Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire - Two Evolutionary Psychologis [Paperback]

Do you want to find out about the origin of dumb blonde jokes? Or why polygamy is good for women? If you do, you will really enjoy this book. It is provocative, politically incorrect, uncomfortable and brutal but it is also a very clearly written and passionate introduction to the the exciting field of evolutionary psychology.

Many years ago, before evo psych was even sociobiology, some people (usually social scientists) would ask themselves, how did things go down in the prehistory? They realized that our instinctive behaviors were honed on the savannahs of Africa long before we became civilized or even before we became human. The Darwinians among them further realized that the ten thousand or so years since the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry was not enough time for human nature to have changed much. Ergo, we are savannah animals dining at the Burger King with our fingers on the nuclear trigger reading the Wall Street Journal, but with our biological imperatives virtually unchanged since the Stone Age.

From that simple, but profound, realization has sprung evolutionary psychology, which is a fine tool for gazing more or less objectively into the labyrinth of human behavior leading to some understanding of why we behave the way we do.

As wonderful as I think evolutionary psychology is--and it is indeed an eye opener that has taken the groves of academy by storm in the last couple of decades--I can readily see five problems:

One, it upsets people much in the same way that Freud or Darwin upset people, namely by making us more like animals than like beings made in the image of God.
Two, evolutionary psychology, like all psychologies, is limited.
Three, sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between something obviously true (men want lots and lots of reproductive opportunities) and something that may be true ("the death penalty cannot deter young men" from violent crimes--see page 130).
Four, the unwarranted leap that many people, even some very intelligent and educated people, make from the IS of an evo psych discovery to the OUGHT of a moral or societal truth; e.g., women want a man committed to helping them raise their children, but they also want the genetic input from the most alpha male they can find. This, to many people, makes it sound like cuckolding your hubby is the right thing to do since it is the "natural" thing to do. It is also the natural thing to take what you want when you want it, but that doesn't make it right.
Five, behavioral tendencies as gleaned from a study of humans in the so-called Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness are just that, general tendencies that most people at one time or another, for a myriad of reasons, do not always follow. Evolutionary psychology describes main tendencies; it does not prescribe anything. Of course some of these tendencies are powerful biological imperatives that most people find difficult to ignore.

The strength of this book is that the authors go well beyond the familiar discoveries from evolutionary biology to lesser known but fascinating discoveries such as the evolutionary rationale behind beautiful people being more likely to have daughters than sons, to why rich people are more likely to have sons, or why having sons reduces the chance of a divorce, to even why gentlemen prefer blondes.

Here are some observations on the few cases I think the authors didn't get quite right:

They ask: "What is the adaptive problem that religion is designed to solve? Do religious people live longer or have greater reproductive success? So far, no one has been able to point to an adaptive problem that religion is designed to solve." (pp. 158-159) Not so. As Edward O. Wilson so eloquently put it in Human Nature (1978): "When the gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary." (p. 184) What he meant was that the adaptive reason for religion is to make the tribe more cohesive and better able to defeat other tribes in, for example, warfare.

The authors write: "The reason most Western industrial societies are monogamous, despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, is that men in such societies tend to be more or less equal in their resources, compared to their ancestors in medieval times." (p. 90) While I suppose this is true, a better reason is that large polygynous societies are politically unstable since large numbers of males without mates tend to revolution; and given suffrage, they would vote against polygyny, as in the US.

The authors aver that there is no satisfactory (adaptive) explanation for why soldiers die for their country. (p. 186) The clear explanation is that young men put themselves in positions in which they are likely to die in battle because society sees that as being brave and manly, and females like to mate with brave and manly men. The fact that many of these men might die before reproducing is offset by the increased reproductive fitness of those who don't die and the fact that they often (as the authors report) have sex before going off to war.

Another bugaboo that authors don't believe is answered is how homosexuality can be adaptive. (See page 180.) The simple answer is that homosexuality in many environments leads to effective male bonding which in turn can lead to a monopolizing of the available females. While homosexual men may not copulate with the females as much as their heterosexual buddies, they will nonetheless copulate a lot more often than loners who do not have access to the females.

One more point: many sociologists might object to the authors' use of the term "Standard Social Science Model." Not being a sociologist myself, I find it hard to believe that the Standard Social Science Model, as characterized by the authors, virtually ignores evolutionary biology and sees everything in purely cultural terms, leaving us to believe, for example, that gender differences in male-female behaviors are largely the result of a patriarchal bias in society.

Written in a popular style with some understandable simplicity, this book is an excellent introduction to evolutionary psychology, nee sociobiology, which, along with cognitive psychology and neuroscience, constitutes the essence of contemporary academic psychology.

My girlfriend purchased this book for me and it is a little gem of an intro to evo-psych. Not gonna say too much more as there is a far more intelligent prior review other than it covers the basics in a refreshing and novel easy reading style that is provocative and witty. Excellent.