Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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Buss does a fantastic job of providing both an overview of the fundamental concepts of Evo Psych as well as its latest findings.

Hamilton Book Award (2000) for the first edition of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Right, it’s like we edit our memories, inserting or remembering different motivations to what we recorded at the time. Maybe we started evolving language to communicate information—to show that we’re trustworthy—and then once you’ve got that in place, it became useful for gossiping, and then we become more specialized for gossiping. It’s not just a consequence of having huge brains, that your brain gets to a certain size and you will spontaneously start speaking. It should be a welcome addition to the field that serves to further individuals' understanding of Evolutionary Psychology.The author of more than 200 scientific articles and 6 books, Buss has won numerous awards including the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (1988), the APA G. More exciting, playful, even poetic sex is possible, but first we must kick egalitarian ideals and emotional housekeeping out of our bedrooms.

We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. In 1990 he set up the first undergraduate module in Evolutionary Psychology at a British University. That’s something you might think is obvious—if you’ve read the Grimm Fairy Tales, there’s always an evil stepmother. He also introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes, which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation.This is going to sound very abstract, but when I was a physicist, one of the things that frustrated me was that, as a child, I’d imagined you’d study physics and learn how the universe is. Narrated by four different demigods, The Mark of Athena is an unforgettable journey across land and sea to Rome, where important discoveries, surprising sacrifices, and unspeakable horrors await. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution.

She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Chris Paley, author of Unthink and Beyond Bad, recommends five of the best evolutionary psychology books—and explains how experimental data might finally get to the bottom of the question of free will.Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. I have used several competitors of Buss’s textbook in the past, and none are as successful in inspiring student enthusiasm for the field. And I think that, coupled with this evolutionary slant, which I think can really pull together some of these bits of social psychology, it just seems like the most fascinating bit of science that’s going on at the moment. So we know that there will have been pressure to behave morally, in the way other people think of it. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.