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Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Sexual Psychology and Behavior
This volume in the Springer Series in Evolutionary Psychology presents a state of the art view of the topic of sexuality and sexual behavior drawing on theoretical constructs and research of noted individuals in the field. Comprehensive and multi-disciplinary, this book seeks to provide a broad overview without sacrificing the complexity of a multi-faceted approach. The book is framed by introductory and closing sections that provide a context for the range of ideas contained within. Ample space is provided in designated sections that focus on key areas of sexuality from both male and female perspectives and that include information from primate studies. This volume can serve as a graduate text in sexual behavior in evolutionary terms and as a guide for further research.
431 pages, Hardcover
First published March 8, 2014
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June 16, 2014
I was asked to review this book for the journal PsycCRITIQUES. I just submitted my review, but the journal owns the copyright so I can't post it here. Because that was a professional review that I bit my nails over, here is my decidedly unprofessional review that is going to be stream-of-consciousness.
The quality of the chapters varied greatly. The chapters on topics I was already familiar with were boring to read only because I was already overly-familiar with the topics, not because they were poorly written. (Although the first chapter--on sexual strategies theory--does, admittedly, read like a laundry list of research findings.) However, I still found these chapters useful as a handy source of citations (I did plenty of underlining; there were some helpful citations for my ev psych class).
I found the following chapters to be quite enjoyable and interesting: men's overestimation of women's sexual intent (Perilloux), female orgasm (Welling), female eating restriction (Li et al.), rivalry in women's friendships (Bleske-Rechek et al.), and female adaptations to ovulation (Welling & Puts; although I was annoyed by glaring holes in some of the theories in this chapter; at the moment, I'm somewhat persuaded by Christopher Badcock's "ovulation is not concealed, but instead human woman appear to always be ovulating" theory, given that it's hard to explain how concealed ovulation could evolve gradually when obviously-ovulating women would've been more attractive to men).
And these chapters pissed me off:
Chapter 4 (Greengross) on male humor as a sexually selected trait: SO MANY CRITICISMS. This is not a good venue for going into them, but wow. If humor is sexually selected, why aren't men and women more sexually dimorphic when it comes to humor? The evidence for humor being correlated with intelligence is weak, and the author's criticisms of contradictory evidence were biased. There are much better explanations for the evolution of humor than sexual selection (e.g., humor as a means of identifying people with shared cultural knowledge, humor as a way to form social bonds, etc. There is research on this but I don't feel like digging up citations). In my opinion, much of the data the author cited can be explained by humor simply being one more dimension on which people compete, and men usually compete more than women. The author mentioned cross-cultural research on a small set of countries, with Russia being the only one where husbands did not produce more humor than their wives--BUT--the author also mentioned that women outnumber men in Russia. Wouldn't that sex ratio lead to greater than usual competition between women? Right, so HELLO, more parsimonious explanation: When intrasexual competition is greater for men in a population, men will use humor as one more way in which to compete. That does not mean men evolved to be better at producing humor than women, and women to fawn over men's humor production. This is evolutionary psychology at its worst, and it depresses me because I love evolutionary psychology in general.
Chapter 16 (Fink et al.) on male body movements: Dance is a male motor behavior used by women to assess men's genetic quality...?! GAHH again, so much wrong with this. Like the previous chapter, here is problem #1: Sexual selection. Why is there not more dimorphism in men and women's dance behavior, if this is supposedly a sexually selected trait? (Also, where is the evidence that women's perceptions of men's dance differs from men's perception of women's dance? This chapter only described the former.) #2: Parsimony, AGAIN. Movement and body structure in general convey information about genetic quality, and dance just happens to convey the same info... But it's NO MORE INFORMATIVE than movements like running, hunting, sports, etc. In fact, the authors describe a study that compared female perceptions of three male movements--dance, walking, and running--"with no significant difference between the three movement conditions," PLUS, the "attractiveness of dance and running perceptions were significantly positively correlated" (p. 316). So even the authors' own data suggest that dance doesn't convey any more info than basic movements like running and walking...
Chapter 15 (Fleischman) on women's disgust adaptations: Terrific topic (and there's great research on this topic), but parts of this chapter irked me. First, there were too many writing errors for a published chapter. (Where was the copyediting?! No other chapter had as many errors as this one.) Second, why was Fleischman asked to write a chapter on women's disgust adaptations? There were only five citations for research by her in this chapter, and three of those citations were of unpublished data... And one of those sets of unpublished data was still "in progress"!!! That is NOT OKAY. Mentioning unpublished data is fine. Discussing and extrapolating from unpublished data--let alone in-progress data--without providing extensive detail about the methodology and results is not okay.
Chapter 19 (Vasey and VanderLaan) on male homosexuality: Confirmation bias, much? To date, only one culture (Samoa) has provided data supporting the kin selection hypothesis of male homosexuality. The authors bent over backwards to explain why this particular culture is more representative than the multiple other cultures where this hypothesis has not been supported. (They even made up two "categories" of male homosexuality so they could say that the category describing Samoan gay men--but not gay men in those failed-to-replicate cultures--is the one we would've found in the EEA.) Any evolutionary theory of homosexuality rests on homosexuality having a genetic basis, but there is evidence that atypical fetal development (e.g., maternal antibodies to male-fetus antigens)--not the genes we get from our parents--is where homosexuality originates. Epigenetics may be involved, but so far the evidence for atypical fetal development as a common cause of homosexuality (noting that not all instances of homosexuality may have the same origin) is persuasive. The authors totally neglect this research evidence, and charge ahead with the assumption that homosexuality has a genetic origin and therefore could be maintained in the population through kin selection. (The argument for the heritability of homosexuality comes from twin studies, but twin studies confound shared genes and shared fetal experiences.)
