Can anyone recommend a good book on evolutionary psychology?

[CallMeIshmael]

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For example, women may want to bang the rich guy with the nice ride, etc. while having no intention of a long-term relationship. She finds the ability to provide resources attractive.

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Women are attracted to power and success even in terms of "short-term" attraction.

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I agree with both of these.


Like I said, resources/power do play a role in short term mating, it is just less important relative to the role in long term mating.

[pilliwinks]

Looks like there are plenty of folk interested in why women mate [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

I readily confess to being no anthropologist or sociologist, so I will gladly bow to whatever is the received wisdom on who it is that women prefer. My point is that our theories should be prioritised if they contain current data about current habits, and treated with some suspicion if they are based on hypotheses about what did or did not occur in the Pleistocene.

It would be unfortunate if our best theories for human behaviour were of the form: we see now that A does X to B, we speculate that in the Pleistocene it was adaptive for As to do X to B, we now have an explanation for why A does X to B.

The reason this is unsatisfactory is that I find I can make an adaptive Pleistocene 'explanations' for just about any behaviour, including contradictory ones.

Of course if you actually have convincing data about sexual habits in the Pleistocene, I'll be the first to applaud.

Please note that I have no problem with people being driven by unconscious urges or goals. I just have problems with attempts to make sociological hypotheses sound genetic by attributing an imagined selective history to them.

[CallMeIshmael]

Pill,

Somewhat of a related question.


The love of sweets/fats that all of us have is clearly maladaptive in todays world. It would be better for us to crave more healthy foods.

Do you agree that this conundrum is the product of evolution tens of thousands of years ago?

[pilliwinks]

Ishmael, yes. And no.

Everything that we are is inevitably the product of our history - that's how we got here.

That does not mean that it is inevitable that what happened during the history included selection for the feature in question.

In the case of preference for sweets/fats, you could argue that since this is a feature of every extant mammal I ever heard of, that we have it not a selected adaptive trait that emerged tens of thousands of years ago, but rather that it is a legacy of our mammalian precursor past (millions of years ago). Whether this stands up to scrutiny you would have to ask an archaeologist.

It's no conundrum that we have non-adaptive traits. Humans should carry plenty of these, since our habitat has changed so drastically.