Introducing Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd Edition by Dylan Evans

Product Description

Using evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology as well as anthropolgy, primatology and archaeology, characters such as Dawkins, Gould and Dennett are beginning to piece together the first truly scientific account of human nature.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #191567 in Books
Published on: 2006-01-25
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
176 pages
Customer Reviews

Introducing the "Introducing" series.
If you've not read any of the "Introducing Such-and-such" series (or the similar "For Beginners" series from a different publisher) then I'll have to describe the overall series to you as well as this particular book.

Both of these series have the simple goal of serving as a brief introduction to the topic for an intelligent layman. The series makes use of copious illustrations throughout, so that they almost look like a comic book.

I sheepishly have to admit I picked this book up because I knew the Wachowski brothers, creators of The Matrix, had all their principal actors read it.

That said, this book fulfills the goal of giving a simple overview of the basic concepts of evolutionary psychology. I do a fair bit of self-directed reading about various psychology topics, so I found the subject interesting. The authors describe the origins of evolutionary psychology and how it's distinguished from the larger field of general psychology. Various topics covered include the evolution of human social behavior (and why reputation is so important to us), dietary habits (why fatty, sugar-laden foods are so hard to ignore) and mating patterns.

I have only two major criticisms concerning this book. The first is more of a minor annoyance than a significant flaw: Important figures are usually pictured as well as named. Later in the book these people are shown describing through speech bubbles important points of their theories. The problem is that their names are only given the first time. I found it very annoying to have to go back every time a certain picture was presented to remember the name and associate the theory with the correct person.

The second and more important problem is this: Although the authors present several objections to the theories of evolutionary psychology, their responses to these objections feel a bit too pat. They simply don't seem to be taking these arguments seriously. Of course, this is a short book intended only as an introduction to the field, so the authors had a limited scope, but I still found their approach to their critics a bit too dismissive.

Overall, if you're a curious, omnivorous reader like myself, you'll probably find this a good read. As other reviewers have noted, the book includes suggestions for further reading at the end, so if you really enjoyed the subject you already have directions for further research.

Short & Sweet
This book provides a brief introduction to the field of Evolutionary Psychology, defined as a combination of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. I finished it just as quickly as "The Zen of Farting" by Carl Japikse, but needless to say, this book was far more enlightening. The pages are almost in comic book format with pictures taking up the lion's share of space. The pictures weren't necessary to get the points across, but alas, to sell a brief and rudimentary book such as this, volume is necessary.

The author, a Ph.D. student in cognitive psychology at the time the book was written offers a great introduction to the field of evolutionary psychology and provides a laundry list of further readings on the subject.

If you have little to no exposure to this field, this is an excellent book to get you started. I highly recommend it.

This review not based on content but presentation
There's no way I can review this book based on content because I'm not very familiar with the fields, but I did appreciate how well the authors presented the theories on such a controversial theory. They did manage to shed some light on method of explaining human behavior that I never thought of and took for granted (my folly considering I'm an aspiring Sociologist).What's best is at the end of the book there are suggestions for further reading.