This is a fantastic book. It’s a labour of love for him and Souza. They’ve gone across all sorts of different disciplines, looking at the dates that people started evolving to throw, which you can measure. And when we started being able to speak—there are changes in the bones of the throat, which they can time quite well. 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.

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | Wiley Online Books

But when he pretends he is being a neutral and evidence-based writer, then he is doing a disservice to science. Sperm Wars It wasn’t obvious that language evolved, because languages look so very different. But he goes through the underlying structure and it’s very similar”

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I had a slightly strange route in. I was always interested in different subjects. I used to go to different lectures, I used to go to maths lectures and anthropology lectures, and biology lectures, and so on. I studied physics as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and physics was absolutely fantastic. I really enjoyed it. But quite a lot of it was sewn up before I was born. And the questions that were left were either incredibly hard—too hard—or very detailed. I used to wonder what it would have been like to be alive when Newton was alive, or Galileo was alive and things were radically changing. Psychology is at that position. It’s just as messy as I imagined physics was in the past, with different experiments and theories being thrown out all over the place. So it can be a great text to put evolutionary psychology into the greater perspective of brain structure, genes, and biology. That is not to say that the “ Selfish Gene” was wrong, though. The idea that most of what we do is in service of the selfish gene’s reproductive goals still holds true.

Evolutionary Psychology Books - Goodreads Evolutionary Psychology Books - Goodreads

Got it. Now, I’m very intrigued about your fourth evolutionary psychology book recommendation. This is Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe by Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza. Could you give us an overview of the argument this book is making? It’s all quite horrible stuff—you’re more likely to kill very young children, for example. But if you stripped away what everybody says about morality and how they would behave, how they care about their stepchildren, it’s a little bit like what you’d expect. Lions, when they take over a pride, kill the cubs. It happens to a much, much lesser extent in humans. But it’s still measurable. It’s the young cubs that get killed, and they get killed by stepparents. The data allows us to ask questions: Why do men kill more than women? When do they kill more? Under what circumstances? Is it rich people or poor people? And what are they killing for? It’s generally not to get rich. It’s often to do with new partners, relationships, and so on.

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. 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.