This section is for book reviews of publications in evolutionary psychology and related fields.
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Sites 140
A skeptical assessment by Herbert Gintis.
Book review of "Alas Poor Darwin", by Robert Kurzban. Assesses five charges against evolutionary psychology: genetic determinism, panadaptationism, unfalsifiable hypotheses, proximate explanations, and ideological bias.
First chapter.
Steven Pinker reviews 'Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century' by Jonathan Glover.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'Almost like a Whale'(published in the US as 'Darwin's Ghost') by Steve Jones.
Emily Nussbaum reviews 'A Life of Jung' by Ronald Hayman.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Robert Burton.
W. Ford Doolittle reviews 'The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived' by Colin Tudge
First chapter.
John Noble Winford reviews 'The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugene Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right' by Pat Shipman.
Douglas Foster reviews 'The Ape and the Sushi Master' by Frans de Waal.
Erica Goode reviews 'Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts' by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan.
Mary Lefkowitz reviews 'Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed' by Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
Jon Turney reviews 'Investigations' by Stuart Kauffman.
Richard Bernstein reviews 'The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?' by Stephanie Gutmann.
Robert Coles reviews 'The War Against Boys : How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men' by Christina Hoff Sommers and 'Real Boys' Voices' by William S. Pollack .
Richard Dawkins reviews 'Extinct Humans' by Ian Tattersall, Jeffrey H. Schwartz.
Holly Brubach reviews 'Looking Good : Male Body Image in Modern America' by Lynne Luciano.
Richard Klein reviews 'You're Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery' by Richard Stengel.
Courtney Weaver reviews 'Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution' by Paula Kamen.
Anne Magurran reviews this book by Evelyn Fox Keller. Genes, the author argues, are merely bit players in the game of life.
First chapter.
First chapter.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Professor Steve Jones has rewritten Darwin's 'Origin of Species', a book that contains ideas which are just as controversial today as they were 140 years ago.
Review of 'A Natural History of Rape' by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'Darwin's Worms' by Adam Phillips.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'A Darwinian Left' by Peter Singer.
W.G. Runciman reviews 'The Meme Machine' by Susan Blackmore.
J. B. Schneewind reviews 'Writings on an Ethical Life' by Peter Singer.
Stewart Kellerman reviews 'The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love' by Susan Allport.
A review of Richard Lewontin's "It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and other Illusions".
Rob Nixon reviews 'A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons' by Robert M. Sapolsky.
John Durant reviews 'Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated' by Steve Jones.
Bruce Bridgeman compares two approaches to the understanding of human attraibutes in evolutionary perspective.
Evolutionary psychology (EP) is barely a decade old, yet already there are several textbooks available designed to give students an overview of the discipline. This is a worthy addition to the range - according to Neil Levy.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Kurt Schwenk reviews 'The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures' by J. Scott Turner.
A review of Stephen Rose's "From Brains to Consciousness Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind".
Paul Bloom reviews 'Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky With the Human Brain' by William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton.
Fly: An Experimental Life' by Martin Brookes.
First chapter.
Natalie Angier reviews 'The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory : Why an Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future' by Cynthia Eller.
Courtney Weaver reviews 'The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex' by David M. Buss.
John Horgan reviews 'Darkness in El Dorado' by Patrick Tierney.
First chapter.
Mark Ridley reviews 'Genes, Peoples and Languages' by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.
A review by Danny Yee of Lewontin's introduction to human genetics and human biology.
"Dupré's Human Nature and The Limits of Science is not a successful attempt at providing a criticism of evolutionary psychology. Quite literally because it is not about evolutionary psychology, rather, as an extreme statement, it is about the author's prejudice of what evolutionary psychology is about," writes Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair in this detailed analysis.
John McCrone reviews 'The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity' by David Horrobin.
First chapter.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Liesl Schillinger reviews 'A General Theory of Love' by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon.
Ann Finkbeiner reviews The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing by Frank T. Vertosick. Free registration required at the New York Times
First chapter.
Why have humans evolved such costly and complex brains? And further, why do we use our brains to produce such seemingly useless behaviors as art or music? Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suggests that the reason might lie in what he considers to be Darwin's most significant contribution to evolution: sexual selection.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Jim Holt reviews 'The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World' by Helen Fisher.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'The Language of Genes' by Steve Jones.
Steven Marcus reviews 'Darwin's Worms' by Adam Phillips.
First chapter.
Linked offers many heuristic possibilities if your interests are in genetic, neural, electronic, or social organizations.
