Chapter 7 Further Reading

This list moves from foundational texts to critiques to alternative frameworks. Read with the chapter's core question in mind: what can evolutionary psychology legitimately claim to explain about attraction, and where does it overreach?

Foundational Evolutionary Psychology of Mating

Buss, D. M. (1994). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Basic Books. The most readable and comprehensive statement of the standard evolutionary psychology account of human mating from its leading practitioner. Buss presents the cross-cultural research, parental investment theory, and the good-genes framework in accessible form. Read critically: the explanatory framework is elegant but, as you now know, the empirical picture is more contested than the book suggests. Fourth edition (2016) addresses some critiques. Essential primary source.

Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871–1971. Aldine. The original parental investment paper. Academically demanding but extraordinarily influential. Even reading the abstract and first few pages gives a sense of how powerful a simple theoretical insight can be. Understanding this paper is understanding the engine of most evolutionary mating psychology.

Miller, G. (2000). The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. Doubleday. Miller's ambitious argument that female choice drove the evolution of specifically human cognitive and cultural capacities — language, music, humor, creativity, moral sensibility. A genuinely alternative evolutionary account that foregrounds female agency and male display. Controversial and not fully supported empirically, but intellectually provocative and highly readable. Challenges the resource-competition narrative while remaining evolutionary.

Feminist and Critical Evolutionary Science

Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Hrdy's case for cooperative breeding as central to human evolution — and for the cognitive consequences of growing up in a world of multiple caregivers. Beautifully written and scientifically rigorous. Her argument reframes "what makes us human" away from male competition and toward the cooperative social intelligence that emerged from allomaternal care. Essential reading for any serious engagement with evolutionary approaches to human sexuality and connection.

Fine, C. (2017). Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society. W. W. Norton. Fine's most recent and most focused critique of the testosterone narrative — the popular claim that testosterone explains sex differences in risk-taking, competitiveness, and sexual behavior. Fine is a meticulous scientist and a sharp writer; she does not deny sex differences but demonstrates repeatedly that the evidence for testosterone as their primary driver is weaker than advertised. Important complement to Buss.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Basic Books. More theoretical than Fine, Fausto-Sterling argues against the sharp biology/culture binary at a foundational level. Her work on intersex conditions and on the developmental biology of sex challenges the idea that there is a stable "biological substrate" that culture then modifies. Dense in places but intellectually transformative for students willing to engage with the underlying philosophy of science.

Broader Context and Critique

Hrdy, S. B. (1981). The Woman That Never Evolved. Harvard University Press. Hrdy's earlier synthesis of primate female behavior, making the case that the "coy, passive female" model was empirically unsupported across the primates. The book that launched a reformation of how evolutionary biologists thought about female reproductive strategy. Some sections are dated but the core argument holds.

Eagly, A. H., & Wood, W. (1999). The origins of sex differences in human behavior: Evolved dispositions versus social roles. American Psychologist, 54(6), 408–423. The key social-role theory paper, including the reanalysis of Buss's cross-cultural data showing that sex differences in mate preferences decrease as gender equality increases. Technically a journal article but accessible to undergraduates. The definitive empirical statement of the social-role alternative to evolutionary accounts of sex differences in mate preferences.

Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205, 581–598. The foundational philosophical critique of uncritical adaptationism in evolutionary biology. Gould and Lewontin are not rejecting natural selection but demanding more rigorous standards for claims that a given trait is an adaptation. The "just-so story" concept as applied to evolutionary psychology derives from this tradition. Accessible and beautifully argued for a scientific paper.

On the Replication Crisis in This Domain

Gangestad, S. W., et al. (2019). Do women's mate preferences change across the ovulatory cycle? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 145(5), 404–429. The comprehensive meta-analysis that largely dismantled the ovulatory-cycle-shift literature. Demonstrates how an apparently robust finding — replicated in dozens of studies — failed to hold up under rigorous examination. Essential reading for understanding the Replication Crisis applied specifically to evolutionary mating psychology.

See also: Appendix A (Research Methods in the Science of Attraction) for guidance on evaluating evolutionary claims in the primary literature.