Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
In the 1980s, David M Buss, one of the Deans of Modern Evolutionary Psychology, conducted a worldwide survey of more than 10,000 people from 37 different cultures. He and his collaborators simply asked what qualities they sought in their ideal mate. They discovered that, regardless of race, religion, history, culture, and geographic location, men and women everywhere sought very similar qualities in their mates. Men sought youth and physical attractiveness in their mates, whereas women sought resources and status in theirs.
Tell me about the David Buss book, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating.
Buss’s book approaches the evolved sex differences in the brain slightly differently. In the 1980s, David M Buss, one of the Deans of Modern Evolutionary Psychology, conducted a worldwide survey of more than 10,000 people from 37 different cultures. He and his collaborators simply asked men and women throughout the world what qualities they sought in their ideal mate. They discovered that, regardless of their race, religion, history, culture, and geographic location, men and women everywhere sought very similar qualities in their mates. While there are some qualities – such as intelligence and kindness – that both men and women wanted in their mates, there were very marked sex differences. Men sought youth and physical attractiveness in their mates, whereas women sought resources and status in theirs.
Of course, we don’t need evolutionary psychology to know what men and women want in their mates. Our great-grandmothers (and their great-grandmothers) always knew that men liked young beautiful women, and women liked rich and powerful men, without any knowledge of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is noteworthy, not in what they discovered, but in explaining why. Both youth and physical attractiveness are markers of health and fecundity, so young and beautiful women on average make better mothers. Because of men’s need to protect and invest heavily in their children, resourceful men of higher status make better fathers. What men and women seek in their ideal mates is dictated by their evolutionary needs. They are driven by evolutionary logic that they themselves are largely oblivious to. Buss’s book explains the evolutionary logic behind what men and women desire in their mates and why.
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Dr Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist, Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at University College London and in the Department of Psychology at Birkbeck College University of London. He has written over 80 articles and chapters in psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology and biology. He shares his evolutionary psychological observations in his popular blog The Scientific Fundamentalist at Psychology Today.
