It’s at once a horrible book and an interesting one. There are these questions, and they’re very hard to answer, I think because people will always lie about these things. And it’s so careful, the care they take over their data, their care about comparing the theories, it’s breathtaking. And deserves to be popular. Albeit probably Pinker knows better and would deny the above claims, “How the Mind Works” gives readers the idea that organisms are perfect, machine-like adaptations and that evolution works better than any humanly engineered system. Right, it’s like we edit our memories, inserting or remembering different motivations to what we recorded at the time.

It feels to me like this argument is a little more heated than the debates around language, because it’s more nuanced. But I didn’t hesitate to include a controversial book because I think much of evolutionary psychology is. It’s not like studying 19th century physics; my physics lecturer told me, ‘this is how water pressure works and we know it is because we’ve known about it for 200 years and tested it.’ This is a new discipline, and by nature that means its got lots of theories. Over time they’ll be weeded down and we’ll have more confidence. And finally, even if that were true -which is most likely it’s not-, it has no predictive power as to how we should be. Genetic mutations are not always an “evolution” of the past in the sense of “being better” but they develop as simple variations that can either be helpful, harmful, or neutral.While natural selection is the primary factor in evolution, Buss states that other causes of evolutionary change are sexual selection (mate preferences) and genetic drift (the favoring of a subset of the gene pool due to unique circumstances). Buss does not discuss the (neutral) mutations that survive because they do no harm even if they provide no benefit. There’s something else that’s unusual about humans that we don’t often talk about: we’re the only animals that can kill at a distance” That’s what we’re doing much of the time—coming up with externally plausible explanations for why we do what we do” Quite interesting and illuminating, although one tends to start seeing human behaviour, especially the "mating dance" between both sexes in a rather cynical light. Sometimes it seems depressing how much our preferences and character traits today are the product of recurrent environmental adaptive problems men encountered tens of thousands of years ago.. that life's only goal is to be as reproductively successful as possible and that every single thing seems to revolve around getting sexual access to the best and many individuals (men) and getting access to men who hold important ressources (women).

Imagine I’m a chimp, and some other chimp or even several other chimps decide I ought to be punished” What Buss fails to realize is that some of those workers will go home and tell their wives “go to the kitchen, woman”. You mentioned Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, so let’s move onto that next. This is a book I read while studying experimental psychology as an undergraduate and I have such fond memories of it, because unlike so many set texts this was not at all a chore to read. It’s so interesting, so very readable. Why do you like it so much? Yes. For example, Herb Gintis has suggested that Bingham and Souza underplay the importance of child-rearing, the role of culture and the invention of fire in their analysis.And many of those who don’t say that, still secretly prefer their wives to remain simple-minded, ignorant, and largely at home.

Another chunk of the criticism applies to “pop evolutionary psychology”, such as the evolutionary psychology that people who read one or two books on the topic engage in. That’s the typical “after-the-facts storytelling”. Or, as Nassim Taleb said, “people who love a nice narrative but have no evidence”. Strategic interference between the sexes: different strategies for example inferences about sexual intent; men are biased in favour of inferring sexual intent because it was reproductively costly to miss an opportunity Homicide is really interesting from an experimental perspective, because the data is so good. You can argue about whether somebody is abused or whether somebody is angry, or whether somebody is lying to you. But when you’ve got a murder, you’ve got a body; this definitely happened. And the police have got an incentive to find out who did it. So you’ve got really, really good data.It wasn’t obvious that language evolved, because languages look so very different. But he goes through the underlying structure and it’s very similar”