Rating: 
Summary: Thank you for an excellent work
Review: A quote from Buss which appeared in the New York Times brought me to his book. I've spent years doing divorce work as an attorney. I also spent a considerable amount of my own time studying the elements and mechanics of relationships. This text and the research behind it helped explain many unanswered questions. Thank you for a work well done.
Rating: 
Summary: Let's pretend that Darwin was (pretty much) right.
Review: From the reviews: "Women and men are often at cross-purposes in mate selection, sexual relations and affairs." And "men have a much greater proclivity for promiscuity than do women." I'm confussed. In a species at evolutionary equilibrium, how possibly can the genders be at "cross-purposes?" And what purpose can a "greater proclivity for promiscuity" serve a man if there is not a woman to serve that man's desire?
In the first instance, a gender under natural selection that is disadvantaged will evolve to overcome this fate. Certainly, the other gender will move to counter. But at equalibrium, neither will have, on average, an advantage,
In the second instance, a desire for a greater number of sexual contacts is fruitless if those contacts are not reproductive and hence heterosexual. Without a woman to engage a man's greater proclivity for promiscuity that proclivity is meaningless. So what's the point?
I understand that there are different ways that men and women approach mating. But these ways cannot possibly be divergent. They must work together even if they are not pretty.
Rating:
Summary: Men want skinny women, and for marriage, beautiful too
Review: I just read the reviews of a book called something like: "How to find a husband if you are over 35" or something like this by a woman with a Harvard MBA. If anyone is looking to find out about what makes a man tick, forget the pseudo-self help crap, read this book. I am not sure if I agree with what women want, per Buss, but I do agree with the major points of the book:
1) Men and women inevitably end up long-term mating (i.e., marry) people with whom they are comparable in "worth" in the open-market. Chances are, if you are ugly, then so will be your mate. It's not necessarily true in present day, that a beautiful woman will marry an ugly guy if he has money. It's criteria such as how much money you have; how accomplished you are; what social class you come from; how attractive you are; and so on, that will be used to attract and retain your most compatible long-term mate.
2) Men will lower their standards significantly to hook up with less desirable women but they would not consider these same women as long-term/marriage material.
3) Men generally desire thin (ratio of waist to hip), younger, and pretty woman. If you are a beautiful, thin woman, you have a great chance of finding a long-term mate. If you are a beautiful, thin woman, and have a wonderful personality (kind, nurturing) then you will have a better chance of finding a better mate than a woman who is merely beautiful and thin but with a bad personality. The more you have, the better your long-term mate will be (attractive, accomplished, kind). There is no free lunch here. Denial or self-reinforcements, without actually knowledge or your worth in the open market will not get you any where.
4) Women want kind and faithful men who are as attractive as the woman could possibly attract.
------ Bottom line...
If you are a woman, if you are thin, attractive in the face (make up, hair, we can all be attractive), educate yourself, and become kind/nurturing/good/moral/loyal, then you could have your pick of the men out there. But, if you are fat, don't spend time on hair and wardrobe, eat better and go to the gym. Don't watch Oprah and try to justify why fat is beautiful. You are only going to deny yourself a chance to find a long-term mate.
If you are beautiful, thin, and smart, but have bad luck with men, try being loyal, kind, nurturing, and learn to cook. You will stop meeting cheaters or abusive men. I know that this isn't politically correct, but do you want politically correct or the truth? Loved this book. Sorry for the typos, I am just so excited about the book.
Rating: 
Summary: More facile than good
Review: I've been tearing through books about genes and behavior. Matt Ridley's _The Red Queen_ and _Genome_ are particularly interesting. This one is not. While data sources are widely cited, a large fraction of the data for universal human behavior comes from surveys conducted among American college students in singles bars. This is supplemented by scoring personals ads for content.The results are unsurprising--women pursue men somewhat older who are better off than they are. Men pursue women for youth and attractiveness. The evopsych underpinnings are asserted without qualification or any indication that the assertions are in the least bit contoversial. For example, in discussion about the role of concealed ovulation, the author tells one common evopsych story--that women don't go into heat because it means men will hang around more to keep other men away. In Jared Diamond's _The Third Chimpanzee_, he cites and attributes six stories that purport to explain why people don't know when women are fertile. When you're writing about controversial science, it's important to let your readers know when you are speculating. This book fails to do so.
