Published: The Expanded Evolution of Desire: A Review

The following has been published by Human-Nature Reviews, URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/04/buss.html

The Expanded Evolution of Desire: A Review
September 23, 2003

David Buss: The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. (2003), 2nd Edition. NY: Basic Books. 354 pp., 12 chapters, 22 pp. bibliography + 9 pp. of references for Chapters 11 & 12, about $18 in paper.
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"...me and my rowdy friends have rowdied on down." Hank Williams Jr.
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Buss addresses material that he and his army of collaborators defined in the first place: the preferences of each gender, differences in their strategies for casual mating or for long term partners, maintaining relationships between spouses, conflict in sexual agendas, breaking up of partnerships, marital careers, and harmony between the sexes. They own the territory and Buss commands both topics and materials within it. He closes several chapters with predictions of what research might tell us in the next edition of ED. (David also appended two chapters, "Women's Hidden Sexual Strategies" and "Mysteries of Human Mating," to the first edition and a separate list of references for them.)

Contrary, however, to one of the cover blurbs, ED is no longer a shocker: The differences between the behaviors of our two genders and the evolutionary explanations for them have been caught naked in Time and Newsweek. Any shock in ED comes not from our conduct but from scientists' finding good sense in what we do. And that shock is felt only by the minority of our population that self-selected into delusions that human nature is infinitely malleable. (See Pinker, 2002; Sowell, 1987.) Such believers often work in universities, are politically left of center, and discount evolutionary foundations for human conduct. Another set of people won't like ED. They endorse self reliance and attach consequences to behavior: unfortunately, many of them look to God to mend traits that Buss would probably call design features.

The rest of us will like ED but it's old news. We watch the nature shows on television, our kids compete to know all about dinosaurs, and we buy Scientific American's special issues about human evolution. Our gender stereotypes have always appeared in C&W tunes but now with an extra layer of detail: Chris Kagel refrains "'Cuz the girls love it" to his musical questions about why men do dumb things. (An accident? Or did his lyricists read Geoff Cowley's material in Newsweek?) Dierks Bentley sings of a young girl who screams "Faster!" when her date races through a cornfield with his lights off and eludes the cops. Indeed, many of my private clients with ambivalent courtships and marriages suspect that I cribbed my evolutionary stories from John Gray (1992) who doesn't mention ice ages. (What a wonderful thing: there really is no direct connection between the conduct that we have and our explanations for it.)

Some Blurting about Hard Eggs and Soft Molars

The next Big Stories may come from outside of the neodarwinian, adaptationist framework that Buss uses.

1) I prefer to see us as channeled although emergent and I am grateful for the insights that we get from genetics, evo-devo, network phenomena, and statistical physics. (The dynamics of emergent networks beautifully accommodate the phenomena of strategic variation described by Buss.)

2) It might be for the next generation to explain why males don't exist in harsh conditions and to consider that having two genders allows one species to realize benefits from both chaotic and orderly situations.

3) Males can also be seen as an extended phenotype/mutation of females, an imperfect companion that resulted from our not getting a second X.

4) Females are firmly eugenic in their standards and get away with it, males catch hell. Even if men have good grades, women don't like acne, allergies, ectomorphs, loners, fatties, geeks, and the lopsided (Buss, 1999; Miller, 1998, 2000). Women also strive mightily to repair these things in their flawed sons.

5) Females compete directly with other females not just for males but for how their children will be treated. (The cosmetics industry is a reflection of female-female battles, not just of the tricks that allure males.) Whether in groups of wolves, rhesus, chimps, or followers of Nat Angier, both women and offspring have different opportunities as a function of mother's social position.

6) Rape is not strictly a function of loser-males who trap females but could involve different populations of males and females. Impulsive females get pregnant at earlier ages than average, impulsive males become fathers at later ages than average. Impulsive females are probably easier targets. Risk-taking females (NOT the same as "impulsive") may require high stimulus intensities to elicit either joy or fear, pleasure or pain, a trait escorted by perpetual boredom unless something outrageous occurs and a trait that sometimes contributes to psychopathy (Fechenhauer, 2001; Rowe, 2002). (The teenage girl in the front of Bentley's truck was the daughter of an ex-con who "peppered" the tailgate with a shotgun as Bentley drove her away. Becky goes happily with him to a honky tonk where Bentley fights a "mountain of a man" for her. When home at 2:30 A.M., Becky's father heads for the truck but she gives Bentley a "come-and-get-me grin." "And like a bullet we were gone again." If we buy the idea of a psychopathic streak in Becky, then Bentley is not a predatory male but a sucker!)

