Book Reviews

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: THE NEW SCIENCE OF THE MIND By David M. Buss, Boston: Allyn and Bacon Press, 1999, 456 pp., ISBN: 0-205-19358-7, US$46.67 TASTY SLICEBUT WHERE IS THE REST OF THE PIE?
Readers of this journal will appreciate the need for an undergraduate textbook on evolutionary psychology. Like me, they have probably been piecing together material from many sources for their courses. I therefore jumped at the opportunity to incorporate David Busss new textbook Evolutionary Psychology into my own upper-level course and took special care to obtain evaluations from my students. Based on both their assessment and mine, Evolutionary Psychology can be praised in some respects but must also be criticized. On the positive side, it is well written from an undergraduate perspective and captures the interest of the students with its fascinating material. On the negative side, it is partial, in both senses of the word. Much of the material that I regard as essential for a course on evolutionary psychology is missing from its pages, and it often uncritically accepts favored interpretations without considering viable alternatives. The problem of partiality goes deeper than the textbook and extends to the very definition of the subject. The term evolutionary psychology is increasingly becoming associated with a particular school of thought rather than with the general study of psychology from an evolutionary perspective. As one example, I recently attended a symposium on evolution and cognition sponsored by the Konrad Lorenz Institute. The distinguished participants certainly qualified as evolutionary psychologists as I understand the term, but here is how Celia Heyes, one of the organizers, began her introductory chapter of the book that resulted from the conference (Heyes, in press): When I first encountered the term evolutionary psychology, I thought it referred to the study of how mind and behavior evolved. But I was mistaken. In current usage, evolutionary psychology refers exclusively to research on human mentality and behavior, motivated by a very specific, nativist-adaptationist interpretation of how evolution operates. You know there is a problem when evolutionary biologists interested in cognition avoid the use of the term evolutionary psychology. Perhaps we shouldnt

Received June 10, 1999; accepted June 10, 1999. Address reprint requests and correspondence to: David Sloan Wilson, Department of Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000. E-mail: dwilson@binghamton.edu Evolution and Human Behavior 20: 279287 (1999) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010

1090-5138/99/$see front matter PII S1090-5138(99)00010-0

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worry about labels, but the narrow definition of evolutionary psychology has two ominous consequences. First, evolutionary theory has the potential to unify the study of human behavior, which traditionally has been fragmented into a bewildering array of isolated and often hostile intellectual tribes. Unification is the theme of Consilience by E.O. Wilson (1998) and Tooby and Cosmides (1992) influential chapter, The psychological foundations of culture in The Adapted Mind. At one level Buss would enthusiastically agree, but the narrow definition of evolutionary psychology suggests that the study of evolution and human behavior is in the process of fragmenting, just like the rest of the social sciences. Second, when a narrow slice of human nature is presented as if it were the whole pie, people are bound to object. The appropriate way to object is to add the rest of the pie, allowing the initial slice to be seen in context. Unfortunately, it is also tempting to object by denying the reality of the slice. After all, if the material leaves you unsatisfied, perhaps there is something wrong with the material. By being partial, the narrow version of evolutionary psychology undermines its own goals, inviting an extreme form of skepticism that can never be allayed by another empirical study on the slice. In my opinion, much of the information reported in Evolutionary Psychology is (roughly) true, but it is unlikely to become generally accepted until it is seen as part of a larger story.

The Slice
With these general comments in mind, the specific contents of Evolutionary Psychology can be described. The first chapter reviews scientific movements leading up to evolutionary psychology and common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. The second chapter describes general principles of evolutionary psychology, which consists mostly of adaptationist thinking and the likelihood that the human mind consists of many domain-specific psychological mechanisms. Sources of data and empirical methods for testing hypotheses are described. The remaining chapters use these conceptual tools to study a variety of topics: problems of survival (one chapter), challenges of sex and mating (three chapters), challenges of parenting and kinship (two chapters), and problems of group living (four chapters). The final chapter attempts to show how cognitive, social, developmental, personality, clinical, and cultural psychology can be studied from an evolutionary perspective. Theoretical concepts are discussed verbally at a level that undergraduates can easily grasp but which does not lead to detailed understanding. Coverage of the literature is very comprehensive for the narrow version of evolutionary psychology, making it a useful reference work for professionals in addition to a textbook for undergraduate students. The script for most chapters is to introduce the subject (e.g., short-term sexual strategies in men), list the adaptive problems that presumably had to be solved in ancestral environments (e.g., partner number and variety, sexual accessibility, identifying which women were fertile, and avoiding commitment), and review the evidence for the predicted behaviors. Specialized psychological mechanisms are claimed to be the only way that adapted minds could have evolved, but otherwise there is no attempt to delve into proximate mechanisms.

