I have just finished reading “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, approved Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire– Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do“. Hows that for a really long book title.
This was a very interesting read. This book gives a 2 chapter intro into Evolutionary Psychology and then it is off to explaining many of humanity’s cross-cultural universal behaviors from an evolutionary psychological perspective. I think that this book is a wonderfully enlightening read. I would suggest that everyone pick it up (if you are into that sort of reading). In some cases I think that they maybe trying to hard to come up with answers, but their empirical evidence is telling.
I was previously on the ‘nurture’ side of the ‘nature vs nurture‘ argument, but with the books that I have been reading such as this plus Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (Paperback) a (sociocultural look at mating in humans and other creatures) and The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (an evolutionary biological look at mating in humans and other creatures) I am seeing that our evolution greatly affects what and why we do things as humans today.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/12/has-the-human-species-escaped-the-laws-of-evolution.html