7) Finally, no one studies teeth. The Victorians hid their rotten teeth when sitting for portraits and photographs. Both photographers and dentists whiten teeth and many parents spend fortunes for braces and rubber bands, my generation invests similar amounts in caps and crowns. There may be juicier data in these effects than in the relative size and angularity of our two ears.

Some Skepticism and the Judgment of the Birds

David's own fitness is at stake here, "fitness" as reflected in network terms and not in the number of people that he can beat up or in how long he will live. Instead, fitness depends on the number of his collaborators, students, and sources, his ability to recruit new ones, and to find jobs for his old ones. Thus, his legacy requires détente with traditionalists in government granting agencies (as if he needed an FCC license!) and with left-bent individuals of whatever gender in academia and in the media. He apologizes to and deflects criticism from the left but ignores deists on the right. (They don't buy his kind of book. Academics do and some 90% of them are Democrats.) While there are topics with shock value, the David Buss of ED is more Polonius than Laertes, perhaps in order to achieve a reputation for impartiality. (Has "fitness" become the new N-word?)

For example:

"Ultimately, the disturbing side of human mating must be confronted if its harsh consequences are ever to be ameliorated." (p. 5)

"Judgment of what should exist rests with people's value systems, not with science or what currently exists." (p.17)

Page 210 tells us: "...mating behavior is enormously flexible and sensitive to social context...no behavior is inevitable or genetically preordained...Knowledge of the conditions that favor each mating strategy gives us the possibility of choosing which to activate and which to leave dormant."

He seems to argue that behaviors may be in our genes but we choose whether to obey them. He may also be saying that we need to arrange environments in order to elicit more of the behaviors that we think that we want, ignoring the strongly genetic contributions that seed those wants. I can tolerate the latter but am aghast at the former. And I suspect his academic readers (Sowell, 1987), perhaps blank-slaters for genetic reasons (Pinker, 2002), will only consider the second interpretation. Sooner or later, however, culture comes back to the possibilities found in genes. The problem of suicide has evolutionary solutions and, as Ed Wilson (1975) pointed out, Camus was an aging bull-shitter who, losing testosterone, found God. I find more interesting the question of why we react with horror at some incidents but not others, verbalize horror rather than apply consequences, and talk more about these topics as we get older.

David's findings rely heavily on questionnaires. While people might lie about what they do, David finds the same stories regardless of source, and that, in itself, becomes scientifically interesting. He is also an adaptationist who subscribes to Bowlby's metaphor that the Pleistocene was our mother and evolutionary psychology should be about the crafting that occurred in the ice ages and made us human. Buss also believes that if a behavior exists, it must be doing something that was useful in the past 1.2 million years. He depends heavily on whatever universals that he can find in our conduct and the mechanisms that he infers from them. (Preachers find gods, psychologists find mechanisms: neither will ever be seen by the rest of us.) Skeptical about an adaptation? David describes the human phenomenon and then gives us a heavy toad or a peculiar insect that does something similar, and therefore, for the same reasons. Thus, he frames his hypotheses outside of evo-devo, internalism, and Hox genes and he has no need for network dynamics as a selective force. Some of you may not find these exclusions restrictive for our understanding of evolution and mate selection. I do.

First, there are beautiful lines in Eiseley (1946/1957, p. 167) that resonate within me and, I hope, within you. He leans out of a 20th story window at 4 A.M. in New York and watches from above as pigeons leave their roosts: "I will never forget how those wings went round and round, and how, by the merest pressure of the fingers and a feeling for air, one might go away over the rooftops." You can find parallels in the mating behaviors of primates and birds (Wilson 1975, 2000) despite the lack of a known direct evolutionary connection between them and us. We share minds with birds, similarities that could be more attributable to homology than to convergence (Raff, 1996; Gould, 2002). That is, shared ancestral genes biased our outcomes as long as 500 mya and we only carried out of the Pleistocene fancier versions of the baggage that we carried into it.

Second, mate selection is seldom a passive enterprise and we often care too much for whom we screw and sometimes more for those whom we can't. Buss touches these themes in his chapter on sexual conflict. (Beck, 1988, compares love to insanity.) We may find that both sperm and vaginal fluids carry messengers that elicit bonding between the partners and, if the usual channels are not available, sustain oral recreation. (Yes, things that are not necessarily in good taste sometimes taste good.)