Galen Strawson reviews 'The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World' by Colin McGinn.
First chapter.
A General Theory of Love, by three long-time collaborating psychiatrists, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, is a compelling and timely discussion not only of love between lovers, but love between parents and children, therapists and patients.
John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary look at a range of topics in evolutionary biology, from abiogenesis to the origins of societies and language.
Carol Gilligan reviews 'The Kinder, Gentler Military : Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?' by Stephanie Gutmann
First chapter.
Lee M. Silver reviews 'Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters' by Matt Ridley.
Anne Magurran reviews 'Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection' by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
First chapter.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'The Meme Machine' by Susan Blackmore.
First chapter.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?' by Michael Ruse.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers' by Colin Tudge.
Natural selection inevitably favors organisms which behave in self-serving manners, for it will be these organisms who leave the most descendants, and so how can evolutionary psychology ever explain morality?
Jerome Groopman reviews 'Why We Hurt : The Natural History of Pain' by Frank T. Vertosick Jr
Laura Shapiro reviews 'A History of the Wife' by Marilyn Yalom.
Jim Holt reviews 'Taboo : Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It' by Jon Entine.
First chapter.
Jerry Coyne reviews 'Genome: Autobiography of a Species' by Matt Ridley.
First chapter.
First chapter.
When did language arise, and how? And why? If it is of value for the survival of a species, as it clearly is, then why has only one species succeeded in acquiring full-blown language? An interesting discussion of Terrence Deacon's 'The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain'.
Joe Cain reviews 'The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics' by Robin Marantz Henig.
Danny Yee reviews Tim Birkhead's evolutionary history of sperm competition and sexual conflict.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Rachel P. Maines reviews 'Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey' by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
This book is a milestone on the road to a new behavioral understanding of religion, basing itself on what has come to be known as cognitive anthropology.
Genetics has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of human history in the last few years and Robin Dunbar gives his opinion of Steve Olson's account.
Robin McKie reviews 'The Madness of Adam and Eve' by David Horrobin.
Karla Jay reviews 'Nymphomania: A History' by Carol Groneman.
Ann Finkbeiner reviews 'Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell' by Lyall Watson.
Adrian Woolfson reviews 'The Century of the Gene' by Evelyn Fox Keller.
Bernd Heinrich reviews 'The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots' by Irene Maxine Pepperberg.
George Johnson reviews 'The Advent of the Algorithm : The Idea that Rules the World' by David Berlinski.
George Page reviews 'Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think' by Marc D. Hauser.
Stephen S. Hall reviews 'Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry' by T. M. Luhrmann.
James Gorman reviews 'Clever As a Fox: Animal Intelligence And What It Can Teach Us About Ourselves' by Sonja I. Yoerg.
Frans B. M. de Waal reviews 'A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion' by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer
Paul Raeburn reviews 'Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition' by Tim Birkhead.
First chapter.
Stephen Wilson reviews 'Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart' by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Faith Bethelard.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'The Triple Helix' by Richard Lewontin.
This edited volume is the first publication of the Cleveland-based Institute for Research on Unlimited Love and its president Stephen G. Post. The mission of this organization is to "support research and education on 'unlimited love,' a concept defined as 'total constant love for every person with no exception.'"
First chapter.
First Chapter.
Essay Review of C. D. Darlington, 'The Evolution of Man and Society'.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'A Universe of Consciousness' by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'Unweaving the Rainbow' by Richard Dawkins.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'Victorian Sensation' by James A. Secord.
James Gorman reviews 'Truth About Dogs: An Inquiry into the Ancestry, Social Proclivities, Mental Habits, and Moral Fiber of Canis Familiaris' by Stephen Budiansky.
First chapter.
David Papineau reviews 'Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier' by Brenda Fowler
John R. G. Turner reviews 'The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment' by Richard C. Lewontin.
Ian Tattersall reviews 'The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature' by Geoffrey F. Miller.
Simon Conway Morris reviews 'Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny' by Robert Wright.
Derek Bickerton reviews 'Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior' by James McBride Dabbs and Mary Godwin Dabbs.
First chapter.
Emily Eakin reviews 'Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power' by Benjamin Demott.
Natalie Angier reviews 'As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl' by John Colapinto.
Robert J. Richards reviews 'In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life' by Henry Gee.
First chapter.
Paul Mattick reviews 'On the Emotions' by Richard Wollheim.
This review appeared in Cambridge Review 10 June 1967, pp. 409-11.
