A. R. Bergandi 2008-07-28

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

This book is very easy to read and I found it extremely enjoyable and informative. Its a keeper for sure!

Jacylin Nanyada 2008-07-20

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Buss has a rather limited view of evolutionary psychology. This book and his others are just vehicles for promoting his own views and research. If you want a really useful book, read Evolutionary Psychology: The Ultimate Origins of Human Behaviorby Palmer & Palmer. It's a sleeper but a keeper! Highly recommended.

Rosanna Tarsiero 2008-03-09

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

The book is organized in 6 parts and 13 chapters. Part one explains evolution theory and evolutionary psychology and how they are misunderstood and misrepresented, whereas the rest of the book deals with problems like survival, mating, sexual-strategies, kinship and group living.

This book explains behaviours we see everyday, such as gender differences, aggression, jealousy, conflicts, and problems of rank, status and prestige.

Granted, it is not a book full of PC, neither it adopts a feminist view. In fact, it dispels some feminist nonsense (long overdue), such as pointing out how competition happens mainly against same-sex people and how the strategies used by women to put down other women reflect the different mating strategies rooted in gender (such as slandering other women who pursue short-term mating strategies as opposed to long-term ones).

It makes for a very interesting reading!

Miltie Verveniotis 2007-10-11

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

This was the first book I read dealing with Evolutionary Psychology. I read it after college and law school so the textbook format was actually perfect for what I was looking for. It begins with a rudimentary and straight forward explanation of evolution by natural selection. From there it gets into the details of evolutionary psychology. It is a very solid introduction to the field in my opinion. I was told that when it comes to EP to start with Buss's book but don't end there and I sort of see why. I don't think you could go wrong by starting here.

saimiri37 2005-06-24

39 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

I used this book as a text book for a course I taught on Human Behavior. On the whole, the students really enjoyed the text and they found Buss's writing style to be very engaging and easy to read. I would agree.

Nevertheless, I feel this book--like the whole field of Evolutionary Psychology--requires a far more rigorous scientific framework before it can be considered a field that can substantively explain human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Don't get me wrong: evolutionary hypotheses can provide a lot of insight into particular human behaviors. However, I would have liked to see much more discussion on what is science, what constitutes a scientifically valid argument, how do we falsify a particular hypothesis, etc. These issues could be covered in a few pages or so, and I think they could help flesh out or perhaps even justify some of the arguments put forth in the text. As it stands now, the book reads more like an apologetic and as I skim the pages, I get the same feeling that I do when I've been pamphleted by evangelicals. Buss's arguments are fraught with generalizations: studies on college kids are extrapolated to the whole human species, studies on plumage color in birds are used to argue for handicaps in humans, and on and on it goes. There are sentences that make pretty extraordinarly claims that go unreferenced and there are sentences that make trivial points that are tailed by six references.

Professor Buss does a good job in conveying the basics of natural selection, but then uses some of the most tenuous definitions of fitness in trying to make an adaptive argument: questionaires, age, symmetry, and even intuition are all stand-ins for fitness. This is a shame because in order to know when selection will operate, we need to know how phenotypic (including behavioral) variation covaries with fitness. Because his fitness proxies are so weak, I have a hard time buying many of the arguments advanced in the book. Other evolutionary forces are rarely discussed; such lapses are unfortunate since it is likely that drift has played some (if not a major) role in getting populations to cross adaptive valleys, as well as affecting the evolutionary dynamics of frequency-dependent selection. But I digress...

I hope future editions (and I'm sure they're on their way) will include a chapter on scientific and evolutionary epistemology. That is, I would like to see a chapter address the question: what steps do evolutionary biologists proceed through when they make an adaptive argument. This would be a timely and useful contribution given that intelligent-design folks are trying to loosen up and poke holes in the definition of science. One chapter starts down this road but never critically discusses how hypotheses are tested (and rejected!), it focuses more on how hypotheses are developed--and believe me, evolutionary psychologists are good at coming up with hypotheses. Professor Buss's book, with its profligate use of unfalsifiable hypotheses, does not help the cause in this respect. Sure, evolutionary psychologists can always hide behind Lakatos as they denigrate Popper for being too severe, or, like Dunbar et al., they can actually learn some math, some scientific epistemology, and help bring evolutionary psychology into a more rigorous, more reputable position. Buss's book does too much of the former and not enough of the latter.