231 of 247 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"What would a savanna-raised primate do?", September 3, 2007
What happens when two psychologists write a book on why people do the things they do?
It gets a loooong title: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire-- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.
This book, written primarily by Alan Miller, has, as its core, a commitment to the Savanna Principle: "The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment" (p. 21).
In other words, look to humans (or early hominids) hundreds of thousands of years ago to get a clue to why, well, if Hillary Clinton is elected President of the US, she will not have an affair.
Intriguing?
This book is going to irritate some, be the subject of water cooler conversations, be involved in harassment complaints (seriously... someone is going to use the "Savanna Principle defense"), and hit the Jay Leno show. How can it not, when it is rich with topics like:
- The human "semen displacement device" (p. 85).
- The "horny sister hypothesis" (p. 181).
- The myth of the midlife crisis (p. 140).
- Why most suicide bombers are Muslim (p. 165).
- Why do children love their parents (p. 187).
The authors revisit early humans in the savanna. What strategies, environmentally and genetically based, lead to humans making more copies of themselves than other strategies ("genetic fitness"). How did natural selection affect humans from the shoulders up?
When I first read the "Savanna Principle" ( "The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment"), I immediately thought of some very non-savanna issues: flying a F-22 Raptor, performing Shakespeare, developing open heart surgery... very non-ancestral environment human activities and accomplishments. I would say that the human brain does not have difficulties here. We are very trainable. Yet the focus of this book is on our interactions with other people, particularly male-female interactions.
I was immediately reminded of an earlier book titled Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, by Randolph Nesse and George C. Williams. They also took the view that we can better understand human health and sickness with a "Savanna Principle" approach.
The book is really hypothesis based. There are many ideas here, some of which will be found to be untrue, but others will be found to be true. These hypotheses are out there for scientists to investigate. In fact, just this morning there was an article in the newspaper that indicated researchers had proven (this will be debatable) that men are attracted to good-looking women, while women are attracted to good providers.
What would a savanna-raised primate do?
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244 of 262 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Getting Laid; Producing Progeny, September 4, 2007
What's the song line: is that all there is? Well, yes, pretty much according to Miller and Kanazawa in this wide ranging, interesting, and sometimes upsetting book. The Fight: are we driven by genes or by how we are raised? For them, it is the genes, no contest. Men still look for blonde women because being blonde told a man 10,000 years ago that a woman was young and thus fertile(most women with blonde hair in their youth have it turn brown as they age) and a man's brain is still wired to see it that way, ignoring the fact older women can get all sorts of cosmetic help. Same with large breasts: small ones do not sag as much as a woman ages but large ones do---thus an indication of age and less fertility. Do good looks matter? Yes they do---faces that have more symmetry are considered by our genes to be better looking(experiments with babies show they spend more time looking at these faces) and symmetry is a sign of health and a sign of health is a sign that the progeny will be healthy. And a woman will cheat for the sake of producing better looking offsping. And on it goes. A final nugget: men and women have different brains, with a man's brain big on classifying and developing systems to look at the world(thus more men and less women of science) and a woman's brain is more empathetic(thus more nurses and grade school teachers). (For a very good book on women, check out "The Female Brain,") Some of the book is likely true(genes do play a role), some of the book good only for cocktail party chatter, and some of the book destined for the dust bin. But whichever category it goes in, this is an easy to read and provocative introduction to evolutionary biology.
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188 of 201 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really nice introduction to evolutionary psychology, November 24, 2007
This book is really good, because besides a few repetitions it really is interesting and presents novel ideas (at least to people like me, who are not familiar with this topic) to old questions. It is really easy to understand, not too complicated, and shows the whole picture, not just the ideas the authors think are right, but the the other side as well (even tho they try their best to point out what they believe in, but thats reasonable). It really isn't biased and is a really good book, I recommend it to anyone who isn't afraid of new ideas.
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