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194 of 219 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful but misleading, October 5, 2003
I teach evolutionary psychology in college, organizing my classes around the "logic of inquiry." I use this book to illustrate cross-cultural investigation, including the pragmatic difficulties of getting good data from massive studies. For that purpose, the book has its uses. However, unless you are a critical, already-knowledgeable reader, this book may not be a good choice. The book exemplifies neither the state of the art nor a model of how to think soundly about the questions. Buss's hypotheses tend to be very vague. Indeed, he often says things like, "Evolutionary psychology explains this constellation of traits," as if there were some one hypothesis held by all evolutionary psychologists. He rarely, if ever, presents alternative hypotheses from within evolutionary studies. He presents little, if any, contradictory or complicating data, never shows what would be involved in falsifying his hypotheses, and never shows why his theory is better supported than others' views of evolution. You get no sense from this book of the vigorous, usually exciting debates on mating *within* evolutionary circles. You get litle or no sense from this book that problems of sexual adaptivity do not occur alone. You would never know that for humans, copulation has less to do with reproduction than in nearly any other species-and that this complicates immensely understanding our evolved mating habits. You would never know that across the animal kingdom problems of mate selection depend heavily on what we eat and how we attain it. You would never know that across the animal kingdom mating habits depend on social structure. You get no sense that evolutionary psychology must grapple with the difficult questions of how other essential-and extremely odd-characteristics of human life set limits or biases on mating. In general, you would think from reading Buss that mating has exclusively to do with reproduction or survival of offspring. Indeed, if the logic of Buss's inquiry were correct, there would be no reason for species to differ sexually. He presents his arguments as if human mating patterns follow directly from the differential investments of males and females. But that difference exists in all species! Why, then, do species differ so? Buss doesn't even let you know (if he has even recognized) that this is a fundamental question. You would never know from reading Buss the commonplace that motivation need not resemble function. That is, a behavior (or traits) may be pursued for motives that have nothing to do with why it is reproductively advantageous. For purpose of natural selection, why an organism prefers a behavior is of no moment. Though he obviously knows this, and mentions it in passing a couple of places, he writes as if the function were the cause of the behavior. In many, if not most, cases, we are caused to do something for reasons-e.g., how much fun it is-that have nothing to do with why it is naturally selected. This complicates understanding what's selected and why--especially since motivational systems have evolutionary and cultural histories of their own. As others have noted, Buss's original work relies altogether too heavily on self-reports and "what if" questionnaires. Now, we know fairly well (though Buss never tells you) that self-reports tend to reflect both cultural norms and a bias toward presenting one's self favorably (even, oddly enough, in anonymous questionnaires.) We can improve and cross-check self-reports, but the methods are cumbersome (requiring a great deal of time with each subject, generating massive amounts of data, and requiring extremely powerful statistical analyses) and expensive. This book gives little evidence that much of Buss's data has been appropriately cross-checked. And in fact, other researchers have shown that even with some of the same populations as Buss studied, more extensive testing shows results very different from Buss's. However, we cannot cross-check answers to hypotheticals! For instance, a question like, "How many sexual partners would you have in the next year, if you could?" cannot possibly be checked for accuracy. However, you can do things like correlating answers to that question with other variables. But it is not at all clear that Buss, suffering from a very simple-minded theory to guide his research, has tested for and analyzed the right variables. For instance, some researchers have shown that men suffering ambivalence and anxiety about sex tend to offer inflated numbers on questions like that-and that when data is analyzed controlling for psychopathology, men and women differ on the question far less than Buss claims. Similarly, you'd never know from Buss the difficulties of identifying which of our traits are selected, and whether they are naturally or sexually selected. Generally, you need to know what to explain before you start explaining it. Buss's writing style misleads, too. Though he does not overtly misrepresent his data, he places far more emphasis on ways that men and women disagree than agree, even though in fact his data show that the range of agreement vastly exceeds disagreement-and remains equally stable over time. Generally, I think this book reflects more energy and ambition than insight and imagination. Buss's data matter, precisely because they cover so many subjects in so many locations. But the book also shows the danger of collecting massive amounts of data without an adequate theory to guide what you study. The reason I structure my classes as I do is that, in fact, nobody knows yet just which elements of human life are accurately explained as naturally selected (or why or when), sexually selected (or why or when), cultural, geographical, and so forth. I emphasize to my students that these questions matter deeply (and why), that we know the standard social science model to be false, and that we are just beginning to develop a reliable science of human evolution. I want my students to be able to participate in the emerging inquiries, to know how to think correctly about data and about alternate candidates to explain the data. To read Buss, you would think my design is all wrong-you'd think that the data are great, the answers are settled for all but the muddle-headed and stubborn, and that there are no alternative explanations. And if, having read Buss, you thought those things, you would be wrong. That's another reason I use this book. It shows how much of what passes for truth needs much more scrutiny, proving my point that understanding the logic of inquiry matters most.
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by Nancy Etcoff
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