So, yeah... My overall conclusion: Some interesting chapters, some chapters that provide useful summaries and references for me, and some chapters that pissed me off.
The quality of the chapters varied greatly. The chapters on topics I was already familiar with were boring to read only because I was already overly-familiar with the topics, not because they were poorly written. (Although the first chapter--on sexual strategies theory--does, admittedly, read like a laundry list of research findings.) However, I still found these chapters useful as a handy source of citations (I did plenty of underlining; there were some helpful citations for my ev psych class).
I found the following chapters to be quite enjoyable and interesting: men's overestimation of women's sexual intent (Perilloux), female orgasm (Welling), female eating restriction (Li et al.), rivalry in women's friendships (Bleske-Rechek et al.), and female adaptations to ovulation (Welling & Puts; although I was annoyed by glaring holes in some of the theories in this chapter; at the moment, I'm somewhat persuaded by Christopher Badcock's "ovulation is not concealed, but instead human woman appear to always be ovulating" theory, given that it's hard to explain how concealed ovulation could evolve gradually when obviously-ovulating women would've been more attractive to men).
And these chapters pissed me off:
Chapter 4 (Greengross) on male humor as a sexually selected trait: SO MANY CRITICISMS. This is not a good venue for going into them, but wow. If humor is sexually selected, why aren't men and women more sexually dimorphic when it comes to humor? The evidence for humor being correlated with intelligence is weak, and the author's criticisms of contradictory evidence were biased. There are much better explanations for the evolution of humor than sexual selection (e.g., humor as a means of identifying people with shared cultural knowledge, humor as a way to form social bonds, etc. There is research on this but I don't feel like digging up citations). In my opinion, much of the data the author cited can be explained by humor simply being one more dimension on which people compete, and men usually compete more than women. The author mentioned cross-cultural research on a small set of countries, with Russia being the only one where husbands did not produce more humor than their wives--BUT--the author also mentioned that women outnumber men in Russia. Wouldn't that sex ratio lead to greater than usual competition between women? Right, so HELLO, more parsimonious explanation: When intrasexual competition is greater for men in a population, men will use humor as one more way in which to compete. That does not mean men evolved to be better at producing humor than women, and women to fawn over men's humor production. This is evolutionary psychology at its worst, and it depresses me because I love evolutionary psychology in general.
Chapter 16 (Fink et al.) on male body movements: Dance is a male motor behavior used by women to assess men's genetic quality...?! GAHH again, so much wrong with this. Like the previous chapter, here is problem #1: Sexual selection. Why is there not more dimorphism in men and women's dance behavior, if this is supposedly a sexually selected trait? (Also, where is the evidence that women's perceptions of men's dance differs from men's perception of women's dance? This chapter only described the former.) #2: Parsimony, AGAIN. Movement and body structure in general convey information about genetic quality, and dance just happens to convey the same info... But it's NO MORE INFORMATIVE than movements like running, hunting, sports, etc. In fact, the authors describe a study that compared female perceptions of three male movements--dance, walking, and running--"with no significant difference between the three movement conditions," PLUS, the "attractiveness of dance and running perceptions were significantly positively correlated" (p. 316). So even the authors' own data suggest that dance doesn't convey any more info than basic movements like running and walking...
Chapter 15 (Fleischman) on women's disgust adaptations: Terrific topic (and there's great research on this topic), but parts of this chapter irked me. First, there were too many writing errors for a published chapter. (Where was the copyediting?! No other chapter had as many errors as this one.) Second, why was Fleischman asked to write a chapter on women's disgust adaptations? There were only five citations for research by her in this chapter, and three of those citations were of unpublished data... And one of those sets of unpublished data was still "in progress"!!! That is NOT OKAY. Mentioning unpublished data is fine. Discussing and extrapolating from unpublished data--let alone in-progress data--without providing extensive detail about the methodology and results is not okay.
Chapter 19 (Vasey and VanderLaan) on male homosexuality: Confirmation bias, much? To date, only one culture (Samoa) has provided data supporting the kin selection hypothesis of male homosexuality. The authors bent over backwards to explain why this particular culture is more representative than the multiple other cultures where this hypothesis has not been supported. (They even made up two "categories" of male homosexuality so they could say that the category describing Samoan gay men--but not gay men in those failed-to-replicate cultures--is the one we would've found in the EEA.) Any evolutionary theory of homosexuality rests on homosexuality having a genetic basis, but there is evidence that atypical fetal development (e.g., maternal antibodies to male-fetus antigens)--not the genes we get from our parents--is where homosexuality originates. Epigenetics may be involved, but so far the evidence for atypical fetal development as a common cause of homosexuality (noting that not all instances of homosexuality may have the same origin) is persuasive. The authors totally neglect this research evidence, and charge ahead with the assumption that homosexuality has a genetic origin and therefore could be maintained in the population through kin selection. (The argument for the heritability of homosexuality comes from twin studies, but twin studies confound shared genes and shared fetal experiences.)
So, yeah... My overall conclusion: Some interesting chapters, some chapters that provide useful summaries and references for me, and some chapters that pissed me off.
Displaying 1 of 1 review