This is one of several books I checked out for my Abnormal Psych research paper (on Hypersexuality). Like the other books, it was of limited use for that topic, but I found the info good enough that I went back and read the whole book after I finished the paper. Here's the quick score, with much, much more discussion below.
The Evolution of Desire, by David M. Buss. Revised edition, 2003.
Concept: 7
Presentation: 7
Writing Quality: 7
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8
Entertainment Value: 7
Rereadability: 7
Overall: 9
This book is simply packed full of useful information. It's crammed with statistics, surveys, and polls illustrating what men and women want in a mate, with tons of analysis about the biological and sociological reasons why we want it. The title is appropriate, but misleading. It sounds like a book about how desire came about to exist in humans, but that's almost exactly wrong. The book is actually about how desire caused humans to evolve, and how our biological imperatives continue to influence our mate choices, on a conscious and subconscious level.
It's not a perfect book; the
most helpful review on Amazon.com enumerates a long list of problems, chiefly with the methodology of the surveys Buss conducted, but also with his analysis of them. My objections were more to the constant generalizing in the book. Buss constantly says things like, "72% of women said X and Y..." which may be true, but their reasons for saying it could be very different, and just because people say something on a hypothetical survey doesn't mean they actually do it in real life. Much less do it in every situation, since every situation is different, depending on the people stuck in it.
Furthermore, Buss' his information is almost entirely targeted at heterosexuals of child-bearing age. He pays scant attention to people who are seeking a partner but not considering having children with that person; teenagers who don't want to settle down yet, adults who have kids already, older people past child-bearing age, homosexuals, etc. Presumably the same genetic drives motivate those people, though they're less predictable since what they consciously want differs from what their genetics are pushing them to obtain.
On the whole though, the book has a lot of very interesting and useful information. In the rest of this review I'm going to quote a bunch of stats and summarize a bunch of his chief conclusions, for your benefit but also as a way for me to record my notes and thoughts on a book that's well overdue at my ex-university's library.
I was going to post it all in one update, but I've been working on it on and off for several days, and my comments and notes thus far are up over 14 pages, and I'm only halfway through the book. I'm doing 2-4 pages of summarization and opinion on each chapter, depending on how much of each chapter is fascinating. Since it's running so long, I'm going to break this review up into several, perhaps many, parts. Here's the intro and chapters one and two. I'll post the rest in updates over the next week or so. The information all ties together, but you can theoretically read just the chapters on subjects you are most interested in.
Chapter One: Origins of Mating Behavior.Darwin's discovery of natural selection can be seen clearly affecting human behavior in the way we've evolved characteristics and behaviors useful for obtaining a mate, rather than (simply) for survival. Many animals display this, most obviously in things like deer antlers and peacock tails. It's known as sexual selection, rather than natural/survival selection. This sort of feature exists in a feedback loop. Females, peahens for example, prefer a huge, colorful tail on a male. Therefore males with larger, more colorful tales breed more, thus having more offspring with the genetics for large colorful tales, thus perpetuating the trait. The peahens aren't crazy in their choice; they like males with large, colorful tails since to have such an ornamental appendage, a male must be healthy and strong; sickly males will have mangy tails, or will die to predators since they can't escape or fight with all those heavy feathers slowing them down. The birds don't realize any of this consciously, of course. It's simply the mechanism that's evolved over millions of years.
Humans have similar preferences and desires, and even though we are conscious creatures, possessed of at least semi-free will, our genetics and evolutionary drives still propel us. We can't control our desires. We can refuse to act on them, and can (sometimes) overcome them with logic and reason, but quite often we give into them without realizing it. We rationalize that we want to do, or we should do, what our genes drive us to do.
The most basic human desires for a mate of the opposite sex, boil down to simple, stereotypical factors. Men want a young, healthy, beautiful woman, who is at the peak of her breeding years and can give birth to and successfully raise numerous healthy offspring. Women want a strong, capable, economically-secure man who can provide for her and her/their offspring, and who will not abandon her to raise the young on her own. These desires exist across almost every human culture, primitive and modern. We desire this, our children will desire this, and our ancestors desired it, which is why we do, since our ancestors reproduced successfully, and passed on their preferences to us.
Keeping a mate is another problem humans must face. Unlike many animals, both partners participate in the raising of resource-intensive offspring. Women want a mate who can provide ample resources for the young. Men want a partner who will be faithful, and this is an almost uniquely human problem, since human females are capable of mating and getting pregnant all the time. Many female animals only go into heat at certain times of the year, or only for a few days at a time, and their males can guard them during that time. Human males can not (generally speaking) guard their females full time (only the super rich, such as maharajas with harems and eunuch guards), but do not wish (consciously and genetically) to raise another man's children. Both genders are therefore genetically motivated to select a mate who will not cheat on them, though men can get away with it if they are such good providers that they can keep more than one woman satisfied. (Again, this is on a biological level; cultural issues and human psychology greatly complicates the equations.)
Humans also have a biological predilection to keep possible options open for mate replacement. If a partner is infertile, or dies, it pays to have an alternative in mind. Humans thus tend to notice other potential mates even when they're in a relationship, and this noticing grows much more pronounced if the existing mate is proving unsatisfying. Not reproducing, not looking like a good subject to reproduce with, not providing as necessary to support a child, etc.
