Human Nature Review

In The Evolution of Desire (hereafter ED) David Buss addresses topics that he and his army of collaborators defined in the first place: the preferences of each gender, differences in their strategies for casual mating and for long term partnerships, maintaining relationships between spouses, conflict in sexual agendas, breaking up of partnerships, marital careers, and harmony between the sexes. He closes several chapters with predictions of what research might tell us in the next edition of ED. (Buss 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. Matrix could as well substituted genes for computers. Thus, any shock in ED comes not from our conduct but from science's finding good sense in what we do instinctively. And that shock is felt largely by the minority of our population open to the delusion that human nature is infinitely malleable. (See Pinker, 2002; Sowell, 1987.) Such believers often work in universities and are politically left of center. Another set of people won't like ED. They endorse self reliance and attach consequences to behavior: many of them look to God to mend traits that Buss would probably call design features. (New Scientist had an essay several years ago about the novel union between right-wing Christians and academic liberals, one cemented by their shared opposition to evolutionary theory.) 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. Further, human 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 questions about why men do dumb things. Dierks Bentley sings of a young girl who screams "Faster!" when her date