Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon
Date Published: 1994-08-23
ISBN-13:9780679407737ISBN:0679407731
Description: Good. Good title in good condition. Pages are clean and tight. DJ shows some shelf wear and bumping. Satisfaction guaranteed. If item not as described, return for refund of purchase price. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon
Date Published: 1994-08-23
ISBN-13:9780679407737ISBN:0679407731
Description: Very Good. Very Good DJ! NOT EX-LIB! Hardback, with bumps and rubs to cover. No underlining or writing. WE SHIP SIX DAYS A WEEK! All text bright and tight! I have a stellar reputation as a bookseller. Please email with any questions. Thank you for looking! "Find it! Buy it! Read it! " Arkansas Bookseller. read more
Edition: 1st pb edition
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage/Random House, NY
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780679407737ISBN:0679407731
Description: VG edgwear. 1 page creased. No dj-trade pb. Illustrated. 8vo-8" tall. 466pp. Why we are the way we are--the New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780679407737ISBN:0679407731
Description: Fine in fine dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. Fine/Fine. Hardcover with dust jacket is as new. read more
"This was the first book we chose for the evolutionary psychology/human nature/existentialist/humanist book club I co-founded with a friend from work.
It's a really good overview of the field of evolutionary psychology; which I find fascinating. It also gives examples from Charles Darwin's own life for each major section to bring a personal touch to all the scientific studies and evidence for the points being made. I really liked learning more about Darwin as a person, since I knew very little about him previously.
If you are interested in evolutionary psychology and its roots in human nature this is probably one of the best, if not the best, text on the subject written for mass consumption. Highly recommended if you want to read into the subject."
"A very thoughtful and understandable book on a subject I'd never heard of till I read Steven Pinker: evolutionary psychology, which looks at human behavior in light of Darwin's theories and later scientific thought. Robert Wright focuses eventually on human morality, but he also explains how we are hard-wired when it comes to love and romance, marketplace dynamics, workplace pecking orders, elder care, religion and ethics, etc. He uses the real life of Charles Darwin as Exhibit A, too. Wright is a fine writer, but it still took me about a month to read this, and I'm left wondering where to turn next. There are copious notes and a rich bibliography, but I may go back to Pinker and his writing on the origins and uses of language. Wright is humorous when you least expect it. This comes from his extended look at marriage and family: "Granted, within any monogamous marriage there is compromise. And within any two-man prison cell there is compromise. But that doesn't mean prisons were invented by a compromise among criminals." If I don't take anything else useful from this book, there's this: the primary goal of our genes is not to make us eternally happy. It's to make us prolific -- by hook, or by crook."
"Intro to Evolutionary Psych, particularly human moral instinct. All this interspersed with a Darwin biography. It's pretty good. I read it in 2008, about 14 years after it was written, so most of the ideas were already mainstream. i would have loved to have read it in the mid-1990's ."
"This is one of those seminal books (to me at least) that has a lot to say about the nature of human relationships.
Quotes: p 36 - ...while there are various reasons why it could make Darwinian sense for a woman to mate with more than one man (maybe the first man was infertile, for example) there comes a time when having more sex just isn't worth the trouble. Better to get some rest or grab a bite to eat. For a man, unless he's really on the brink of collapse or starvation, that time never comes. Each new partner offers a very real chance to get more genes into the next generation - a much more valuable prospect, in the Darwinian calculus, than a nap or a meal. As the evolutionary psychologists martin Daly and Margo Wilson have succinctly put it: for males "there is always the possibility of doing better."
There is a sense in which a female can do better too, but it has to do with quality, not quantity. Giving birth to a child involves a huge commitment of time, not to mention energy and nature has put a low ceiling on how many such enterprises she can undertake. So each child, from her (genetic) point of view, is an extremely precious gene machine. Its ability to survive and then, in turn, produce its own young gene machines is of mammoth importance. It makes Darwinian sense, then, for a woman to be selective about the man who is going to help her build each gene machine.
p 38 whatever the ancestral environment was like, it wasn't much like the environment we're in now. We aren't designed to stand on crowded subway platforms, or to live in suburbs next door to people we never talk to, or to get hired and fired, or to watch the evening news. This disjunction between the contexts of our design and our lives is probably responsible for much psychopathology, as well as much suffering of a less dramatic sort."
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