Rating: 
Summary: Correlation
Review: Kehoe in his review takes Buss to task for an interpretation of correlations, but Kehoe is wrong in his interpretation. Statisticians consider correlations of .50 to be large. Kehoe actually concludes that a correlation of .50 means that people are dissimilar. This is simply wrong: if married people are said to have a correlation of .50 on a personality test it would mean that they are highly similar and often share the same attitudes or opinions. It's a bit odd to see Kehoe make such a negative review of this book when it's clear that Kehoe misunderstands the statistics cited in the book.
Rating:
Summary: Mating happens....
Review: The other reviewers have pretty much said it--this is a good book with some problems, and the rest--so I will confine myself to some things they don't mention.
First, Buss continues his long campaign of featuring women's desire for wealth and men's desire for beauty, in spite of the fact that his own data show wealth is far behind love, reliability, caring, intelligence, and other goods in women's esteem, and (to a lesser extent) the same for men and beauty. Moreover, wealth and beauty matter much more for dates and one-night stands than for real relationships, where love, commitment, sympathy, and compatibility are most of the picture. Buss' exaggeration of the role of wealth and beauty has led to some real errors in the popular press.
Among mysteries yet unexplained, he lists homosexuality--certainly hard to explain by Darwinian factors. He does not mention the theory that it may stem from a hormonal glitch in fetal development. He also does not deal with the fact that in some societies--ancient Greece and parts of the Middle East and New Guinea--homoerotic behavior is essentially universal among men, at least at some time in life.
Another mystery is rape. Buss does not emphasize enough that rape is a crime of violence, almost always intended to hurt and harm and/or to assert dominance. It is not primarily sexual or about sex or reproduction. Hence its universality in war (including gang rumbles) and its rarity elsewhere; otherwise, thugs and very disturbed people are the usual perpetrators. There are always frat rats counting coup, but they aren't much of the story. Evolutionary psychologists make much of the fact that women of reproductive age are the usual victims, but forget that those are the women who are out and about, and the ones whose rape is most humiliating to their menfolk and their people (remember Bosnia). The surprising thing is that so many little girls and elder women get raped.
Rating:
Summary: Mating happens....
Review: The other reviewers have pretty much said it--this is a good book with some problems, and the rest--so I will confine myself to some things they don't mention.
First, Buss continues his long campaign of featuring women's desire for wealth and men's desire for beauty, in spite of the fact that his own data show wealth is far behind love, reliability, caring, intelligence, and other goods in women's esteem, and (to a lesser extent) the same for men and beauty. Moreover, wealth and beauty matter much more for dates and one-night stands than for real relationships, where love, commitment, sympathy, and compatibility are most of the picture. Buss' exaggeration of the role of wealth and beauty has led to some real errors in the popular press.
Among mysteries yet unexplained, he lists homosexuality--certainly hard to explain by Darwinian factors. He does not mention the theory that it may stem from a hormonal glitch in fetal development. He also does not deal with the fact that in some societies--ancient Greece and parts of the Middle East and New Guinea--homoerotic behavior is essentially universal among men, at least at some time in life.
Another mystery is rape. Buss does not emphasize enough that rape is a crime of violence, almost always intended to hurt and harm and/or to assert dominance. It is not primarily sexual or about sex or reproduction. Hence its universality in war (including gang rumbles) and its rarity elsewhere; otherwise, thugs and very disturbed people are the usual perpetrators. There are always frat rats counting coup, but they aren't much of the story. Evolutionary psychologists make much of the fact that women of reproductive age are the usual victims, but forget that those are the women who are out and about, and the ones whose rape is most humiliating to their menfolk and their people (remember Bosnia). The surprising thing is that so many little girls and elder women get raped.
