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How love evolved and what it replaces. |
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Why singing evolved, and how language grew from it. |
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Why men are less complex than women. |
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Why men rape. |
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What beauty and ugliness mean in evolutionary terms. |
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What humans see in gods, and what gods do for us. |
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Why humans succeed while other apes are going extinct. |
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Why we have big brains and short toes. |
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Why men can't smell, and what chimpanzees believe. |
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Why being in love makes you crazy. |
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When women lost reliable coital orgasms, they evolved passion as a partial replacement. That is, if you don't have a climax, you can still enjoy the intimacy if you love the guy. Passion can't cope with the partner's promiscuity, so passion demands monogamy. |
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But as primates we evolved to be promiscuous. Women's multi-orgasmic ability is a sign of that promiscuity, as is the male's temporary impotence after his orgasm, both evolved to ensure that we would have many partners. So we have a deep conflict in our instincts, with both men and women wanting the promiscuity we evolved for, and at the same time wanting monogamy for passion's sake. |
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These conflicting instincts have shaped our evolution for about the last four million years. The most important single product has been obsession - the ability to focus attention, and a hunger to do so. When focussed on what we desire we call it "passion". Obsession also gives us science and stalkers, religion and religious zealotry. It is a very mixed blessing. |
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Illustrations are explicit, and the book might not be suitable for young readers. It may offend the devout, though that wasn't my goal. It covers details of tissue evolution and Big Picture summaries, balances anatomy and emotion, alternates between fossil evidence and conjecture. The thesis is serious, but there's room for humor. Whoosh, we need some. |
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This is not new science. I use the same evidence others have used to support the Mighty Hunter approach. But my conclusions are radical, and suggest that hunting is a trivial result of our evolution, not its impetus. This is scenario-building, not basic research. The result is a new framework that could revolutionize our self-view. If you hate it, call it Pseudo-Science. If you like it, call it Philosophy. |