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Summary: convincing and important
Review: I reccommend this book to everyone with an open mind, and with a bit of curiosity about the human animal and the way it behaves. If you don't like the message, it is up to you to provide some real evidence against it, not just say "I don't like it". Isn't that what people said when Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around the sun? It's better to find out what people are really like (as described in this book), and adjust your behavior accordingly.
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Summary: Men dominate women. Evolutionary psych proves it.
Review: All I want to say is summed up in this paragraph from The Moral Animal. It is deeply disturbing to me that this type of mysogeny is being published and lauded (by male reviewers, mind you) in 1990. Did you skip the beginning of the book with its incredibly anti-women agenda? We obviously haven't come very far.Female orangutangs are a good example. They do often seem to exercise positive choice, favoring some males over others. But sometimes they resist mating and are forcibly subdued and -- insofar as this word can be applied to nonhumans -- raped. There is evidence that the rapists, often adolescents, usually fail to impregnate. But suppose that they succeed with some regularity. Then a female, in sheerily Darwinian terms, is BETTER OFF MATING WITH A GOOD RAPIST, A BIG, STRONG, SEXUALLY AGGRESSIVE MALE; her male offspring will then be more likely to be big, strong, and sexually aggressive--and therefore prolific. So female resistance should be favored by natural selection as a way to avoid having a son WHO IS AN INEPT RAPIST (assuming it doesn't bring injury to the female)... Once females in general begin putting up the slightest resistance, then a female that puts up a little extra resistance is exhibiting a valuable trait. For whatever it takes to penetrate resistance, the sons of strong resisters are more likely to have it than the sons of weak resisters. Thus, in sheerly Darwinian terms, coyness becomes its own reward. And this is true whether the male's means of approach is verbal or physical. Nice to know that if you get raped, at least any child born of that hateful act will go out and do the same thing. Thanks, Robert.
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Summary: Simply fantastic - best book I've read in years
Review: As annoying as it is, those of us who spent years getting degrees in philosophy would have been better off studying biology, because that's where elegant, integrating answers to the riddles of human nature are arising. I can't say I feel uplifted, but enlightened, for sure.
Rating: 
Summary: A good book to take at face value...
Review: While not the most thorough scientific treatment of evolutionary psychology, this book is well written and puts forth many interesting ideas about human behavioral evolution. Do I agree with all of them? No. Are they feasible? For the most part, I think so. But to me this is a book written by a non-scientist making some very interesting, well-thought out opinions and ideas for the origins of many behaviors we take for granted under the blanket term "human nature." If you're looking for a review to cite in a research context, this isn't it. But if you're looking to get some insight or to start your brain working on some of these questions, this is a fine stepping off point. And I agree with another reviewer...using Darwin's life as a literary device is clever and enjoyable.
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Summary: and the data show?
Review: This is a strange forum in which to ask scientific questions, but here goes. Science writer Robert Wright's central theses about evolutionary psychology rely heavily on the work of psychologist David Buss. As a psychologist, Buss has published a cross-cultural analysis of human mate preferences, dealing with around 9000 respondents in 33 countries on six continents and five islands. And the data show? "In general, the effects of sex on mate preferences were small compared with those of culture. Across the 31 mate characteristics (surveyed), sex accounted for an average of only 2.4% of the variance in preferences." Culture accounted for an average of 14% of the variance. Mate preferences in men and women show very little variance in the top five traits: mutuality of attraction, dependable character, emotional stability and maturity, pleasing disposition. <Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology>," 21 (1990), 5-47. Just how hard do we have to massage this data to discover the snakes within which drive women to seek mates with access to material resources, and men to seek mates with salient cues of fertility?
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Summary: The "way we are?"
Review: I have utterly no problem with the idea that we are creatures of evolution, and that our behavior is at least partially biological. However, before I can accept an explanation for "why we are" I need to hear an accurate description of "the way we are." Steven Wright has no idea. He should have titled this book, "My Peronal Morality: Ideas that Explain Why We Are the Way I Assume We Are."
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Summary: Thought provoking and entertaining reading
Review: I'm mostly amazed at the wide range of opinions displayed in the reader reviews here. This is a GOOD book, not a great one, and it clearly makes the reader think about some issues that are close to home. I claim that's its greatest attribute: it's approachable, understandable, and most readers seem to "get it." I don't mean they believe it, but they understand what's being discussed, and are aware of the deeper implications re: traditional (i.e. religious) explanations of human behavior. EP is a new science, and as one can tell from these reviews, some people refuse to catagorize it as science at all. I can understand their reluctance - there's very little if any empirical evidence for any of this stuff. The same can be said for traditional explanations, can't it? Face it: we humans DO share behavioral patterns, both among ourselves and with other primates. Wright's book, and others like it, is a great introduction to a possible explanation for those patterns, one that doesn't rely on a divine design.
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Summary: Great stuff! The bouncing off Darwin's life was genius!
Review: This book is not for your average reader. This takes time and attention. I was awed by the amount of research and integration and synergy in this book. Many times I found myself setting the book down just to absorb my own amazement of the clarity and ability of the author to communicate some of the most slippery yet solid ideas of the intellectual repetoire. I leave the description of the details to other capable reviewers, and simply, to the author and book itself. Don't dismiss this until you've really read it and read it thought-fully.
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Summary: The snake makes us do it.
Review: I'd like to propose a simple exercise for readers of this book. Ask yourselves whether or not it contains a decent account of the evolution of brains. One way to do this is to reflect critically on Wright's explicit and implicit reliance on the rather extreme "modularity of mind" thesis implicit in the "triune brain" (reptilian, mammalian and human) model advanced near the beginning (p. 39) and the end of the book (p. 321, hardback edition) and underlying almost all its argumentation. Wright writes as if the reptilian module (the snake inside us) were hermetically sealed off ("contained") by the rest of the brain. Rather worse, he writes as if our "natures" were fundamentally reptilian, as if we were not highly social primates, with natures that enable groups to monitor the style of play we bring to our various "prisoner's dilemmas", and to alter the "payoffs" in those games to deter deviant behavior. Wright never discusses the coevolution of language and brain and, as a result, never comes close to illuminating the basic issue of the interaction of culture and biology in human evolution. I think the book's principle value is its utility in teaching students how to recognize very bad science writing. Let those who think this a "soft minded" attitude, demonstrate some mastery of the neuroanatomy in Terry Deacon's <The Symbolic Species: coevolution of language and brain>, particularly Deacon's discussion of the evolution of the hominid prefrontal cortex.
Rating: 
Summary: Get the Red Queen by Matt Ridley instead
Review: There's no comparison. I found The Moral Animal to be a weaker version the Red Queen by Matt Ridley. SAVE YOUR MONEY and get the Red Queen instead. Ridley clearly communicates while this author left me underwelmed.
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