(January 01, 1967)
W.G. Runciman reviews 'The Meme Machine' by Susan Blackmore.
Jerry Coyne reviews 'Genome: Autobiography of a Species' by Matt Ridley.
Adrian Woolfson reviews 'The Century of the Gene' by Evelyn Fox Keller.
John McCrone reviews 'The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity' by David Horrobin.
Fly: An Experimental Life' by Martin Brookes.
Robin McKie reviews 'The Madness of Adam and Eve' by David Horrobin.
Jon Turney reviews 'Investigations' by Stuart Kauffman.
Professor Steve Jones has rewritten Darwin's 'Origin of Species', a book that contains ideas which are just as controversial today as they were 140 years ago.
Laura Shapiro reviews 'A History of the Wife' by Marilyn Yalom.
Anne Magurran reviews this book by Evelyn Fox Keller. Genes, the author argues, are merely bit players in the game of life.
Review of 'A Natural History of Rape' by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Genetics has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of human history in the last few years and Robin Dunbar gives his opinion of Steve Olson's account.
John R. G. Turner reviews 'The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment' by Richard C. Lewontin.
First Chapter.
Steven Pinker reviews 'Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century' by Jonathan Glover.
Ann Finkbeiner reviews The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing by Frank T. Vertosick. Free registration required at the New York Times
John Durant reviews 'Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated' by Steve Jones.
First chapter.
Joe Cain reviews 'The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics' by Robin Marantz Henig.
Jim Holt reviews 'The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World' by Helen Fisher.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers' by Colin Tudge.
First chapter.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'A Universe of Consciousness' by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi.
Lee M. Silver reviews 'Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters' by Matt Ridley.
Jerome Groopman reviews 'Why We Hurt : The Natural History of Pain' by Frank T. Vertosick Jr
A review of Stephen Rose's "From Brains to Consciousness Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind".
Holly Brubach reviews 'Looking Good : Male Body Image in Modern America' by Lynne Luciano.
"Dupré's Human Nature and The Limits of Science is not a successful attempt at providing a criticism of evolutionary psychology. Quite literally because it is not about evolutionary psychology, rather, as an extreme statement, it is about the author's prejudice of what evolutionary psychology is about," writes Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair in this detailed analysis.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'The Language of Genes' by Steve Jones.
John Horgan reviews 'Darkness in El Dorado' by Patrick Tierney.
Galen Strawson reviews 'The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World' by Colin McGinn.
First chapter.
First chapter.
James Gorman reviews 'Clever As a Fox: Animal Intelligence And What It Can Teach Us About Ourselves' by Sonja I. Yoerg.
George Page reviews 'Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think' by Marc D. Hauser.
David Papineau reviews 'Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier' by Brenda Fowler
Danny Yee reviews Tim Birkhead's evolutionary history of sperm competition and sexual conflict.
First chapter.
Karla Jay reviews 'Nymphomania: A History' by Carol Groneman.
Stewart Kellerman reviews 'The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love' by Susan Allport.
Evolutionary psychology (EP) is barely a decade old, yet already there are several textbooks available designed to give students an overview of the discipline. This is a worthy addition to the range - according to Neil Levy.
A review of Richard Lewontin's "It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and other Illusions".
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'Victorian Sensation' by James A. Secord.
First chapter.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'The Triple Helix' by Richard Lewontin.
Essay Review of C. D. Darlington, 'The Evolution of Man and Society'.
Bruce Bridgeman compares two approaches to the understanding of human attraibutes in evolutionary perspective.
Stephen Wilson reviews 'Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart' by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Faith Bethelard.
Richard Dawkins reviews 'Extinct Humans' by Ian Tattersall, Jeffrey H. Schwartz.
First chapter.
John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary look at a range of topics in evolutionary biology, from abiogenesis to the origins of societies and language.
First chapter.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'Almost like a Whale'(published in the US as 'Darwin's Ghost') by Steve Jones.
Courtney Weaver reviews 'Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution' by Paula Kamen.
Robert Coles reviews 'The War Against Boys : How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men' by Christina Hoff Sommers and 'Real Boys' Voices' by William S. Pollack .
First chapter.
Richard Klein reviews 'You're Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery' by Richard Stengel.
Natalie Angier reviews 'The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory : Why an Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future' by Cynthia Eller.
This book is a milestone on the road to a new behavioral understanding of religion, basing itself on what has come to be known as cognitive anthropology.
Rachel P. Maines reviews 'Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey' by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
Paul Raeburn reviews 'Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition' by Tim Birkhead.
