Fun and easy to read introduction to evolutionary psychology. 
As the book explains, we should not let our feelings about "right and wrong" or "fair and unfair" interfere with learning about these theories. There are many things everywhere in nature that don't seem fair, and we humans are just part of it, although many try to think of us (humans) as above all that.
After reading it, some attitudes make sense, and it makes understanding men and women easier. The book is indeed not politically correct, but political correctness should not interfere with knowledge and facts. This book explains how things are, not how they should be (and history shows us that "should be" is a matter of time, place, culture and opinion). We should not forget that even if a theory explains a situation (or we think it does), this may change if a new theory explains the situation better. For me, as of now, this book explains human behavior, and it does so with interesting and entertaining anecdotes and facts.
"Women are the reason men do everything" (p. 133) 
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.
The truth hurts!. Even if its not true.
A must read entertaining and politically incorrect truth, this book will probably receive bad reviews from people that see them self in the book, but would rather not. Its all about the human animal we are born, grow, reproduce and die. It's all about sex.
But, don't belive everything you read.
A Basic Primer 
For anyone who has vaguely heard about Evolutionary Psychology, or who finds conventional psychological dogma unconvincing, this is a useful little primer on the basic state of play in the wonderful world of evolutionary psychology. It is written to appeal to the layperson and has nothing that will tax the brain, so it can be read cover-to-cover inside 60 minutes: a good commute book.
Kanazawa (for the book is his, despite his generous gesture of giving Miller first author credit) takes us on an over-flight that encompasses the grounding tenet of evolutionary psychology: that our minds are as much the result of selection pressure as our bodies. This much is, for anyone capable of a moment's thought, uncontentious. No doubt there are still people who bore others at cocktail parties with tales of Jungian Archetypes or Freudian Ids, but equally there are people who claim to commune with the dead and others who believe the world is governed by gods and goblins. This book is not for such folk, but rather for those interested in how things really work and how they came to be. As such, the book's lightweight style may actually work against it: designed to be easy-to-read for the American market, it may find few takers because a largely religious nation is unlikely to accept such secular notions, whereas it may be too slender a work to appeal to those in Europe who would otherwise be inclined to add this to their collection.
Be that as it may, Kamazawa swiftly wafts us through the essentials: the mind of homo sapiens was formed on the savannah and has not altered notably since then (the contention being that selection pressures cannot operate when faced with a moving target). While this ignores an important principle (if the target is moving, selection pressure favors the animal that can cope with a moving target), it is adequate for most of the main points Kanazawa wants to make. Many people, especially in the USA, may find the reductivist approach inherent in EP to contradict their dearly-held beliefs regarding all manner of things including "free will" and what others would have termed "the perfectability of mankind" but a moment's thought will be enough to show that on the whole EP is closer to the mark than the ramblings of sociologists and traditional psychologists. Sadly, Kanazawa doesn't do much to explicate the most important principle of science: refutability. But he's not really to blame, as EP itself hasn't progressed much beyond some inspired insights and guess-work. It remains to others to develop the mathematical models that have served other branches of science so well, and we can only hope that ten years from now a more complete version of EP will be conveyed to the general reader.
The last section of the book summarizes the "challenges" that faced EP when it was first developed by the authors of The Adapted Mind (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Unfortunately in this section Kanazawa reveals how infrequently academics venture out into the wider world: his statement that it remains a puzzle why young men (soldiers) go out to die tells us much more about his research methodology than about the underlying question. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes with anyone in the military can answer the question: young men (and, nowadays, young women too) don't go out to die. They go out believing that their skills, body armor, and the support of their colleagues will be sufficient to enable them to return safely home. And the statistics support this. For every active soldier who goes on a tour of duty in a combat zone, 99% return home from the tour in one piece.
Sadly, Kanazawa actually misses most of the important gaps in EP, such as conformity and the very different agendae of men and women. But again, we can hope that others will map the terrain in these areas.
In summary, a very incomplete and undemanding work that nevertheless is an acceptable primer for those unfamiliar with EP, but a disappointment for anyone with more than a passing acquaintance of what is probably the single most important field in the quest for self-knowledge and comprehension of the human species.
Blame it on our genes
Believe it or not, there actually are evolutionary explanations as to why (many) men prefer well-endowed blondes, why single women are more likely to travel than single men, and why more neurosurgeons are men (while more kindergarten teachers are women). This book provides those explanations (and so many more) based on research from the fascinating and emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Clearly illuminating the biological and evolutionary influences on human behavior, preferences, thoughts, feelings, and values, the authors demystify so many peculiarities of human nature. A word of caution---after reading this book, you might find yourself obsessed with finding evolutionary explanations for why we do the (often odd) things we do.
reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
"A lively and provocative look at how evolution shapes our behavior and our lives. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our brains and bodies are hardwired to carry out an evolutionary mission that determines much of what we do, from life plans to everyday decisions. With an accessible tone and a healthy disregard for political correctness, this lively and eminently readable book popularizes the latest research in a cutting-edge field of study-one that turns much of what we thought we knew about human nature upside-down. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, enjoy watching a favorite TV show, or feel scared--walking alone at night, we are in part behaving as a human animal with its own unique nature-a nature that essentially stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa re-examine some of the most popular and controversial topics of modern life - and shed a whole new light on why we do the things we do. Reader beware: You may never look at human nature the same way again.That mouthful of a title says it all. According to Kanazawa, a media-savvy researcher whose studies of ""beautiful people"" have been covered by the BBC and the New York Times, and the late Miller, a professor of social psychology, evolutionary psychology explains almost everything about human behavior. Proponents of what they call ""the Standard Social Science Model"" believe that the human mind is exempt from biological pressures, while evolutionary psychologists hold that people are an animal species driven by animal needs. The authors suggest that human evolution stopped when agriculture began changing the world much faster than the world could change us, and now 10,000-year-old impulses to find the right mate and produce healthy offspring control nearly every aspect of our existence, from choosing jobs to religious belief. This accessible book opens the youthful field of evolutionary psychology wide for examination, with results often as disturbing as they are fascinating. (Publishers Weekly)"
why beautiful, beautiful, daughters, have, more, people
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