The Chemistry of Love

I saw this image on Facebook recently:

While some object that there aren’t really people who engage in scientism and reductionism, that it is a caricature, clearly whoever made this image thinks that love and oxytocin are equivalent in some respect – although what in fact the heart represents is itself open to discussion, I suppose.

But at any rate, I do think that there is a danger to fail to do justice to different levels of reality. Understanding how a car functions is not the same as driving one from point A to point B. Understanding the physics of music does not mean that it cannot be experienced as beautiful. And the fact that any experience of love is rooted in brain and body chemistry with an evolutionary history, need not be taken to mean that our relationships are reducible to chemical formulas.

The above Sans Science cartoon is a response to the XKCD cartoon purity.