Emily Nussbaum reviews 'A Life of Jung' by Ronald Hayman.
This edited volume is the first publication of the Cleveland-based Institute for Research on Unlimited Love and its president Stephen G. Post. The mission of this organization is to "support research and education on 'unlimited love,' a concept defined as 'total constant love for every person with no exception.'"
W. Ford Doolittle reviews 'The Variety of Life: A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived' by Colin Tudge
When did language arise, and how? And why? If it is of value for the survival of a species, as it clearly is, then why has only one species succeeded in acquiring full-blown language? An interesting discussion of Terrence Deacon's 'The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain'.
Kurt Schwenk reviews 'The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures' by J. Scott Turner.
Carol Gilligan reviews 'The Kinder, Gentler Military : Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?' by Stephanie Gutmann
Paul Bloom reviews 'Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky With the Human Brain' by William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Douglas Foster reviews 'The Ape and the Sushi Master' by Frans de Waal.
First chapter.
Emily Eakin reviews 'Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power' by Benjamin Demott.
First chapter.
Mark Ridley reviews 'Genes, Peoples and Languages' by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'The Meme Machine' by Susan Blackmore.
Simon Conway Morris reviews 'Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny' by Robert Wright.
Liesl Schillinger reviews 'A General Theory of Love' by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Robert Burton.
Stephen S. Hall reviews 'Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry' by T. M. Luhrmann.
J. B. Schneewind reviews 'Writings on an Ethical Life' by Peter Singer.
Natalie Angier reviews 'As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl' by John Colapinto.
Anne Magurran reviews 'Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection' by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
A General Theory of Love, by three long-time collaborating psychiatrists, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, is a compelling and timely discussion not only of love between lovers, but love between parents and children, therapists and patients.
John Noble Winford reviews 'The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugene Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right' by Pat Shipman.
Why have humans evolved such costly and complex brains? And further, why do we use our brains to produce such seemingly useless behaviors as art or music? Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suggests that the reason might lie in what he considers to be Darwin's most significant contribution to evolution: sexual selection.
First chapter.
Bernd Heinrich reviews 'The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots' by Irene Maxine Pepperberg.
Book review of "Alas Poor Darwin", by Robert Kurzban. Assesses five charges against evolutionary psychology: genetic determinism, panadaptationism, unfalsifiable hypotheses, proximate explanations, and ideological bias.
James Gorman reviews 'Truth About Dogs: An Inquiry into the Ancestry, Social Proclivities, Mental Habits, and Moral Fiber of Canis Familiaris' by Stephen Budiansky.
First chapter.
Natural selection inevitably favors organisms which behave in self-serving manners, for it will be these organisms who leave the most descendants, and so how can evolutionary psychology ever explain morality?
First chapter.
Mary Lefkowitz reviews 'Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed' by Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
First chapter.
Linked offers many heuristic possibilities if your interests are in genetic, neural, electronic, or social organizations.
First chapter.
A skeptical assessment by Herbert Gintis.
Ian Tattersall reviews 'The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature' by Geoffrey F. Miller.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?' by Michael Ruse.
Frans B. M. de Waal reviews 'A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion' by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer
Courtney Weaver reviews 'The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex' by David M. Buss.
First chapter.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Steven Marcus reviews 'Darwin's Worms' by Adam Phillips.
Derek Bickerton reviews 'Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior' by James McBride Dabbs and Mary Godwin Dabbs.
First chapter.
First chapter.
A review by Danny Yee of Lewontin's introduction to human genetics and human biology.
Ann Finkbeiner reviews 'Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell' by Lyall Watson.
A review and a link to other reviews of 'Unweaving the Rainbow' by Richard Dawkins.
Erica Goode reviews 'Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts' by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan.
First chapter.
Rob Nixon reviews 'A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons' by Robert M. Sapolsky.
Richard Bernstein reviews 'The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?' by Stephanie Gutmann.
Robert J. Richards reviews 'In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life' by Henry Gee.
First chapter.
First chapter.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'A Darwinian Left' by Peter Singer.
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of 'Darwin's Worms' by Adam Phillips.
George Johnson reviews 'The Advent of the Algorithm : The Idea that Rules the World' by David Berlinski.
First chapter.
First chapter.
First chapter.
First chapter.
Jim Holt reviews 'Taboo : Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It' by Jon Entine.
First chapter.
Paul Mattick reviews 'On the Emotions' by Richard Wollheim.
This review appeared in Cambridge Review 10 June 1967, pp. 409-11.
(January 01, 1967)
