Book Review: The Evolution of Desire by David M. Buss
Human desires are difficult to understand. Everything from dating, courtship, sex, and marriage elicit different kinds of emotions that leave us bewildered or even confused. David Buss has written a very important book, one that takes on human desires by the horns. The book by its very nature, helps us view ourselves and those we love through a new pair of lenses. Buss gives valid explanations for the gender differences we observe between men and women. He elaborates on critical human desires, and why we feel a sense of attraction, love, and jealousy every time we play the mating game.
Human desire and sex differences in mating are rooted in our evolutionary past in the form of sexual selection. “Sexual selection is the evolution of characteristics because of their mating benefits, rather than survival benefit.” Sexual selection takes two forms. “One is when characteristics that lead to success such as strength, intelligence, or attractiveness to allies, evolve because the victors can mate more often and hence pass on genes for qualities that have led to their success.” In the other form, “members of one sex choose a mate based on their preferences for particular qualities in that mate. The desired characteristics evolve.” These characteristics that evolve therefore with time, become embedded in our daily lives as sexual strategies.
Sexual strategies are the methods people use to accomplish sexual goals. “These are adaptive solutions to mating problems.” Buss writes. These strategies help human beings to compete against others, to attract highly desirable mates of high reproductive value, and to retain them long enough to reproduce. Those in our past who failed to effectively use these strategies remained noncompetitive and therefore failed to mate. Our ancestors have so far been victors in a long evolutionary mating truce, shall we fail them?
If we are not to fail them that means, we have to play the game. Playing the game requires us to acknowledge the prevailing mating conditions and their repercussions. We have to ask ourselves different questions. What do women want? What do men want from women? What happens when a partner cheats? Should we marry them? Should we divorce them? What are the consequences of monogamy, polyandry, and polygyny? All these questions have answers closely drawn from our shaky evolutionary past. Human emotions like anger, love, and jealousy can be traced back to our ancestors, for whom, these reactions meant life and death.
Sexual selection favored certain traits in men. In women, the traits favored were quite different from those in men. That led to the gender differences we observe today between men and women. Women are choosy while selecting mates. The reason stems from their evolutionary past as well as biology. Women have a limited number of ova while men have millions of sperms that spun their whole lives. They reach menopause early enough and that gives them a short streak of reproductive time. One pregnancy results in a 9-month gestation period, lactation, and care for the baby. These series of events can seriously impact a woman’s life. If a mate is poorly chosen, the woman not only risks death, but also poor health for her children, and a lack of resources to take care of them. Women are therefore selective when looking for mates.
A woman’s selectiveness quite often leads her to choose quite carefully the desirable characteristics of a desirable mate. They want healthy children who will grow to maturity and thereafter reproduce, they want a man who could defend them, and most importantly, they want a man with resources. A woman’s evolutionary desire for a man with resources explains why modern ladies love men with money and high status. Those men with a lot of resources, or those who displayed an ambitious zeal to accrue resources were highly favored by women. A man’s resource potential was indicated by his social status, age, ambition, industriousness, dependability, and stability. Men with these qualities were likely to have resources, or the potential to accrue them in the future.
Men on the other hand are not quite selective like their female counterparts. While an erroneous mating decision could ruin a woman’s life forever, men didn’t carry around such burdens. Men, therefore, evolved a pervasive desire for casual sex. However, a man’s lust for casual sex can only be satisfied by a woman, these led women to dictate rules that men had to abide with. These leads men to spend generously on women in the hope that woman will consent. However, men are quite selective about who they commit their resources to. For casual encounters, men try as much as possible to invest very little. When looking for long term mates, on whom they intend to confer various resources exclusively, men tend towards women who are beautiful and young.
A man’s desire for youth and beauty has evolved with him. A woman’s beauty is a sign of high reproductive capacity. A man who chooses an attractive woman was likely to reproduce healthy children with a high mate value. This desire for beauty in a potential mate leads women to cherish and overemphasize their attractiveness and youth. The cosmetic industry is directly designed to exploit this feminine desire to impress men. In a long term mate, men not only desire youth and beauty, but also chastity and fidelity. An unfaithful woman was likely to elicit a chain of negative emotions in a man including anger and jealousy.
Buss writes comprehensively off many other human traits in people and the relevant emotions they elicit on. He writes extensively on sexual fantasies between sexes, hook up and sexual regret, prostitution, and mate switching. His discussions are followed by a wealth of evolutionary explanations and data. His studies were conducted worldwide and among different cultures. The evolution of desire is a must-read for those who want to understand sex differences in human beings and our evolved mating strategies.