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I will shortly criticize Evolutionary Psychology for what it omits, but first it is important to praise it for what it includesthe sense of excitement that characterizes the field, the feeling that evolution offers a whole new perspective on human nature that in retrospect is almost certainly true, yet whose insights have all too often been missed from other perspectives. The field of evolutionary psychology proves its worth by the questions it asks, before they have even been answered. Some predictions (e.g., concerning major patterns of mate choice and parental investment) are so basic that their answers are almost a foregone conclusiononce we recognize their importance. Other predictions (e.g., concerning bilateral symmetry as an important factor in mate choice or the effect of time spent apart on sperm count) are more subtle and risky in the sense that they might easily prove to be wrong. Evolutionary psychology proves its worth not only as a basic science but also as an applied science, with implications ranging from medicine, to criminology, to landscape design, to educational reform. My students often remark that their view of the world has been permanently changed by evolutionary thinking and Busss textbook contains much of the material that can lead to this powerful effect. In short, Buss has written a good textbook on the school of thought known as evolutionary psychology. Those who appreciate the school of thought, as I do, may well want to use the book for their courses and for themselves as a reference work. Those who think that the school of thought is just one slice of a larger evolutionary pie, as I also do, will need to add the rest of the pie and place the slice that Buss provides in the appropriate context.

The Rest of the Pie

In his chapter on survival problems, Buss (pp. 7273) provides a good example of how evolutionary psychology identifies problems that have been missed from other perspectives: Rozin (1996) notes that among the eight leading textbooks in introductory psychology, with an average length of 668 pages, the median number of pages devoted to the entire topic of what humans eat and why is less than half a page. Unfortunately, the sword cuts both ways. Using his index as a guide, Buss devotes 6 pages to culture, 6 pages to development, 2 pages to norms, 2 pages to individual differences, 1 page to learning, and no pages to morality, religion, behavior genetics, or, for that matter, brain. These omissions show how strongly the narrow version of evolutionary psychology is oriented toward a certain view in which all the evolution took place in the distant past, resulting in a universal human jukebox of specialized psychological mechanisms that are played when pushed by environmental buttons. Development is largely the switching on of mechanisms during various stages of the life cycle. Culture is largely evoked culture, a manifestation of individual phenotypic plasticity. Specialized psychological mechanisms are perceived as so theoretically essential that there is no need to examine the actual organization of the brain. The commitment to individualism is so strong that there is no need to discuss society as anything more than what individuals do to each other in the course of maximizing their inclusive fitness. The commitment to a uni-

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versal human nature adapted to ancestral environments is so strong that there is little need to discuss existing heritable variation (behavior genetics) or individual differences apart from sex differences (the discussion of sociopathy on pp. 397398 is an important exception). On the other hand, the idea that men and women share substantially the same human nature is lost in the rush to find sex differences. For example, Busss own research shows that men and women agree on the most important qualities of a mate (e.g., Table 1 in Buss 1985); kindness and understanding, intelligence, physical attractiveness, exciting personality, good health, adaptability, creativity, desire for children, college graduate, good heredity, good earning capacity, good housekeeper, and religious orientation. The only significant differences between men and women in the ranking of these qualities were physical attractiveness (ranked third for men vs. sixth for women) and good earning capacity (ranked eleventh for men and eighth for women). Buss (1988: 624) states that sex differences should be evaluated within the context of a high degree of sexual congruence, but this is hardly the impression gained from Evolutionary Psychology, with separate chapters devoted to male and female long-term mating strategies. No textbook can cover all bases but these omissions are so large, so theoretically driven, and exclude so much research on mind and behavior from an evolutionary perspective, that they constitute major shortcomings for a textbook entitled Evolutionary Psychology, if this term is to refer to anything more than a narrow school of thought. In addition, failure to include these topics can provoke undeserved criticism of the material that is included, as I will now illustrate with two examples. Individuals and society. Ever since Darwin, evolution has been rejected for its perceived moral implications. So much of what individuals should do to increase their fitness, they should not do in the normative sense of the word. If this visceral reaction blinds people to the entire theory of evolution, what hope is there of convincing them about evolution and human behavior? Perhaps the moralists are wishful thinkers who cannot see the world as the tough place that it really is. Or, perhaps there is a moral side to human nature that can be explained by evolution as successfully as the immoral side. Perhaps the visceral reaction to discussions of self-serving behavior is the activation of a specialized psychological mechanism, ringing with the urgency of an alarm bell at the violation of well-entrenched social norms. Modern hunter-gatherer societies are notable for their egalitarianism. Status differences among men are minimized, food and other resources are shared (including gathered resources, for which sharing appears small only in comparison to large game), and most major decisions are made on a communal basis. When leaders exist, they act more like elected public officials than overbearing individuals who take what they want. The urge to dominate is not absent but is effectively suppressed by what Boehm (1993) calls a reverse dominance hierarchy, in which would-be dominants are controlled by other members of the group. When groups can punish individuals in a coordinated fashion, the imbalance of power becomes so great that most self-serving behaviors are not an option. Social control goes far beyond responding

