MARK P L I MSOLL, LLC

[Home] [FAQ] [ShortWorks] [Blog] [Books] [Quotes] [About] [Contact]

Teach Children to become Sexual Iguanas

(A review of Evolutionary Psychology and its theories)

By Mark Plimsoll

Elected President of Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 2003-2004.
Currently studies Stalking and Adolescent Mental Health. (IsHighlyCited.com, 2003)

As an introduction to Professor David Buss, Guru of popular psychology studies on cheating (sexual infidelity) and violent jealousy, peruse this partial list of his publishing credits (papers and books):
Distress about rivals: Reactions to intrasexual competitors in Korea, the Netherlands, and America.
Forgiveness or breakup: Sex differences in responses to a partner's infidelity.
From vigilance to violence: Mate retention tactics in married couples.
Tactics of mate retention.
Human mate poaching: Tactics and temptations for infiltrating existing relationships.
The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex.

Dr. Buss thinks it obvious that prehistoric humans lived a brutish, dangerous, and short life with perhaps a few cues taken from "Psychohistorian" founder Lloyd deMause, who describes human history as a not-yet-completed climb out of ubiquitous incestual child abuse, gang-rape (violent or complicit) and resultant sperm competition, female slavery, and marauders bent on harem acquisition, and that's just family life, not to mention organized warlord cultures and periods of intertribal strife.
To widen the available gene pool, the feminine sexual strategy includes what superficially seems counter-productive, a "desire to stray" that "exists today solely because that's what benefited ancestral women."
As if a death blow to the institution of marriage, his research shows wives prefer to cheat on their husbands on days they ovulate (full moon nights?), yet prefer sex with their spouses when "least likely to conceive" with ruthless use of deception, sexual display and denigration of rivals in the pursuit of a partner.
Whew. Makes me wish I was single again. Almost.
Mate poaching gets real complicated and dangerous, take it from me.
Uh, I mean, what would I know about it? That stuff doesn't happen to decent people...

