LOVE -- POETRY OR GENETICS?

Well, I think your long run is over, fellows! All you poets of either pen or piano who have for generations been waxing eloquent about human love! I don't care if it's a Shakespeare sonnet or a Mozart minuet, you've had it all wrong all along!

Now I hesitate to report this in this the lyrical season of spring, love and marriage, but scientific facts are facts my dear outdated friends. Today's breakthrough hypotheses by our neuro-scientists and evolutionary-biologists have once and for all stuck the finger of irrefutable fact into the eye of this love stuff. You and I fall in love because we have to.

All you Hallmark and red-roses devotees must now and forevermore understand that the reason we love -- our date, our mate, our parent, our god -- is largely because evolution has hard-wired us to do so. What we have traditionally felt was our heart skipping a beat has in fact been our brain lobes and gene pools skipping to the pre-ordained rhythms of evolution. A blind planetary compulsion for every form of life to mate, breed, and re-produce itself.

I've often wondered what these researchers say at the end of the day to their spouses and children. Maybe something like, "OK, time for a DNA assessment to see how well our love-drives are performing today." And does this mean that old fashioned miracles like the loaves-and-fishes now have competition from new miracles like the lobes-and-genes?

I'm not being disrespectful to the legitimate discoveries of modern science. The dogged pursuit of truth is what science is all about, and many of us wouldn't be here today without its discoveries and cures. However, the problem some of us have is not with the laws-of-science. It's with the laws-of-unintended-consequences. The unintended conclusions many lay people reading these reports may arrive at.

This comes into especially sharp relief when you hear defense attorneys arguing their case according the compulsion of some brains to "kill for love." Or kids caught in the act saying something like "Gee, mom, my genes made me do it!"

I asked my therapist if I'm carrying my concerns too far. His answer concerned me: "Re-read your Darwin, take two serotonin tablets, then call me in the morning...."