PI, i think what Nomaken means is the universal unconditional love most people feel toward everyone, empathy, caring... we are all chips from the same block of wood so there is a love between us all, but fear is what clouds that love for a lot of people so we can't really access all that fuzzy mojo so easily and spread it around to everybody. so we select the ones we get along with and don't fear and show them love instead, which is all fine and dandy but it's not the same as the already existing love. excuse me if i am not being very concise, i feel like my brain is lopsided. 
I don't see that empathy/caring are the same as love (unconditional or not), sure they can often come together but I don't agree that love is necessary for the first. I also don't agree that as a race humans have a predisposition to love absolutely everyone- how would survival of the fittest have ever worked if mankind was too busy loving everyone to actually be the 'fittest'?
* purposefulinsanity runs screaming from this thread that seems to have been sucked into a 60's timewarp wondering if that was really a button mushroom she just ate.
I don't know, PI. If we did not have a universal love for our own kind, we would still be laying eggs in the sand and swimming back out to sea. Call it xenophobia, maybe, if love doesn't fit, but without it we would not have needed to evolve intelligence. Animal instincts would have been enough to ensure survival, in some form.
Banding together is a most important advance, which humans can't claim to have invented, but we have benefitted more than many animals by protecting and helping each other.
It's mainly when we start to subdivide among ourselves into smaller groups, that fatal problems begin.
