Diehard romantic: Henry Gibbons describes the kiss as "the anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction".
Credit: Corbis
PASH, PECK, SMACK, SMOOCH, SNOG. In its various forms the kiss has long been a source of inspiration to lovers, musicians and poets — less well-known is that scientists have also been getting some of the action. Philematology is the formal name for the study of smooching, an act known affectionately in the lab as 'osculation'.
Renowned 19th century American physician and diehard romantic, Henry Gibbons, described the kiss as "the anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction".
If that doesn't leave you swooning, consider the work of bacteriologist Arthur Bryan at Baltimore City College, Maryland, in the 1950s. He reported that up to 250 colonies of bacteria can be transferred in a single passionate kiss. Which brings us to an important question. Why, exactly, do we kiss?
Lip-smacking mystery
Mystery still surrounds the motive for that very first kiss. As anthropologist Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, notes, many species engage in behaviour that looks suspiciously similar. Snails use their antennae to caress, birds nibble beak-to-beak, and many mammals lick or gently gnaw each other. So maybe kissing is just an animal impulse?
"When you find something in 90 per cent of cultures around the world and you also find it in a great many mammalian species, that's something innate," says Fisher.
Chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest relatives, kiss in wildly different ways and contexts. According to Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, chimps specialise in a platonic kiss of reconciliation. "Within a minute of a fight having ended, the two former opponents may rush towards each other, kiss and embrace long and fervently, and then proceed to groom each other," he writes in his book, Chimpanzee Politics.
Bonobo kisses, on the other hand, are usually given during play, and have sexual overtones: while chimp kisses don't get more lascivious than a quick peck, bonobous revel in sloppy, tonguey tonsil-hockey.
Some trace the evolutionary origins of the kiss to mouth-to-mouth feeding of offspring, a behaviour observed in many species of birds and mammals. This could have led to kissing as a sign of affection between mother and child; a gesture that spread to other relationships. But some anthropologists point out that the people who still feed their young in this way — the Papuans of New Guinea and the San of southwest Africa — were strangers to kissing before Europeans arrived.
Little nibble
For Freud, kissing was a subconscious return to infancy and suckling at the mother's breast, and many researchers since have noted the parallels. "When a baby is looking for a nipple it's already making the movements and the facial expression and the pouted lips that we later apply in the kiss," says Glenn Wilson of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, England.
De Waal thinks kissing evolved as a way of communicating good intentions. "Superficially, a kiss resembles a bite. So you're showing that you could do something harmful, but you're not — instead you're making yourself vulnerable."
Slightly less charming is de Waal's comparison of kissing with another behaviour in monkeys and dogs: "They turn their behind and 'present' it to another individual, they take a vulnerable position so the other can inspect them or smell them or climb onto them. It is the same principle, I think, as the kiss."
However, not everyone is convinced that kissing is a product of evolution. "Kissing is a behaviour that's 100 per cent learned and it has absolutely nothing to do with genetics," says Vaughn Bryant, professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University in College Station, USA. "If it were innate, everybody would be doing it — and they're not."
In one of the many
In one of the many discussions I had with my grandmother she told me that in her days, she only kissed my grandfather twice: one time at the beginning of their relationship and the second and last time was when they got married.
thats sad
thats sad