Men and women are destined to clash over mate selection. Men want a woman who can raise their young, and have a genetic predisposition to involving themselves in the process of raising the young. That being said, it's a very sound genetic strategy to impregnate as many women as possible, since while the resulting offspring won't be as successful without the man's direct assistance, odds are some of them will survive, and in any event, women who are impregnated by one man can't get pregnant by another. So this is a useful way for one man to propagate his genes, while blocking other men from propagating theirs. This causes men to be willing to engage in sexual intercourse far more readily than women, who bear the physical toll of pregnancy and raising the child and are therefore evolved to select their partners much more carefully.
There is a fundamental conflict between these different sexual strategies: men cannot fulfill their short-term wishes without simultaneously interfering with women's long-term goals. An insistence on immediate sex interferes with the requirement for a prolonged courtship. The interference I reciprocal, since prolonged courting also obstructs the goal of ready sex. Whenever the strategy adopted by one sex interferes with the strategy adopted by the other sex, conflict ensues.
It's fairly obvious that these genetic behaviors motivate humans even when, thanks to birth control or other factors, reproduction is not a factor in potential sexual intercourse. It's also obvious, though never directly addressed by Buss, that sexual pleasure goes naturally with the sex act. In the same way that fatty, high calorie food tastes good to us (since it's what we needed to eat to survive when food was scarce), and makes us want to eat it even when we know it's bad for us, sex feels good, and makes us want to do it even when we know we shouldn't, or even when there's no chance of it leading to reproduction (masturbation, for instance).
Sexual strategies are constantly shifting. When there are more women than men, women have to lower their standards and men become reluctant to settle into a monogamous relationship. When there are more men than women, women can be highly selective and monogamy becomes much more common. In cultures where polygamy is allowed, parents put intense pressure on their sons to achieve and succeed, since many men are locked out of reproducing entirely.
Chapter Two: What Women WantWhat women want, and the fact that they want very different things than men want, derives directly from sexual and genetic differences. Men produce countless billions of sperm; around 12,000,000 per hour. Women produce ova, have only about 400 of them, release (usually) one per month if past puberty and until menopause, if they're not pregnant, and can not make any more than those original 400. One act of sexual intercourse, a negligible energy expenditure for a man, can result in a very resource-intensive nine month pregnancy for the woman, who risks her life in the birthing process, and if successful will then expend additional energy in the process of lactation.
Incidentally, Buss stresses that while this is true of humans, it is not a universal male/female issue. Many female animals produce eggs and drop them with minimal resource depletion, leaving the male to fertilize and guard the eggs, and sometimes even provide for the offspring.
Given the high cost of reproducing, human females must select their mates carefully. There are countless traits that a woman might factor into her decision, and cultural factors are major influences, as are individual preferences. Biological factors underlie the process though, and they developed over millions of years, and are highly focused, for good reason:
A strong preference for a particular navel shape would be unlikely to evolve unless male navel differences were somehow adaptively relevant to ancestral women. From among the thousands of ways in which men differ, selection over hundreds of thousands of years focused women's preferences laser-like on the most adaptively valuable characteristics.
Evolution has favored women who prefer men who possess attributes that confer benefits and who dislike men who possess attributes that impose costs. Each separate attribute constitutes one component of a man's value to a woman as a mate.
The way this works is similar to how random mutations drive evolution via natural selection. Mutations can be good or bad or indifferent. There's no logic or drive to them. Giraffes don't get longer necks to reach higher vegetation because they stretch for it, or because they want longer necks, or because they consciously know they'll enjoy greater reproductive success if they do. Some giraffes just have longer necks via random genetic chance, and those longer-necked giraffes are therefore able to eat more, and be healthier, and have more young; young who who inherit the genes for longer necks from their parents. Natural selection is a blind, stupid, random process in the individual, but over populations, and generations, it's brilliantly-focused and highly-effective.
Human sexual preferences work in similar fashion. Some women prefer longer eyelashes, or large chins, or in-turned navels. But if these traits aren't genetically repeating, or don't help the children succeed, then they will not be passed on, since there won't be anyone to pass them on. The logic isn't that women have spent a million years intentionally picking traits in men that will make their children survive and succeed. (Though this can sometimes happen in humans, since we can think and reason, at least when sports or celebrity gossip is not involved.) The logic is that women have based their partner selection on all sorts of traits, but the ones that have resulted in more, healthier children are the ones that have been passed on.
Economic Capacity. Bearing and raising children is a costly activity. Historically, women needed a man's help to survive this process. Women were therefore well-served to select a man who could provide for her, and who would be willing to do so. As Buss points out, "...if all men possessed the same resources and showed and equal willingness to commit them, there would be no need for women to develop the preferences for them." This sort of genetically-created preference turns into a feedback loop. Women want men who have resources to mate with. Men therefore seek resources in order to make women want to mate with them. It's a symbiotic, chicken/egg scenario.