Third, the externalist tale of environments' shaping creatures makes all of us passive variations of Locke's tabula but we must look to evo-devo and other fields to escape that mold. For example, Bouchard (1996) and his team subscribe to the concept of "experience producing drives," a step that might account for identical social outcomes in separated identical twins. Lewontin (2000) argues that settings and occupants become a unity and occupants turn settings into environments. (Lewontin's model applies to Bouchard's findings although these guys rarely appear in the same genetics book!) Olding-Smee et al (2003) and Turner (2000) reinforce Lewontin's model with examples and numbers. The arrow between genes and settings points both ways, whether that setting is a rock or another human (Brody, 1999; Turner, 2000; Brody, et al, 2001). This sort of model promises an understanding of the highly variable, intensely stubborn personal will with which each of us exerts influence on one another and on our nests. Buss understands it when he talks about men and women as environments for each other. Evolutionary psychology will perish from anemia if it does not consider both the living and nonliving environments that we make and open itself to discussion of human will.

Bottom Lines

ED summarizes an important segment of what an important viewpoint tells us about mate selection. Buy it for that reason. Unfortunately, like many a spouse, ED gained 90 pages in 9 years, getting fat as we spent more time together. I cheered for the svelte first edition and bought copies for my friends: familiarity, repetition, and homilies, however, bred not contempt but somnolence. ED would benefit from King's Dictum but applied to second editions: "2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%" (King, 2000, p 222).

Buss wrote this book in the same manner that he conducted his international studies on mate preferences: incrementally and, like a good infantry general, with an extraordinary network of like-minded partisans. He thanks 125+ individuals in his opening and it's difficult to imagine anyone within EP who is both knowledgeable about this topic and not his ally. Buss and his allies, however, perhaps know too much from one viewpoint to keep ED simple but too little about important alternative viewpoints to make it complete.

EP itself would benefit from a Mencken. If only Silverman were younger...

Recommended

Birkhead, T. (2000 Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Judson, O. (2002) Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. NY: Metropolitan.

References
Beck, A. (1988) Love is Never Enough. NY: Harper.
Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D., Tellegen, A., & McGue, M. (1996) Genes, Drives, Environment, and Experience. Chapter 1 in C.P. Benbow & D. Lubinski (Eds.) Intellectual Talent: Psychometric and Social Issues. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 5-43.
Brody, J. F., Bloom, H., & Turner, J. S. (June, 2001) "Alternatives to the Received View of Evolution" Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Rutgers, NJ. A panel consisting of 3 presentations: Brody (Alternatives to the Received View of Evolution: if Darwin had been a woman), Howard Bloom, Visiting Scholar, New York University (The Xerox effect: on the importance of pre-biotic evolution), and J Scott Turner, Ph. D., SUNY, Syracuse, New York (Darwinism's difficulties: extended organisms, constructed environments and emergent physiology).
Brody, J. F., (1999) Active Darwinism and Psychotherapy, NY Chapter, Association for Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, November 13, 1999. Also in Brody, J. F. (2002) From Physics and Evolutionary Neuroscience to Psychotherapy: Phase Transitions and Adaptations, Diagnosis and Treatment. In G. Cory & R. Gardner (Eds.) The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences & Frontiers, Praeger-Greenwood, pp. 231-259.
Buss, D. (1999) Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. NY: Doubleday.
Eiseley, L. (1946/1957) The judgment of the birds. In The Immense Journey. NY: Vintage, pp. 163-178.
Fechenhauer, D. (2001) Females' risk attitudes and sociosexuality predict their chance of being raped. Presentation at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society Annual Meeting, Rutgers, NJ, June 22.
Gould, S. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap.
Gray, J. (1992) Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. NY: Harper Collins.
King, S. (2000) On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. NY: Scribner.
Lewontin, R. (1998/2000) Triple helix: Gene, organism, environment. Cambridge, MA, Harvard.
Miller, G. (1998) How mate choice shaped human nature: A review of sexual selection and human evolution. In Crawford C & Krebs D (Eds.) Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 87-130.
Miller, G. (2000) The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. NY: Doubleday.
Odling-Smee F.J., Laland, K.N., & Feldman, M.W. (2003) Niche Construction. The Neglected Process in Evolution. Monographs in Population Biology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking.
Raff, R. (1996) The Shape of Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Rowe, D. (2002) Biology and Crime. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury.
Sowell, T. (1987) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Quill.
Turner, J. Scott (2000) The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Wilson, E. O. (1975/2000) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press.

Acknowledgment
This was written in the Cafe at a Barnes and Noble Store. Buy from a human in a store, not on the 'Net.

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