Gave up on it about a third of the way through, skimmed ahead to see if I should carry on, but it seemed to be more of the same.
What I read seemed very well researched, sensible, interesting, etc. I imagine this is an excellent book for someone who wants to be convinced that evolution is largely responsible for the way most things are. Being already aware and convinced of it, the repetitive nature of the short chapters—putting up weak “Nature Only” arguments only to shoot them down over and over again—came across as needlessly verbose and exhausting.
Highlights
Kindle locations.
[...] the ultimate effect of any adaptation is to help to propagate only those genes that give rise to it.
As a headline from the spoof news site, The Daily Mash, put it, "Rolling into a ball not as good as running like f*ck, hedgehogs told."
Human evolution has been particularly rapid since we took up agriculture. [...]
Among other things, there's been strong selection on genes related to disease resistance, diet, and nervous system functioning.
For most of our history, women spent the bulk of their reproductive years either pregnant or breastfeeding. women don't menstruate when they're pregnant, and they tend not to menstruate when they're breastfeeding either, at least not in hunter-gathered conditions. The net result is that, until recently, most women had only a hundred or so menstrual cycles in their lifetimes. Things are very different today. [...] [Women] have many more menstrual cycles than their ancestors: as many as four hundred. This is more than their reproductive systems are designed for, and it exposes them to unnaturally high levels of ovarian hormones and unnaturally frequent hormonal fluctuations. This in turn increases women's risk of breast cancer - as well as conditions such as anemia and endometriosis. These maladies were almost unheard of until recently.
[...] we should always bear in mind the words of the American feminist Gloria Steinem, who asked, "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"
According to [Steven] Pinker, art, music, and fiction are directly analogous to strawberry cheesecake. They're not adaptations; they're technologies we've developed to artificially stimulate our brains in ways we find enjoyable. They're hacks! Art, for example, draws much of its power from species-typical aesthetic preferences: preferences for symmetry, certain colors, and particular types of scenery. These preferences plausibly evolved to help us choose suitable mates, suitable food, and suitable habitats.
The sexual asymmetry in maximum offspring number is not unique to humans. In many species - the vast majority, in fact - the ceiling number of offspring for males is higher than that for females. The most important reason for this is parental investment. That was [Robert] Trivers' great insight,. In most species, females invest more time, energy and resources into their young than do males. [...] The implications of this simple fact are far reaching.
[...] both sexes are capable of falling in love and forming long-term relationships, and thus that long-term relationships must generally have been adaptive for both sexes: men as well as women.
Environmental variables don't operate on a blank slate; they operate on minds that are somewhat differentiated by sex.
How would socialization theories explain the violence gap that opens up between the sexes at puberty? Is there a sudden surge in gender socialization - a surge which, for some unknown reason, happens at exactly the same stage of life in every culture and in many dimorphic species?
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