The Evolution of Desire by David Buss
#8 in my 2007 book challenge was The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating by David Buss. I found it often repetitive, and occasionally interesting. Published in 1994 and relying on research up to twenty years before that, it’s old for non-fiction, and thus dated about things like sexual behavior in the face of AIDS. The author has an interesting premise, and one I didn’t find very shocking or surprising: men and women’s mating strategies are often unpleasant adaptive mechanisms that have ensured survival and propagation. These strategies are general and animal-like, rather than individual and emotional. Buss interestingly deploys many examples from the animal world to illustrate parallel points. His anecdotes of humans, though, never felt like they illustrated his scientific data well. They seemed more like stories (and often unpleasantly sexist ones) in the vein of “love’s a bitch.” Additionally, the scientific evidence Buss relies on was sometimes sketchy. He noted that lesbians mating behavior didn’t conform to certain of his theories, but didn’t explore this at any length. In one particularly egregious instance, Buss noted how the sexual revolution proved one of his theories, since it occurred during a time of more women than men, yet he didn’t mention another key contributing cause, the birth-control pill. The chapters had some slipshod endnotes that hinted at less than rigorous scholarship. One of the members of my book group recommended Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? instead.