Preview & Excerpt
Hi, everyone from Ximalaya Book Club. I’m Zhichao Wei, the producer and host of a premium paid Ximalaya program called “Zhichao Wei: An In-Depth Guide to Cutting-Edge Psychology Books.” In today’s episode, I’ll be talking you through David Buss’s book Evolutionary Psychology.
“Evolutionary psychology”—I’m guessing that if you’re even a little interested in psychology, you’ve probably heard of it. Evolutionary psychology is a very important branch of our field. Its most basic idea is this: over the past several million years, our human ancestors faced all kinds of challenges to survival. Those who adapted to them survived, and they carried psychological mechanisms that helped them deal with those challenges. Those mechanisms were passed down, all the way to us modern humans. Inside our minds, we preserve plenty of ancient relics. So if we want to understand what modern humans think, feel, and do, a lot of the time we have to look back through our ancestors’ evolutionary history for the answers.
What makes evolutionary psychology so memorable is its incredibly powerful explanatory power. A lot of human behavior looks pretty nonsensical at first glance, but once you understand it against the vast sweep of evolutionary history, its meaning suddenly becomes crystal clear. Evolutionary psychology seamlessly connects the mechanisms of human psychology and behavior to the history of human evolution—and evolution is unquestionably the common foundation of all the life sciences. In that sense, evolutionary psychology may be the bridge that finally unifies psychology with the life sciences.
David Buss’s Evolutionary Psychology is the most authoritative work in the field. At many American universities, when they offer a course called “Evolutionary Psychology,” this is the textbook they use. Buss is now a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an authority on using evolutionary psychology to explain relationships between the sexes, and you could even call him one of the founders of evolutionary psychology.
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