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to individual behaviors and takes the form of an elaborate system of norms that governs most aspects of social life. As Turnbull (1965: 118) described the Mbuti, Even the most insignificant and routine action in the daily life of the family is potentially of major concern to the band as a whole . . . It is important that there should be a pattern of behavior that is generally accepted, and which covers every conceivable activity. In contrast, social norms and the power of groups over their members are virtually absent from the pages of Evolutionary Psychology. Individuals are assumed to freely choose their behaviors in game-theoretic fashion, frequently opting to benefit themselves at the expense of others. They are highly sensitive to being cheated (as revealed by the Wason selection task), but the role of groups in defining and punishing cheating is ignored. In the chapter on dominance, the possibility that individuals achieve status primarily by benefitting their group is limited to two short paragraphs (pp. 358359). The narrow version of evolutionary psychology has only itself to blame for those who reject such a morally indifferent portrayal of human affairs. A more balanced and effective treatment would move the subject of morality and social norms onto center stage, where it already exists in the minds of many readers. Moral and immoral behaviors, as conventionally defined, correspond roughly to behaviors that contribute to the common good and behaviors that benefit the self at the expense of the common good, respectively (Alexander 1987). Both have a largely adaptive basis; we are designed to behave morally and immorally, depending on the context, and probably with large individual differences (Mealey 1995; Wilson et al. 1996, 1998). Moral behavior cannot be based exclusively on voluntary altruism (which nevertheless may play an important role) but requires a system of social control (Boyd and Richerson 1992; Sober and Wilson 1998). Indeed, the reason that moral and immoral behaviors are distinguished from each other is most likely to promote the former and suppress the latter. Moral systems can be highly effective in some situations but can break down in others. They may become especially fragile in large anonymous societies that depart from the smaller face-to-face groups of our evolutionary past. Morality is primarily an in-group phenomenon that is often (not always) used as a tool of aggression toward other groups. Understanding morality from an evolutionary perspective can help inform modern social policy, whose express purpose is to promote the common good (Bowles and Gintis 1998). Perhaps the most important point is that building, enforcing, and abiding by moral systems can be an adaptive evolutionary strategy. Including the moral side of human nature not only provides a fuller picture of evolutionary psychology, but also makes the immoral side easier to swallow. Open-ended processes. Evolution is an open-ended process that uses blind variation and selective retention to produce forms that did not previously exist. The narrow version of evolutionary psychology is curiously nonevolutionary. All the evolution is assumed to have taken place in the past, leading to a universal human nature that can be regarded as fixed as far as ongoing adaptation and natural selection is concerned. Not only is this unlikely to be true for genetic evolution (Wilson 1994), but it ignores a host of other open-ended evolutionary processes that influence mind

