Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life Read Online Free

psychology, some of them distinguished professors at major universities, have often been so arrogant in their dismissals that they’ve made us look good when the actual data pronounce them wrong. In retrospect, 1975 may not have been the apocalypse for the world of traditional social science—there are still holdouts who refuse to accept that the last thirty-five years have happened—but it certainly was Darwin’s second coming, and the consequences continue to unfold.

The Importance of Being Earnest
    Oscar Wilde, although he had never heard of evolutionary psychology, did write the perfect slogan for the discipline: “We are all in
the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Part of the reason evolutionary psychologists have often upset proper academics is that we have had an inclination to root around in the gutters. A few years back, when I told my colleague David Funder that I was doing a study of homicidal fantasies, he simply rolled his eyes. Funder observed that the modus operandi for an evolutionary psychologist seemed to be this: Choose a topic that is normally avoided in polite conversation and shine a spotlight on it. When I thought about it, I realized this was not a completely unfair assessment. But we do not pick such topics just because they are what sells in the tabloids. Instead, we study unsavory topics (as well as nicer ones) because these are the issues with which humans the world over concern themselves—who’s sleeping with whom, who might stab me in the back, who might hurt my kids, and on and on. Why do so many people read the tabloids and gossip magazines like People and Us , anyway? Because they have better book reviews than the New York Times , or because they have rumors about which powerful man is cheating on his wife and sleeping with which Hollywood ingenue? And why have people the world over shelled out billions of hardearned dollars a year and stood in long lines to see movies like Gone with the Wind, Titanic , Braveheart, and Avatar ? I would venture to guess it is not because those movies illustrate the finer points of cinematography, but because they present vivid conflicts between the bad guys (them) and the good guys (us), brave and heroic men involved in love affairs with beautiful young women, and other topics humans have always gossiped about.
    There is more to the field than just engaging topics, however. Evolutionary psychologists are also searching for an integrated conceptual paradigm to unite the social sciences with the biological sciences. Indeed, part of what irks traditional academics is the field’s apparent grandiosity—we claim that the evolutionary perspective can integrate psychology, economics, political science, biology, and
anthropology, and we also insist that the perspective has profound implications for applied disciplines such as law, medicine, business, and education. And we go even further, claiming that these issues have important implications, not just for academics but for everyone—from your relatives in rural Wisconsin to the members of the UN Security Council. If there is any hope of changing the world for the better, from reducing family violence to reversing overpopulation and international conflict, economists, educators, and political leaders will need to base their interventions on a sound understanding of what people are really like, not on some fairy-tale version of what we would like them to be.
    The next few chapters will focus on the research my colleagues and I have conducted on simple, selfish biases, exploring topics such as sexual attraction, aggression, and prejudice. We have considered questions such as: Why are old men attracted to much younger women? Why are older women not drawn to young men in the same way? Why does a woman’s commitment to her partner drop after seeing a powerful executive, regardless of whether he is good-looking or not, whereas a man’s commitment is