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jsabotta2 comments on Resist the Happy Death Spiral - Less Wrong
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"If you try to sever science from e.g. parental love, you aren't just denying cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. You're also denying Martine Rothblatt's founding of United Therapeutics to seek a cure for her daughter's pulmonary hypertension. (Successfully, I might add.) Science is legitimately related, one way or another, to just about every important facet of human existence."
Well, no. No one in their right mind makes the argument that "scientists can't love their children" or "a scientific enterprise cannot be motivated by love.".
The phrase "Science has nothing to say about a parent's love for their child" means only that there is no "scientific explanation" for a parent's love. This may or may not be entirely true, but right or wrong, it has nothing to do with (as you rather confusingly put it) "denying" Martine Rothblatt seeking a cure for her daughter's pulmonary hypertension. That search is an act of love, motivated by love, not an explanation for why the love is there in the first place.
Not yet, anyway, at least with regards to the specific mental mechanisms that create the feeling. If you take a "ten thousand foot high" view of the subject, evolution explains love perfectly - love is what drives humans to be monogamous (though not perfectly, for various reasons) and it also drives us to protect our young. This is beneficial for the survival of the species, and it is one of the reasons humans are arguably the most successful creatures on the planet in terms of survival. Nearly every mammal exhibits similar behavior, with variations depending on their specific adaptations, so it is quite reasonable to say they likely experience a feeling very much like what we call love.
That's the point. There is nothing that science is not involved with, and there are researchers right now attempting to find why we love (and there has been a lot of progress in the area - I've seen some really cool documentaries on the subject).
jsabotta didn't make claims about whether a scientific explanation of parental love exists; he stated, correctly I think, that your beliefs about the existence of such an explanation have no bearing on whether or not you deny Martine Rothblatt's founding of United Therapeutics to seek a cure for her daughter's pulmonary hypertension.
"You're also denying Martine Rothblatt's founding of United Therapeutics to seek a cure for her daughter's pulmonary hypertension." I'm not sure what Eliezer means by this statement. Is he talking about denying that Martine Rothblatt founded United Therapeutics? Is he talking about denying that she founded it to seek a cure for her daughter's pulmonary hypertension? I think that there must be some other interpretation because I don't see how denying either of those things would result from denying that science can explain parental love.
bigjeff, I don't see how you can claim that love "is one of the reasons humans are arguably the most successful creatures on the planet in terms of survival," if "Nearly every mammal exhibits similar behavior." How can our position as the "most" successful species be a result of a characteristic that we share with so many other animals? The reason we are most successful needs to be something that distinguishes us from all other species, our intelligence, for instance.