Why beautiful people have more daughters : from dating, shopping, and praying to going to war and becoming a billionaire : two evolutionary psychologists explain why we do what we do

by Alan S. Miller

Paper Book, 2007

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Perigee Book, 2007.

Description

A lively and provocative look at how evolution shapes our behavior and our lives. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our brains and bodies are hardwired to carry out an evolutionary mission that determines much of what we do, from life plans to everyday decisions. With an accessible tone and a healthy disregard for political correctness, this lively and eminently readable book popularizes the latest research in a cutting-edge field of study--one that turns much of what we thought we knew about human nature upside-down. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, enjoy watching a favorite TV show, or feel scared walking alone at night, we are in part behaving as a human animal with its own unique nature--a nature that essentially stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa reexamine some of the most popular and controversial topics of modern life and shed a whole new light on why we do the things we do. Beware: You may never look at human nature the same way again.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member cissa
This was a very silly book. Lots of footnotes, but the author (only one of the co-authors actually wrote it) would have done well to study a bit of formal logic to avoid some really basic errors in the cause-and-effect relationship.

For one thing, just because 2 things are statistically related does
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not imply causality at all, let along a particular one. "A" might cause "B"; "B" might cause "A"; both might be caused by "C", etc. Jumping from relationship to a specific causality was done consistently throughout the book.

And that's ignoring the circular arguments. The best one here was why women earn less money than men, even when doing the same work. Our author says that there is no such thing as sexual discrimination in this- rather, women and men are paid fairly because women lack the motivation men do in pursuing their careers, and thus deserve less pay. And how do we know this? Why, because women earn less! That proves it!

Also, just because one very specific example of evolutionary psychology turned out to be actually falsifiable, He then concludes triumphantly that this proves that EP itself is falsifiable! That was, though, the only such example in the book; I cannot see any way to prove most of the conclusions one way or another- although I suspect that picking and choosing the data one uses is not a good way to start.

Not recommended.
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LibraryThing member wishanem
I was expecting to read something controversial and maybe challenging, but what I found was shallow, generalized, and often misleading. It was sensationalist, but the writing was dull. I'm not well educated with the field of Psychology, Biology, or Anthropology, so as a layman I was surprised by
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how many of the books arguments failed to convince me.

Here's, word for word, one of the most objectionable passages in the book:

"All men, criminal or not, are more or less the same. The ultimate reason why men do what they do, whether they be criminals, musicians, painters, writers, or scientists, is to impress women so they will sleep with them. Men do everything they do in order to get laid."

I would like to direct the authors' attention to every celibate man ever, as well as to every man who has ever turned out the opportunity to get laid. I'm not particularly offended by the authors' low opinion of men in general, but by their lack of sense in what they claim is an educational book.

Other ideas in this book (paraphrased):

The book says humans are adapted for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle because there hasn't been enough time or a stable enough environment for natural selection since the discovery of agriculture. But it also says all of humanity has the same essential culture, because culture is a direct result of biology. That's the sort of absurd belief that could only be developed by someone deeply immersed in academia. The book attempts to prove all human culture is the same by listing a couple debunked pieces of research on aberrant cultures, but they authors forgot to prove the sameness between all world cultures.

The book says anyone who didn't have children was a genetic failure. People who had more children were inherently more successful than those who did not. This ignores that helping children succeed might be a better strategy than just having tons of them. A non-reproductive person can (and historically often did) help their siblings and their siblings' children. A person with fewer children might have more successful children as a result. The genes responsible for an individual not reproducing or having fewer kids might still thrive.

The book says blonde women are universally considered the most beautiful. Except they aren't. That isn't even debateable.

The book says suicide bombers are mostly Muslim because their culture accepts Polygyny. The dearth of marriageable women makes suicide bombing an attractive option. Riddle me this, authors: why doesn't China have scads of suicide bombers? There are something like 30 million more single men than women in China, and yet suicide boming is basically unknown there.



Absolutely not recommended.
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LibraryThing member sussabmax
I had never really heard of evolutionary psychology before I picked up this book this weekend, but I think I will be reading more about this soon. This was really fascinating. They did a couple of things I really liked, one about how they treated the material, and one involving the end notes.
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First, they made a point of saying that just because something is shown scientifically to be the way things are, it doesn't mean they are good or that we shouldn't try to change things. But, if we want to change things, first we need to understand what is going on, even if we don't like it; we can only make effective changes if we are looking at reality rather than what we would like it to be.

Second, on the endnotes, they used a regular superscript for notes that were just citations of studies, and bracketted superscript for notes that contained additional information. I have never seen a book that did that, but it was wonderful. I hate paging back and forth just to read something like Miller, Brown and Doe, 1987. It was nice to know when it was really worth it to go to the back of the book.

More about the actual topic--fascinating. Not shockingly, it turns out that the motivation for almost everything we do is sex and reproduction. It is interesting to see how different behaviors make their way back to sex and reproduction, though. The sections on risk evaluation were interesting, too. I am very motivated to find more in depth books on this topic.
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LibraryThing member jgrann
Nice and provocative overview of evolutionary psychology. Lite on method, but kept enough detail to feel credible. Some of the more memorable messages for me were, human universals and the presumptions of the Standard Social Science Model. Not that this work is dated in any way, but I could see a
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publication effort modeled on this books chapters examining various topical issues or media coverage.
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LibraryThing member flydodofly
although there were a couple of ideas there that were interesting, and quite logically explained, I somehow could not get really excited them, for the following reason: someone else mentioned here in the reviews that they did not appreciate the continuous we (evolutionary) vs. them (standard) fight
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- I could not agree more. it seemed like a desperate battle to distinguish (i.e. define) the evolutionary psychology from everyone else..., whereas this certainly can all be true, it was irrelevant, and therefore,to put it mildly, distracting.
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LibraryThing member vpfluke
This book in many ways was unsatisfactory. After mentioning that too many social scientists are environmental determinists, he then sets up the sex drive as being the prime determinant for nearly every action humans do. The book is set up in a fashion where the authros puts forth a question that we
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might want answered and then contrives an answer, which may or not ring true.
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LibraryThing member hardlyhardy
Modern science is all for evolution except when it comes to human behavior. They prefer to believe — and belief would seem to be the proper word — that differences between how men and women act are in every case a result of socialization. Raise children differently, they argue, and they will
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behave differently.

The 2007 book “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters” by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa challenges that idea. The book was actually written by Kanazawa based on ideas formed by Miller, who died early in the project. Kanazawa generously listed Miller's name first.

The book, as the title suggests, uses a question and answer format. Why do men like blonde bombshells (and why do women want to look like them)? Why does having sons reduce the likelihood of divorce? Why are diamonds a girl's best friend? Why might handsome men make bad husbands? Why are almost all violent criminals men? Why do some men beat up their wives and girlfriends? Why is sexual harassment so persistent? Why are women more religious than men? And, of course, why do beautiful people have more daughters?

People in all cultures behave essentially the same, the book tells us. Studies that suggest that certain cultures are radically different are in each case either mistaken or fraudulent, as in the case of Margaret Mead's celebrated book on Samoa. So the answer to every question comes down to differing male and female reproductive strategies. Men can theoretically have hundreds of children; women can have relatively few. Women always know who their children are; men can never be certain (or at least not until recently). This explains almost everything, the authors say, although some explanations get a bit convoluted.

There are a few questions evolutionary psychology cannot yet explain, and Kanazawa frankly admits this in a final chapter? How do you explain homosexuality? Why do parents in advanced societies have fewer children? And a few others. To pose one more question, why must one theory explain everything?
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