Word: primal
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Martie Haselton, a psychologist at UCLA, is exploring the forces that may have shaped those more primal attributes into modern love. She believes it all comes down to the long-term health of children. Haselton calls romantic love a "commitment device," a mechanism that encourages two humans to form a lasting bond. Those bonds help ensure that children survive to reproductive age, getting fed and cared for by two parents rather than one. "Natural selection has built love to make us feel romantic," she says...
...most primal of those desires is that a possible partner smells right. Good smells and bad smells are fundamentally no different from each other; both are merely volatile molecules wafting off an object and providing some clue as to the thing that emitted them. Humans, like all animals, quickly learn to assign values to those scents, recognizing that, say, putrefying flesh can carry disease and thus recoiling from its smell and that warm cookies carry the promise of vanilla, sugar and butter and thus being drawn to them. Other humans carry telltale smells of their own, and those can affect...
...drive a car, are stored. Motor skills like those can be hard to lose, thanks to the caudate nuclei's indelible memory. Apply the same permanence to love, and it's no wonder that early passion can gel so quickly into enduring commitment. The idea that even one primal part of the brain is involved in processing love would be enough to make the feeling powerful. The fact that three are at work makes that powerful feeling consuming...
...Primal may not be the word to describe the well-groomed landscapes at Kew, the Royal Botanic Gardens on the outskirts of central London, but the backdrop of grassy slopes and monumental trees turns out to be just the right fit for Moore's work, which can seem both powerfully natural and shrewdly cultivated. For "Moore at Kew," the vast show that opened there in September and remains through the end of March, 27 of his large bronzes and one massive figure in white fiberglass have been set to advantage all around Kew's elegant acreage. Silhouetted against...
...tangled energy and a forbidding hint of bodily dismemberment that spares those pieces from the sentimentality that can infect so much of his art. A work like Two Piece Reclining Figure: Points, from 1969, has the feel that Moore aimed at - but didn't always achieve - of form as primal matter. At Kew you can pet it, but you just might be afraid...