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Lots of different interesting things from last night's presentation/conversation to explore further. Many thanks to Stephanie, Amelia, Alex for fomenting it. Looking forward to seeing what other people heard/thought. For my part, I was intrigued by/am motivated to think more not only about particular issues that arose but also about a set of meta-issues, deriving in part form our earlier conversations about diversity.

I confess I would not have picked the "Science of Love" as a topic, and so among the things that impressed me was how enthusiastically others embraced it as an interesting subject for discussion. And that in turn had me thinking about scientific research more generally, not only about how questions are posed and explored but how they are chosen, and what the implications of that are. So a general set of questions to explore further, using "The Science of Love" as a case study ....

1. What makes a subject worth spending time and money to study, individually and collectively?
2. What are the benefits and costs of studying any particular topic?
3. What are the appropriate standards for research on any given topic?

With regard to (1), there is clearly significant individual variation in what one is on the face of it interested in, and so the question is largely one of what generates/justifies collective interest. Equally clearly, there are lots of subjects of collective interest that don't, at any given time, generate communities of inquiry in which people willingly invest time and money (their own and other peoples"). The "Science of Love" would, I think, have been in this category several years ago. Is that changing, and if so, why?

My guess is that there are several factors operating here, that a substantial collective interest has always existed among humans in general and that it is some other changes that have facilitated its expression as "science". One might be the ongoing increase in the diversity of professional scientists, the addition of more people who (unlike me) have a spontaneous personal interest in the topic? A second might be the relatively independent development in several existing disciplines of a set of tools that can be productively used to dissect and hence explore both emotion generally and "love" specifically. Neurology (my reference was to the work of Antonio Damasio and the group around him), endocrinology, evolutionary biology, and both personality and social psychology, have clearly made relevant advances along these lines.

Perhaps a third reason to endorse a "science of love" (and my own favorite, given the conversation last night) is that it provides an arena in which scientists representing a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives can come together around a shared set of interests and, in so doing, start posing questions and imagining possibilities unlikely to have arisen in any of the individual disciplines alone.

NBS has a twenty year history that's relevant in this regard. It was originally conceived as bringing together faculty in five departments (Bryn Mawr Biology, Psychology, and Human Development; Haverford Biology and Psychology) with common interests in "neural and behavioral sciences". What exactly that meant has been continously debated, negotiated, and renegotiated, and it is only in the past few years that the original ambition has come at last to be fully realized administratively. That some behavioral sciences faculty remain unsure that they have a role to play in NBS and some students continue to worry about whether they have sufficient "neural" background suggests that the administrative achievement is still ahead of the intellectual one. Hopefully, our conversation last night can contribute to clarifying the benefits of creating a fuller intellectual commonality (one rooted in the benefits of diversity). Thanks to all for that.

If there is to be a "science of love" then it seems to me it, like physics or genetics, must begin to entertain questions of (question 2 above) the costs and benefits not only to practitioners but to the wider culture of which it is a part (and from which it needs support). We didn't talk much about this last night, but the parallels seem to me obvious. Are we expecting the new science to improve human lives? to make "love" more available to everyone? And if it moved in that direction, what would be the potential costs? Does it diminish our sense of meaning to have "love" dissected? Would making "love" tools available to everyone diminish our diversity? Should we perhaps be asking science not how to make love "easier" but rather to help us come up with new and different ways of thinking about "love"?

And from this in turn follows question 3, and a concern about eharmony.com I briefly allluded to at the end of our conversation last night. If there is to be a science of love, it should be, for me at least, subject to the same ethical standards I (if not others) would apply to any other "science"

"As the borders between basic and applied research, between the academy and commerce, have blurred, the terrain has shifted from one where scientists needed to be reminded to think about the potential impact of their work on the world at large to one where many scientists start with quite deliberate intentions of impacting on the world at large. And from one in which much science was done out of relatively pure curiosity to one where at least as much is done because of, or at least in awareness of, the potential for significant personal gain, financial and otherwise. The need for some kind of professional code of ethics for science is, in consequence, even greater now than it was ..."

That ethical code would, at a minimum, preclude using the adjective "science" for any activity in which both the observations and the procedures for interpetation of them are not freely and publicly available. Without that, there is no way for others to further test them nor, even more importantly, to make use of them in the continuing development of new ways of thinking about things.