Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

"There are a number of textbooks on evolutionary psychology now. In my opinion, this is the best—I suppose different people have different preferences. In some ways, I included it as a correction to some of the bias in my list, which is obviously jumping to the bits of evolutionary psychology that excite me most personally. Whilst it’s a textbook, I don’t think there’s any reason you can’t sit down and curl up with it. It’s very well written. It covers the whole gamut of things—from really quirky bits that maybe aren’t dramatically important, like the theory of why we perceive heights to be greater when we’re on top looking down (it’s easier to slip going down than coming up)— to more obvious things, like: why are we more frightened of snakes than cars? Cars kill a lot more people, but they weren’t around when we were learning to be afraid of things. David Buss is really good on the mating bits. So there are two really obvious things that can affect the success of your genes above all else: not dying, and having children. David Buss’s research field is all about the mating selection stuff . So it’s very good on that. A lot of evolutionary psychology is quite new, and there are a lot of alternative theories for things. He’s very good not just at giving an answer in the way of a physics textbook, ‘Here’s the answer and here’s how to apply the answer.’ Instead it’s, ‘Here are some experimental results, and here are four different ways of trying to explain those experimental results. What differentiates those theories, and how you would test them?’ “Language is something that we’ve evolved very specialist brain mechanisms for: why? ” Language is a really good example. We’ll look at one of Steven Pinker’s books in a minute, but language is something that we’ve evolved very specialist brain mechanisms for: why? Is it to communicate about facts? Or is it gossip about other people a social thing? Or in some way is it to impress mates? Do more eloquent people get better mates? And, if my wife fell in love with me because I’m more eloquent, why on earth would she have done that? Might it be some combination? 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 a great book that just covers everything. I’ve enjoyed reading it and it points you in different directions."