But it deserves a spot here because it peddles “what I wish it should be” with science, which is the ultimate sin for a scientist. The Third Chimpanzee The Mating Mind doesn’t just explain or summarize though, but it also introduces a thought-provoking new theory. Step-parents are more likely to kill their children than natural parents. That’s something you might think is obvious—if you’ve read the Grimm Fairy Tales, there’s always an evil stepmother. But I think it was Daly and Wilson who first actually collected the data, and proved that this was so. When you’ve got natural children, they share half your genes. When you’re a stepparent, they’re absorbing your partner’s energy, which they could be putting into your own natural children. Indeed, most other evolutionary psychologists on this list either deny, misunderstand, or choose to ignore that men can sometimes and do sometimes share similar interests in repressing and disempowering women.

Best Evolutionary Psychology Books - Power Dynamics™ Best Evolutionary Psychology Books - Power Dynamics™

And of course, once you can gang up on people and punish them, all sorts of things become possible. If you start to trust people—because there’s this ultimate punishment—things like language become a lot more plausible, because you’ve got a reason to tell the truth. People can punish you if you don’t. If you look at animals, most animals, when they’re in groups they’re quite well connected. Wolves, chimps… there are odd exceptions, but mostly they’re groups of kin. In humans, that’s not how tribes work. And it’s not the way companies work. If you want to understand evolutionary psychology, like truly understanding evolutionary psychology, then you need to read this one right after you read Buss’ textbook. Well, Ghodsee discusses something you won’t find in any other book on this list: the power struggle between men and women as groups and not just as individuals.

How to Vote

Yes. I think it does. 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. And actually science is never like that. It’s always getting closer and closer approximations to the truth. It’s adding an extra term to the series, a mathematical series. The real truth is probably something that humans can’t comprehend very well. So I think science as an endeavour, once you get deep enough into it, is always frustrating. This introduction to one of the most exciting approaches to psychology is the best one out there—authoritative, lively, and balanced. It manages to be both theoretically sophisticated and accessible to a wide range of students interested in human nature and how it got that way."- Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, USA And from the same author, but slightly more focused on “ sexual conflict“, also see “ When Men Behave Badly“. Fathers who didn’t care about paternity were out-reproduced by those who did, and they left fewer and fewer copies of their genes.

Evolutionary Psychology The New Science of the Mind - Routledge

So, if you’re altogether frightened of controversy, evolutionary psychology is not the subject you should be studying. It’s exciting that way. He aligns with the zeitgeist and says that I quote: “ Ecological differences among existing humans are entirely the product of childhood and education“.Today, most social sciences accept that selfish interests can sometimes be best achieved by cooperation. If you’re frightened of controversy, evolutionary psychology is not the subject you should be studying” The same name “evolution” can be misleading as it seems to imply that it’s a continuous march towards “better and stronger”.