Evolutionary Psychology features a wealth of student-friendly pedagogy including critical-thinking questions and case study boxes designed to show how to apply evolutionary psychology to real-life situations. It is an invaluable resource for undergraduates studying psychology, biology and anthropology. You’ve got to remember that words are a way of changing what other people do. If I spoke, but no one else changed what they did as a result of me saying them, I would never have evolved language. And that makes another pressure: I learn to say things, but others have also got to evolve to respond to that, because if everybody just did what I told them to do all the time, then fantastic for me—but clearly not so good for their genes. So that creates a sort of arms race, and maybe that explains why there’s such a gulf between us and other animals. Once you start on that race, things proceed very fast. 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. Sure, it came out in 1994 and since then much new research has been performed and led to further advances in the field. The second reason is that it sets up an enormous question for evolutionary psychologists. Most of what’s studied are the obvious questions: When will you kill somebody? When will you feud over something? What will your mating strategies be? They’re sort of obvious, because biologists have already studied them in animals. A lot of it is really saying: how do these theories apply to humans?

Evolutionary Psychology The New Science of the Mind - Routledge

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.This is known as Lanchester’s square law. It was discovered in the First World War. It’s about the use of bullets, but it applies more broadly and means that the cost of punishing people, when you are in agreement that someone should be punished, are dramatically lower for humans than for other animals. And if the costs are lower, it’s more likely to evolve. Other academics have done some of the numerical simulations and, again, show what he predicted from that basic premise. So that’s the central idea.

Evolutionary Psychology (233 books) - Goodreads Evolutionary Psychology (233 books) - Goodreads

In what the authors dub an “obsession” of evolutionary psychology with paternity, they make the case that sex used to be free and easy in our past -just like it is in bonobos societies, they say-.

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Albeit probably Pinker knows better and would deny the above claims, “How the Mind Works” gives readers the idea that organisms are perfect, machine-like adaptations and that evolution works better than any humanly engineered system. This is both in the list of “best evolutionary psychology books” and in the list of “worst evolutionary psychology books”. If you are looking for how evolutionary psychology wisdom more practically translates into human dating and mating, but still have that “scientific rigor”, then look no further. In “How the Mind Works”, Pinker draws from both evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He sets out to explain the intricacies of the human mind, from cognition to categorization, to social intelligence.