Did Kissing Evolve?

You cannot strip a kiss of
its meaning and still pretend
you are studying a kiss

The Gift of a Kiss
What Science Cannot Measure: Kisses Included

by John Wise, PhD

My favorite moment each morning is the kiss Jenny and I share before breakfast. It is playful, warm, surprising. Often soft, sometimes urgent. It grounds me in our belonging, our shared existence as the day begins. I often don’t feel kissable first thing in the morning, yet she kisses me anyway, and that simple act floods my reality with joy. How much joy? Think of Thumper in Bambi, ears twisted, foot thumping uncontrollably.

That simple scene is closer to the truth of a kiss than anything you will find in an academic journal.

Which is why I am smiling.

Phys.org, “Ape ancestors and Neanderthals likely kissed, new analysis finds,” November 18, 2025. The researchers at Oxford did not describe anything remotely like what happens when I kiss my wife. To begin, they had to give the kiss a scientific definition, and talk about killing the magic! “First kiss dates back 21 million years, say scientists,” November 18, 2025, the BBC quotes them as calling a kiss a

… non aggressive, directed oral to oral contact with some movement of lips or mouthparts and no food transfer.

One can almost see the committee debating whether “mouthparts” should be plural or singular!

Having thus captured romance with something like a rusted steel colander, they fed the behavior into computer models and reached their conclusion:

We think kissing probably evolved around 21.5 million years ago in the large apes.

Phys.org adds with admirable confidence that:

… the most recent common ancestor of humans, chimps, and bonobos likely engaged in kissing behavior.

Neanderthal romance, by Grok

There is something both amusing and endearing about the seriousness with which this subject is presented. One imagines a panel of solemn researchers pushing up their glasses as they inform us that Neanderthals probably kissed too, and perhaps even kissed Homo sapiens … based on shared oral microbes!

They also report kissing in wolves, prairie dogs, polar bears, and albatrosses. It plays in our mind like a David Attenborough documentary scripted by someone who has never kissed anything at all, yet delivers solemn commentary about mouthparts operating “as evolution intended.”

Do not misunderstand me.

Science is good, not bad. But it can only do what science can do. It can describe behaviors, run statistics, compare traits, and even generate speculative timelines. But there are whole regions of human experience where scientific description cannot reach the thing being described. As C.S. Lewis once reminded us, you can study the chemistry of water all you want, but chemistry will not tell you what it feels like to be thirsty.

Evolution does more than overlook what science cannot measure. It builds its entire story on the removal of meaning, then explains the world as though meaning were never there. Evolution turns a scientific blind spot into a worldview. What science cannot measure, evolution insists must not exist.

A kiss, especially in marriage, is not a behavior awaiting analysis. It is a lived unity. It is how two people inhabit the same time-space in playful reverence. It is chosen joy, a tiny sacrament of belonging, not in the formal sense but in the lived sense. When Jenny kisses me, it is not the expression of a bond. It is the bond, breathing in the present. It does not symbolize unity.

It is unity.

There is no variable in the model for this. No drop-down menu for delight. No statistical parameter for the way time pauses when affection merges into shared shivering delight. You cannot strip a kiss of its meaning and still pretend you are studying a kiss.

And that, I suspect, is why scientific definitions are sometimes so unintentionally funny. A shared sunrise cannot be measured with even the most precise instrument. The researchers are not wrong. They are simply studying the wrong thing. They are examining only what can fit their tools’ limitations, and in the process the phenomenon itself quietly leaves the room, waiting outside until the analysis is finished.

Tomorrow morning Jenny will kiss me again before we share our coffee. Evolution cannot touch that moment, but the Creator delights in it. Some gifts are too real to quantify, too joyful for analysis, and too personal to have come from anything but Love Himself, who by His word created everything good.

Kisses included.

John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.