Rating:
Summary: it's alright
Review: This book is a decent survey of evolutionary psychological theories of human nature, some quite well-supported and others needing quite a bit more testing. Its greatest flaw is the writing: it is not a pleasure to read. I'd already read Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, and it is at once more well-written and more thoughtful and it has a lot more information. So if you're only going to read one book, or if you're wondering which to read first, I recommend Ridley's. I haven't read "The Mating Mind," but it looks better than this one too. However, despite recommending those other books, I want to emphasize that this one is not that bad. It's just that Ridley's book is so much better.
Rating:
Summary: Hot stuff
Review: This is a masterpiece. In it, we find out just how the males and females of our species are really no different than any member of the animal kingdom. Take the roadrunner, for example. In order to attract a mate, he must first "bribe" her with a captured lizard. He stalks and kills a lizard, and brings it to her. She immediatley tries to gobble it down, but the male holds on to it, ensuring that he can mate with her while she is eating, and only after he "completes the task at hand" does he let her have it. He must essentially "bribe" her in order to mate, and if he doesnt have the lizard, some other enterprising rival with said dinner will get her instead.
Now look at a male and female human. A desireable female will only go for the guy who essentially "bribes" her with flowers and dinners (raw lizards?) and concert tickets and drinks, ect, in order to well, shall we say, copulate, if not mate. If said male doesnt have the means to provide the female with these things, a rival may win her affections instead.
Among apes, the dominant male gets all the females in a tribe. Among humans, the "bad boy" with the sweetest ride and the nicest house, and the biggest checkbook, are those who successfully mate/copulate with the most desireable females. If the bad boy loses the car and the house and the money, he will eventuallly lose out to a rival who has these things, for in humankind, among males, brute animal strangth means little (Woody Allen and Donald Trump couldnt punch their way out of a paper bag) but their "power" comes from material wealth. In this case, a human male who is a brute with no money, stays home alone and watches college football while Donald and Woody have sex with women young enough to be their daughters.
But it gets much more complicated with humans, as we are into things like casual sex, homosexuality, and other deviant things that have little to do with actual mating. All for sexual gratification, but in the end, we find that males and females of the human species are always either looking to mate, or searching for the best potential mating partner, to continue the species. One fascinating aspect was how age affects both the male and the female. For example. The aforementioned Donald Trump and Woody Allen are both well into their fifties, yet retain an ability to procreate for the next 30 years or so, so long as they have available mates of an age to "make babies." Once a woman hits her forties, from the point of view of a potential mate, she is essentially worthless. Does anyone reading this really think Ashton is going to marry Demi? According to the book, he will eventually leave her for younger mating material. So guys like Donald and Woody and even Hugh Hefner, as they have the material mean$, can pick and choose from among the most desireable of the females, of an age to continue their genetic history. Basically, Hugh wants sexy little 19 year old "Bunny", as she is the Playmate of the Year,(Carnally desireable) and of an age to have three or four children for him(Useful as a mate, to carry the species), when he chooses to inseminate her with his DNA. The children she will bear for him, because of his wealth, will be well taken care of (Indeed, those kids of the tycoon are worth their weight in gold)...whereas a woman Hugh's age, in her seventies is not only undesireable to human males, but is worthless as far as procration goes, unless they watch the kids while the males are busy making more in the upstairs bedroom with a much younger, sexually desireable female, if you get my drift.
Rating:
Summary: Exceptional work.
Review: This is an exception work on a worthy subject. It addresses a fundamental aspect of human behavior from a scientific point of view, but the author is thoroughly readable and entertaining. A while ago I became interested in the subject throught the route of artificial intelligence, then real intelligence, then real cognition, then real perception. At the end of this chain, I found this goldmine. Since then, I have bought several copies to loan to friends. I'm sure that the author would be amused to note that most of them were women. (To know me is to love me.) Highly recommended. Enjoy!
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