As an introduction to Professor David Buss, Guru of popular psychology studies on cheating (sexual infidelity) and violent jealousy, peruse this partial list of his publishing credits: Distress about rivals: Reactions to intrasexual competitors in Korea, the Netherlands, and America. Forgiveness or breakup: Sex differences in responses to a partner's infidelity. From vigilance to violence: Mate retention tactics in married couples. Tactics of mate retention. Human mate poaching: Tactics and temptations for infiltrating existing relationships. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex.
As an academic, Buss belongs to the new academic field of Evolutionary Psychology (read "psychology based on interpretations of animal behaviors that influence Natural Selection- i.e. to procreate and maximize personal genetic dispersion") and asserts that "normal" human behavior derives from the same strategies that motivate insects and birds. (Curry 1999)
Buss believes these "genetic strategies" force men into pursuits that help ensure plenty of robust offspring, and the single most important quality a woman can offer, a universal finding in all thirty-seven cultures Buss and collaborators studied, he calls "sexual fidelity". A man "normally" behaves to maximize his ability to inseminate as many concurrent, young, fertile, attractive, and intelligent virgins as possible, especially when he perceives her/them as monogamously loyal to him. Good description of nieces and daughters, the "psychohistorians" would point out.
Dr. Buss seems to expound upon the obvious; that prehistoric humans lived a brutish, dangerous, and short life with perhaps a few cues taken from "Psychohistorian" founder Lloyd deMause, who describes human history as a not-yet-completed climb out of ubiquitous incestual child abuse, gang-rape (violent or complicit), female slavery, and marauders bent on harem acquisition, and that's just family life, not to mention organized warlord cultures.
A woman instinctually seeks an industrious, ambitious, dependable and stable (proven and older?) attractive, physically powerful, healthy, and faithful man to partner long-term in the task of raising children. (Santiago) Buss thinks females risk pregnancy as "an enormous investment" with each sexual union, thus genetics drive them toward men with obvious resources who seem likely to share generously and "stick around".
Studies reveal that premarital sexual permissiveness positively correlates as the best predictor of extramarital sex, and Buss claims (no surprise) that men tend towards multiple partners more than women do. Yet perhaps to widen the available gene pool, the feminine sexual strategy includes what superficially seems counter-productive- a "desire to stray" that "exists today solely because that's what benefited ancestral women" (Buss, 1995-2003, p. 159). As a death blow to the institution of marriage, his research shows wives prefer to cheat on their husbands on days they ovulate, yet prefer sex with their spouses when "least likely to conceive" with ruthless use of deception, sexual display and denigration of rivals in the pursuit of a partner. (Publishers Weekly, 199?)
Not even marital happiness ensures the male's fidelity; "56% of men who were having affairs judged their marriage to be very happy" (Buss, 1995-2003, p. 146). More attractive partners, "higher in mate value" probably cheat more often (Buss, 1995-2003, p. 143) and, in general, a wife's one-night fling might include a higher-ranked partner while her husband would go slumming just for the sex. (Buss, 2000)
Therefore the "fighting couple" represents a normal marriage, ostensibly and instinctually devoted to children but with regular histrionic displays of violent jealousy (unfounded or not) that builds to homicidal levels. This threatens the lives of both spouses (murder/suicide) and/or any rival that will (instinctively) try to "infiltrate" their relationship and "mate-poach".
Buss defines jealousy (p. 196) as "an adaptive signal of an impending threat to a primary love relationship" and continues with the view that "as many as half of all married individuals" practice infidelity as a normal human behavior. (Buss, 2000) (This tempts one to ask which half.) Beyond the destructive influence of jealousy on love, and the predilection toward domestic violence and homicide, jealousy often drives spouses into the arms of others, a point Buss cheekily ignores to make his own argument for Jealousy's biological necessity.
How do those Evolutionary Psychologists explain single-parent homes with latchkey children, and parents who abandoned children? Or why foster parents, or 'parents' of children from donor sperm or egg, bestow love upon their charges? One lay reviewer claims Buss often dismisses anecdotal evidence- "'These two anecdotes, of course, do not add up to scientific evidence.' (Buss, 1995-2003, p. 166) I'm sure the average reader will be swayed nevertheless. My view of this book is almost entirely negative." (Plumb)
Dr. Buss talks of human mating behaviors as "evolved emotional adaptations - which include love: a set of emotional and cognitive adaptations that kick in only in the context of a long-term mating; the feelings of passion, the feelings of devotion, the feelings of commitment..." (Curry, 1999) If Buss really thinks that passion, love, and commitment represent feelings, he most certainly errs. This statement may help illustrate the flaw in his Academic "Yellow Journalism", and how it fits one definition of pornography- anything, like sex and violence, taken out of the human context only to titillate.
Buss protects his career in network terms: the number of collaborators, numbers of cultures studied, his students, tens of thousands of sources, and new recruits to ensure more funding for more jobs in the field. (Brody, 2004) To promulgate the normalcy of infidelity, mate-poaching, and the male's Lolita search, Buss must surely enjoy a rock-solid tenure and, if married, share his life with an understanding, intellectual wife which in sum allows him to happily continue as a respected professor in co-ed University towns like Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and UT Austin.
The unsurprising statistics that too many people behave like iguanas or insects (perhaps everyone will, rarely) brings Buss to conclude that "knowledge...of our dangerous passions...will, in some small measure, give us the emotional wisdom to deal with them." Some believe this defines evolutionary psychology's value, and "why it is the emergent psychology of the twenty-first century." (Littrell, 2000) The important psychological frontier probably lies on the other end of the spectrum; an "old school" of those secular humanists who qualify base instincts as simplistic and vulgar, and engender faith and loyalty to a higher morality that stems from a wide-ranging curiosity, appreciation, acceptance, and exploration of advances in the cultural horizons of the human condition.
From another angle, Evolutionary Psychologists help us understand the expression of the lowest common denominator of a selfish and infantile sexuality- although not nearly as inevitable nor instinctual as Buss claims. Like all children, most personality disorders, and even leaders of supposedly "free" nations, all must learn that one cannot bludgeon others into love. Nor do intra-sexual "mate-poaching behaviors", where someone "infiltrates" into a couple's happiness, occur gracefully, as most "open marriages" in the Sixties and Seventies proved.
These psychologists inadvertently prove (like Freud, et. al.) that what a people (or a theroetician) believes creates reality; culture becomes the definitive nature of nurture. (Plimsoll, right now) Better to to ensure mutual survival with movement toward the protection of everyone's happiness, than agree that scorpion instincts fundamentally "normally" motivate us.
Buss and friends add fuel our society as it burns like Rome with media-enflamed passions that help those iguana instincts motivate millions of unwed children to procreate. I would suggest almost any book to read, to base reality on and create culture, other than works by Dr. David Buss and his "Evolutionary Psychology" collaborators, especially as one's wife dresses to slip off to that office party on a full moon night. Women tend to ovulate on full moons.

References

Buss, David M. (2000). The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex. New York: Free Press

Buss, David. (1995-2003) The Evolution of Desire The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (1st and 2nd Edition). NY: Basic Books Curry, Oliver. (1999?). Conversation with David Buss. The Evolutionist. London School of Economics. http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/cpnss/darwin/evo/buss.htm.
Retrieved June 16, 2004 from the Internet

IsHighlyCited.com. (August, 2003 ) Copyright Thompson ISI "the Thompson Corporation" www.isinet.com/aboutus) http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/author.cgi?&link1=Browse&link2=Results&id=2624. Retrieved June 26, 2004 from the Internet

James Brody, PhD. (2004, January).
Book Review, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating , By David Buss, 2nd Edition. NY: Basic Books, 2003. Human Nature Review 2004 Volume 4: 25-30. URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/04/buss.html. Retrieved June 16, 2004 from the Internet

Littrell, Dennis. (2000 Oct). "Necessary" from the POV of the genes... Amazon.com Review page. Retrieved June 16, 2004 from the Internet

Plumb, Greg. (2001, September) Reviews by readers, Amazon.com page for "The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Love and Sex". http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684850818/qid=1088482524/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/103-8968631-0886245?v=glance&s=books. Retrieved June 16, 2004 from the Internet

Publishers Weekly. (1994) Amazon.com webpage, Book description of "Evolution of Desire". http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/046500802X/qid=1088482332/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8968631-0886245?v=glance&s=books. Retrieved June 16, 2004 from the Internet

Santiago, Jennifer. (unable to verify date- on June 28 "Account Suspended") The evolutionary truth about relationships. A review of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating by David M. Buss. www.booksiloved.com/allreviews.html. Retrieved June 16, 2004 from the Internet