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HUMAN NATURE HAS BEEN DISCOVERED

Why do we love art? Why do artists create art? Why is it sexy? Why are older men attracted to young women? Why are young woman attracted to older high-status men? Did men and women breed each other to be intelligent? Why are we compassionate to strangers? What kind of person do we respect? What kind of person makes us jealous? Why is gossip so much fun? Why are women’s friendships different from men’s friendships? Why do sexual relationships go sour, and when? Why are you attracted to that jerk? Why do people tell jokes? Why do we pay attention to celebrities and leaders? Why do bad things taste good? Why is danger sexy? Why does the love of parent for child, romantic love, friendship love, long-term marriage love, all feel very different? Do we have one word for many biologically adaptive feelings? Where does morality come from? Where does hate come from? What are the biological reasons why people rape, play sports, dance, give to charity, wear makeup, chose celibacy, become psychotic killers?

Evolutionary biologists and game theorists are writing scientific papers explaining how genes for these behaviors were favored in our ancestral environment on the African savanna. None of them make it exciting for a mainstream audience. Yet these scientists are figuring out the dynamics behind some of the most exciting soap-opera dramas humans can play out.

All the questions you see on the front of cover of Sassy and Men’s Health Magazine are ANSWERED by evolutionary biology. “How to make her happy in bed.” “How to get slim while feeling great.” “What women really want.” “When will he think I’m a slut?” “How do I make new friends?” “Does she like me only as a friend?” “How to make him jealous, but not too jealous.”

I don’t know how these guys make such sexy, fun ideas jargony and dry, but they do. Get a load of this:

“The y-axis refers to standard deviations from allometric line of testis size against body weight. Thus, a value of 1 would indicate a testis size expected for an average primate of a given body weight. Values above 1 indicate that testes are larger than would be expected. The values are for genera rather than individual species. The differences between monogamous (P) and single-male (S) groups is not significant, but both differ significantly from multimale (M) groups (see Harcourt et al., 1981).”

– page 220 of John Cartwright’s Evolution and Human Behavior: Darwinian Perspectives On Human Nature (Bradford, 2000)

Believe it not, this is biologese for:

In any mammal, the bigger the males’ balls, the sluttier the females, and the bigger the average size ratio of males to females, the sluttier the males. We’re mammals. Let’s take a look at where we fall on the Slut Scale.

This is not for the readers of Omni. This is for the watchers of Oprah.

Some smarty-pants say I need a Ph.D to write pop science. But my five favorite science writers: Robert Wright, Howard Bloom, Timothy Ferris, David Quammen, and Judith Rich Harris don’t have Ph.Ds. Of the 30 contributors to The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2005, 22 don’t have Ph.Ds. The first writers to present evolutionary psychology to the mainstream market will not be academics. They will be humorists.

The future belongs to the synthesizers.