Where this was said
Defense Rebuttal 1: A Feature, Not a Bug
At 12:22 · chapter starts 11:00
Drew opens with a rhetorical jab that lands: is love hijacking the cocaine system, or did cocaine hijack the love system? The answer is obviously the latter — love came first, by billions of years. He concedes that limerence causes poor decisions and blinkered judgment, but argues that this is the whole point. Human infants require the most intensive and prolonged parental investment of any species on earth precisely because only 25% of the brain is developed at birth. Evolution needed a mechanism to keep two adults bonded through years of grueling child-rearing — and temporary, irrational infatuation is that mechanism. A feature, not a bug. Drew also pushes back on Mark's modern-stakes caveat, suggesting that a broken dating market is a problem with modernity, not with love itself. The two begin circling the same territory from opposite directions.
Human infants are born with only 25% of their brain developed, requiring years of intensive parental care — the evolutionary pressure behind pair bonding.
Scientists knocked out the oxytocin receptor in prairie voles — the 'love hormone' pathway — and the animals still formed pair bonds. The conclusion: evolution considered attachment so critical that it built multiple redundant neurological backup systems to guarantee it happens.
