaviors. Moreover, we do not just live in languaging, we live in conversations in the braiding of languaging and emotioning. Ethics is a particular kind of conversation, a reflexive conversation of seeing and care for the consequences of one’s actions on others. In other words, ethics is a network of doings and emotioning in which the care and concern for the consequences of one’s actions on others is present in what one does, and one acts in a way that entails accepting the consequences of that care and concern. Ethics belongs to the domain of emotions, not of reason, and as such it belongs to the domain of love.

We human beings care for other human beings and other living beings in the biosphere, and have ethical concerns and ethical behavior, because we are loving, languaging animals. That is, we belong to an evolutionary history in which the biology of love has been a central feature of the manner of living that defined our lineage. Yet, we see the other and care for him or her only to the extent that we have lived in the biology of love and intimacy, and have cultivated seeing and caring for the other as part of our living as caring human beings with other human beings. Moreover, it is as we live in recursive reflective conversations that allow us to look at our desires and see whether we like them or not in the context of other desires, that we can have ethical concerns and ethical behavior by caring for the consequences of our desires on others. That is, we belong to an evolutionary history in which living in language and in reflective conversations has been another central systemic feature of the manner of living that defined our lineage. Yet, it is only to the extent that we have lived in reflection by releasing our attachment to our desires, so that we become open to look at the consequences of what we do and act according to whether we like or do not like those consequences, that we can reflect on the consequences of our actions on others an thus have ethical concerns. Furthermore, to have ethical concerns we have to operate in respect for ourselves, accepting the legitimacy of our desires while releasing our attachment to them, so that we may reflect on the consequences of our actions and be responsible about them in the domain of our living with others without denying ourselves in the process. Yet, to do so we must live in self-respect and respect for the other, that is, in the biology of love.

We are not speaking of an ethical imperative. We are speaking of the biology of ethics, of what in our living as human beings makes our ethical concerns possible. We do not have to be ethical, but if we live in the biology of love as human beings, we sooner or later begin to have ethical concerns in relation to those other human beings whose living matters to us. We are not recommending love, nor are we recommending ethical behavior, but only if we live in the biology of love and have ethical concerns, can we indeed live as social human beings who do not become trapped in the culture of domination and submission or in the culture of indifference.

Love is our grounding, nearness our fundament, and when we lose love and nearness we try again and again to recover them because without them we disappear as Homo sapiens-amans even if our bodies may still remain Homo sapiens as zoological entities. Even health, our psychic and physiological health, depends on love and the acceptance of the body nearness of other human beings, and a word in love or a touch intended as a caress, may reestablish a lost physiological and psychic harmony. If we do not realize this, if we do not see that ethical concerns arise in love, and we believe that they belong to the domain of our rationality, in our desire for a harmonious social life we begin to use rational arguments or even force to secure something that looks like ethical behavior. As we lose respect for our emotions we begin to use rational arguments to hide, deny, or justify them. We do so in a path that progressively leads to the negation of the other through manipulation as we become Homo sapiens aggressans in the expansion of the patriarchal passion for control. We know all this, but we forget it in the delusion of omnipotence through a misunderstanding of intelligence as we think of it as an instrument of control and manipulation. But now that we are aware that our own behavior determines what we are and what our children become, we can choose: do we prefer to conserve a lineage of Homo sapiens-amans or a lineage of Homo sapiens aggressans? (See also Bunnell 1997, Bunnell and Sonntag, 2000.) This choice is a matter of emotions, that is, it is a matter of desire – what do we indeed want to conserve?

These reflections seem to fall outside biology, but they do not, because they deal with the essence of phylogenic drift – namely they deal with the constitution of lineages through the systemic reproduction of a manner of living basically defined by the preferences that the living systems have at every instant in the course of their living.