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and behavior, including individual learning, cultural evolution, and brain development. These processes are capable of evolving novel solutions to problems in modern environments. They have been studied by evolutionary biologists interested in human behavior for decades, but they scarcely make it onto the radar screen as far as the narrow version of evolutionary psychology is concerned. It is true that learning and culture have been used to argue against biology by social scientists that Daly and Wilson (1988) describe as biophobic, which may explain why the narrow version of evolutionary psychology avoids the subjects. However, if evolutionary psychology aspires to be more than a counterweight, it needs to incorporate open-ended processes to the extent that they influence mind and behavior. Furthermore, the evolutionary study of open-ended processes will include plenty of innate specialized psychological mechanisms that set the parameters and act as building blocks for the evolution of novel forms. The difference between ancient Greek and Chinese society provides a good example of cultural and psychological adaptation to modern environments (Fiske et al. 1998; Nisbett et al. unpublished). Greek society was based on herding and fishing, which favored a large amount of individual autonomy. Chinese society was based on a form of agriculture that required a high degree of cooperation and social hierarchy. According to Nisbett et al., these ecological and social differences produced distinctive systems of thought. Modern western thought is derived from the Greek system and is mistaken by western social scientists as universal human nature. The so-called fundamental attribution error, for example, turns out to be culturally specific. Nisbett et al. end their article with the following powerful statement, which should serve as a wake-up call for the narrow version of evolutionary psychology: Almost two decades ago, the senior author wrote a book with Lee Ross entitled, modestly, Human Inference. Roy DAndrade, a distinguished cognitive anthropologist, read the book and pronounced it a good ethnography. The author was shocked and dismayed. But we now wholeheartedly agree with DAndrades contention about the limits of research conducted in a single culture. Psychologists who choose not to do cross-cultural psychology may have chosen to be ethnographers instead. Of course, evolutionary psychologists do engage in cross-cultural research, but not in this way. Their efforts are to show that all cultures are the same (e.g., with respect to standards of beauty), or different in ways that can be explained in terms of evolved phenotypic plasticity in ancestral environments (evoked culture). The possibility of open-ended cultural and psychological adaptation to modern environments, which penetrates deeply into what we call human nature, is absent from the pages of Evolutionary Psychology.

The Other Sense of Partial

Evolutionary psychologists are often accused of doing bad science, including telling unsubstantiated just-so stories. In many cases the charge is unfair; the research meets the standards of other disciplines and the effect sizes are frequently so large that the empirical results cannot be doubted. However, in other cases evolutionary psychological research does come across as partisan and uncritical. There is a perva-

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sive habit of describing a single evolutionary hypothesis, presenting data that roughly correspond to the prediction, and proclaiming victory for the hypothesis without developing reasonable alternativesincluding reasonable evolutionary alternatives. There is also a tendency to have it both ways. Cultural universals, such as sex differences in violent behavior, are treated as impressive evidence for the evolutionary view, but variation among cultures also is explained as a manifestation of phenotypic plasticity. In some cases the mind is assumed to be frozen in the stone age and unresponsive to modern environments (e.g., female preference for wealthy social partners, regardless of their own wealth), whereas in other cases it is assumed to be minutely responsive to modern environments (e.g., male preference for sexually experienced social partners, which is highly variable across cultures). I am not criticizing Busss own research but rather the field and the textbook. My students often expressed the skeptical view that they were not being provided the full story and that it seemed that nothing could falsify the evolutionary view. One example is Millers theory of music (and more generally culture) as a form of sexual display, which is supported by an impressive-looking graph about jazz musicians (Miller, in press; discussed on pp. 407409 of Buss). The reader is supposed to marvel that jazz musicians are overwhelmingly young males, exactly like a lek of peacocks strutting in front of females. As extra evidence, we are told that Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, and Honor de Balzac were profligate breeders. Another triumph for evolutionary psychology! What is wrong with this story? Lets begin with the females. Are they any less common among jazz musicians than, say, plumbers? If not, then we do not need to assume that females lack interest in being jazz musicians because they lack interest in multiple mates. Men and women have different reproductive value curves, which should be reflected in the age distribution of male and female jazz musicians, regardless of their relative numbers. But the age distributions look the same, although it is difficult to tell with certainly from the graph. How about all those famous musicians who were not profligate breeders (Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Miles Davis)? And what ever happened to the ancestral environment? One careful study of music in a hunter-gatherer society is for the Aka Pygmies of central Africa (Arom 1991; Arom and Khalfa 1998; discussed from an evolutionary perspective by Brown, in press). About two dozen discrete musical categories exist, each associated with a particular social function and performed only in the context of that function. Music is a general organizer of social life of which male sexual display is a narrow slice indeed. Thus, not only does Millers hypothesis (or at least its presentation by Buss) neglect common sense alternatives, such as the minority status of women in most professions in modern society, but also well-informed evolutionary alternatives (for an excellent general analysis of music from an evolutionary perspective, see Brown, in press). Evolutionary theory potentially can unify the study of humans, but I sometimes wonder if it will become a victim of its own success and the innate psychology that it attempts to understand. Dunbar (1996) and Caporeal (1997) speculate that human face-to-face groups tend to fission when they reach a certain size and that this holds for modern scientific societies in addition to hunter-gatherer societies. Perhaps sci-

