Motivation

I was intrigued by the extent to which Buss focused on a purely universalistic account of human nature. I understand that evolutionary psychology is interested in a species-wide account of evolved human behaviors, but was anyone else surprised by how little room Buss’s story left for intra-species variation? What Buss seems to be saying is this: “because adaptive problems are specific, their solutions tend to be specific … but not so specific that every human in every possible cultural context hasn’t evolved the exact same solution.” That’s some pretty remarkable species-wide convergence.

Before reading this book, I would have thought that one of evolutionary psychology’s main points would be that it was a good thing for humans to have a great diversity of genetic strategies and adaptive moves. That’s because greater genetic diversity would likely enable humans to (a) fight off parasites that would prefer homogenous breeding grounds, (b) confuse enemies, (c) fight off species-destructive cultural memes that prey on common vulnerabilities (such as urges towards large-scale cooperative aggression, i.e. warfare), and most importantly, (d) create stronger competition in the market for advantageous mutations. And these benefits of diverse strategies seem consistent with Buss’s account of why we evolved to reproduce sexually rather than asexually in the first place. But instead, Buss spends most of the book establishing (and re-establishing) the universal facts that “guys go for looks; girls go for status” and “guys are aggressive; girls seek protection.” Despite the range of adaptive contexts humans have encountered in various climates and social environments, our evolution seems, quite remarkably, to have converged on certain clear gender universals. Is this one of evolution’s flaws, that it pulls us as a species towards singular genetic solutions (e.g., towards a universal preference for highly symmetrical, youthful, and ‘averaged-out’ faces, p. 146) when a diversity of preferences and genetic strategies might be preferable?

Perhaps a way out of this confusion is to distinguish genetic variation from cultural variation. For instance, few doubt that almost all humans have evolved a remarkably efficient language instinct that is capable of generating and understanding highly systematic syntactic rules and hugely complex syntactic formations (with recursion, embedded clauses, etc). But this universal grammar can be expressed in many different ways, as different cultures and nations evolve unique ways of structuring language.