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Sex, Murder, And The Meaning Of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, And Complexity Are Revolutionizing Our View Of Human Nature (2011)

by Douglas T. Kenrick(Favorite Author)

3.47 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0465020445 (ISBN13: 9780465020447)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Basic Books

review 1: Literature has long explored the vagaries of the human condition and I guess science decided it was time to catch up a little bit. Some insights from the book that made me stop and take notes:Conservative attitudes about sex and sexuality may drive religiosity (not the other way around), which may explain my total lack of religiosity.Behavioral economics has done a great job at pointing out our economic irrationality, but if we dig deeper we may be able to find an underlying rationality in our evolutionary path. Our individual decisions are often dictated by the social implications of what we are doing, rather than our own individual selfish interests, at least to the extent that our selfish interests aren't related to our social well-being, in which case we act quite se... morelfishly. Multi-directional causality really messes with us. The effect may turn around and influence the cause. All social life has a large degree of multi-directional causality built in. Tremendous complexity can arise out of just a few simple variables. Slight changes can have profound impact. We are chock full of social conforming mechanisms. We want to conform when we feel threatened. Actually it is surprising that we can rebel against societal norms at all. The paradox is that complexity can be reduced by avoiding over-simplification. The better we understand the complex systems we live and operate in, the better we can understand the personal implications.
review 2: Douglas Kenrick is a pioneer in the field of evolutionary psychology, and despite the criticism it has received for generating too many just-so stories to explain human behavior, I thought he did a good job not only of introducing the discipline, but citing good studies to make his case.The mainspring of evolutionary psychology is the idea that we are primarily driven by our desire to pass along our genes to future generations, and that men and women have fundamentally different strategies for doing this. Men play around because it profits them to spread their genes to as wide a pool of women as possible, while women have to invest more resources in caring for children, and so they are much more selective about a mate, and use different standards to choose him.For just one example, both men and women will gravitate toward more attractive faces of the opposite sex, but whereas men will want to have relationships with the most attractive women, that isn't necessarily the case for women, who are more apt to choose older men because they have more status and resources to help in raising a family.Even when men and women are not conscious of these evolutionary goals, they still drive many of their behaviors, evolutionary psychologists say, and Kenrick goes far beyond sexual relations to explore everything from male aggression to altruism to the different motivations we have at different times of our lives. He even posits a mating strategy difference for why some people are more religious than others.An entertaining and enlightening book. less

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