Men who helped raise the child were much more useful than men who abandoned the woman, and culture reinforced this. Children had to be fed and kept safe, as well as taught to hunt, educated in a trade, and they could inherit social status and influence from their fathers as well. Women, and their children, were very unlikely to receive these benefits from a man chosen simply as a temporary sexual partner. "Not all potential husbands can convert all these benefits, but over thousands of generations, when some men were able to provide some of these benefits, women gained a powerful advantage by preferring them as mates."
Buss cites surveys in which American women were asked to rank numerous factors in selecting a mate, according to importance. In 1939, 1956, 1967, and 1982, the results were quite similar. In all cases, women rated their partner's financial prospects at or near the top of their preferences, and in all cases, women placed about twice as much weight on this factor as men did when they ranked their preferences in a female. A more recent survey of over 1000 personal ads bore this out, as women sought financial resources about 11x as often as men did. This preference in women is not limited to any particular age group, or country. Buss conducted surveys and found this was true in dozens of nations around the world, and even in polygamous cultures. The man's financial prospects are less important in countries where women have higher incomes or there are better social support networks; women in the Netherlands value financial prospects only 36% higher than men in the Netherlands, the lowest difference of any nation surveyed.
Women desire men with higher social status even when the women themselves are well off. In cultures where women have more economic power and wealth, they still rank their partner's status near the top of their list of preferences. There are exceptions; very rich older women may pick attractive younger men without consideration of their economic prospects, but these are very special circumstances, and reproduction is not a factor, given the age of the women.
The female desire for a man with good economic prospects exists even when the women have excellent prospects of their own. Surveys of well off women show that they want men who are even more well off.
These women were well educated, tended to have professional degrees, and had high self esteem. As the study showed, successful women place an even greater value than less successful women on mates who have professional degrees, high social status and greater intelligence, as well as desiring mates who are tall, independent and self confident. Perhaps most tellingly, these women express an even stronger preference for high-earning men than do women who are less financially successful.
Social status is very important as well, because it goes hand in hand with economic prospects, and presumably because a higher ranking man will have children who are treated better and more likely to succeed in life. (And obviously enough, women want to marry a chief so their own lives will be better, but Buss doesn't discuss that; just the reproductive benefits.) In a study of 5000 US college students, "...women list status, prestige, rank, position, power, standing, station, and high place as important considerably more frequently than men do."
Educational degrees are a factor as well. Buss relates an anecdote about women in a restaurant complaining that there weren't any eligible men, while surrounded by young, healthy, unmarried waiters. The waiters were not seen as men of acceptable social status or economic value, so were not considered as potential mates. The word "eligible" is a euphemism for a man with substantial assets, who has not already committed them to another woman and her children. In a polygamous culture, it would refer to a man who had enough surplus assets to support additional women and their children. As with economic resources, women all over the world value social status in their potential mates much more highly than men do in theirs.
Age. In all 37 countries in an international study, women preferred men older than they were. Not a great deal older, on average; just 3-5 years, but always older. The most obvious reason for this is that men accrue resources over time, and all other factors being equal, a man of 30 will be a better provider than a man of 25. Of course all other factors are never equal, and age must be factored in with the other determiners of "eligibility;" social status, appearance, etc. Age selections outside the usual range are often caused by related factors.
Other exceptions occur when women mate with substantially younger men. Many of these cases occur not because of strong preferences by women for younger men but rather because older women and younger men lack bargaining power on the mating market. Older women often cannot secure the attentions of high-status men and so much settle for younger men, who themselves have not acquired much status or value as mates.
Ambition and Industriousness factor in as well. Women view hard work and ambition as key indicators of future economic and social success. Men who are lazy or underachieving are less desirable. Men place far less importance on this attribute in their mate selection, in almost every culture studied.
Dependability and stability. These factors in a man are highly valued by women. Of the 37 cultures studied, 16 showed a substantial difference between men and women's preferences for these traits in a partner. In 15 of those cultures women placed a higher value on dependability and stability. Interestingly, dependability was rated higher than total production, in many cultures. Being able to count on the regular, usual resource production was valued very highly. Emotional stability was very important as well. Men who are not stable tend to be jealous, possessive, philandering, and prone to erratic behavior.
Size and strength. These factors are valued, but largely in terms of how they reinforce other status points. A strong partner can provide and protect, but in modern society, it's more about tangential factors; taller men enjoy greater status in almost every culture surveyed, for instance. Women prefer it in almost all cases; a study of personal ads found that more than 80% of women wanted a man who was 6 foot or taller. Ads placed by taller men produced more replies than those by shorter men.
Love and commitment. Women desire, and require, a man who will commit to them and stick with them. Men who are committed value their partner and protect her, funnel their resources to her and her offspring, and show their commitment (love) by behaving thoughtfully in word and deed. Love is a human concept and emotion, but it goes hand in hand with commitment and fidelity. Most people, over 82% of men and 89% of women, say they would require love to marry someone, even if that person matched all of their other requirements very well. This varies between cultures; only 59% of Russian women surveyed in the mid 1980s said they would require love, a low number that reflects the economic difficulties those women were living under at the time.
Coming soon... Chapter Three: What Men Want: Something Different.
Labels: book review, dating, psychology, sex, the evolution of desire