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entists are destined by their genes to fragment into intellectual warring tribes, regardless of what they study. Perhaps human evolutionary psychology has grown to the fragmentation point, despite its conceptual potential for unification. Perhaps it is natural for one of the tribes to adopt the name evolutionary psychology in opposition to other evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior. I, for one, hope that this scenario is wrong and that evolutionary psychology will always be defined as the study of mind and behavior from the evolutionary perspective, period. Scientific fields are defined in part by their textbooks and I hope that Buss, who also believes in the unifying potential of evolutionary theory, will broaden the scope of Evolutionary Psychology in future editions. David Sloan Wilson Department of Biological Sciences Binghamton University Binghamton, New York

REFERENCES
Alexander, R.D. The Biology of Moral Systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987. Arom, S. African polyphony and polyrhythm: musical structure and methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Arom, S., and Khalfa, J. Une raison en acte: pense formelle et systematique musicale dans les societs de tradition orale. Revue de Musicologie 84: 517, 1998. Boehm, C. Egalitarian society and reverse dominance hierarchy. Current Anthropology 34: 227254, 1993. Bowles, S., and Gintis, H. Is equality pass? Boston Review 23: 426, 1998. Boyd, R., and Richerson, P.J. Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups. Ethology and Sociobiology 13: 171195, 1992. Brown, S. Evolutionary models of music: from sexual selection to group selection. In Perspectives in Ethology XIII, F. Tonneau and N.S. Thompson (Eds.). New York: Plenum. (in press). Buss, D.M. Human mate selection. American Scientist 73: 4751, 1985. Buss, D.M. The evolution of human intrasexual competition: tactics of mate attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54: 616628, 1988. Caporeal, L.R. The evolution of truly social cognition: the core configuration model. Personality and Social Psychology Review 1: 276298, 1997. Daly, M., and Wilson, M. Homicide. Hawthorne NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988. Dunbar, R.I.M. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Fiske, A.P., Kitayama, S., Markus, H.R., and Nisbett, R.E. The cultural matrix of social psychology. In Handbook of Social Psychology, D.T. Gilbert, S.T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey (Eds.). Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998, pp. 915981. Heyes, C. Evolutionary psychology in the round. In Evolution and Cognition, C. Heyes and L. Huber (Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in press. Mealey, L. The sociobiology of sociopathy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18: 523599, 1995. Miller, G.F. Sexual selection for cultural displays. In Evolution of Culture, R. Dunbar, C. Knight, and C. Power (Eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, in press. Nisbett, R.E., Peng, K., Choi, I., and Norenzayan, A. Culture and systems of thought: holistic vs. analytic cognition. (unpublished). Rozin, P. Towards a psychology of food and eating: from motivation to module to marker, morality, meaning and metaphor. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5: 1824, 1996.

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Sober, E., and Wilson, D.S. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Tooby, J., and Cosmides, L. The psychological foundations of culture. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 19136. Turnbull, C.M. The Mbuti Pygmies: An Ethnographic Survey. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1965. Wilson, D.S. Adaptive genetic variation and human evolutionary psychology. Ethology and Sociobiology 15: 219235, 1994. Wilson, D.S., Near, D., and Miller, R.R. Machiavellianism: a synthesis of the evolutionary and psychological literatures. Psychological Bulletin 199: 285299, 1996. Wilson, D.S., Near, D.C., and Miller, R.R. Individual differences in Machiavellianism as a mix of cooperative and exploitative strategies. Evolution and Human Behavior 19: 203212, 1998. Wilson, E.O. Consilience. New York: Knopf, 1998.