Forty four years ago, I heard this rather unsettling half-poem in the pipe-tobacco-infused offices of Emil Wolfgang Menzel, primatologist emeritus at New York’s Stony Brook University. It went something like this.

“Higamous hogamous, women are monogamous. Higamous pigamous, men are polygamous.” In layman terms it means: Women want to have babies with only one partner while men prefer having babies with many.

Sensible as this may sound to some religious and rap groups, this same school of thought theorizes that this disparity has more to do with animal instinct than human spirit, as much as we may wish otherwise. For the past 70 years Menzel et. al. have studied the boundary between the two, with some unsettling conclusions.

Ivan Pavlov showed a bell works as well as a bowl of food in getting dogs excited about dinner. B. F. Skinner took Pavlov a frightening step further showing human behavior can be similarly, even subliminally shaped, much to the delight of Madison Avenue. E.O. Wilson pulled out all the stops saying our DNA dictates what we do.

All this dissecting of human behavior into biochemistry, instinct, and evolution can empty meaning from the joy, love, compassion and contentment we all treasure. Which is why nobody ever heard of these guys. They kept asking questions nobody wanted answered.

To them, our emotions are little more than brain-stem-based strategies to ease primitive impulses past a far more cautious frontal cortex. Said another way, difficult decisions are made all the easier by “going with your gut”, “relying on instinct,” “getting worked up” or, dare I say it, “falling in love.”

Therein lies the rub. There’s a trade-off we all make when we get emotional that one might easily argue leaves us vulnerable to those less so. Which has me wondering why, in this the “Information Age,” are we all so overwrought? Is it because there’s money and power to be had, all at the expense of the overwrought?

So, in this issue of NBN we pay homage to Tina Turner and so many others turning our heartfelt feelings into capital gains, political office or gruesome wars, with the simple question that earned Tina a ton: “What’s love got to do with it?” Or sadness, anger, fear, surprise, happiness, and disgust. You’ll love it. Click here.