This book presents the view of evolucionist pychology. These authors have some excellent points, especially concerning social anthropology and some of Freud's misinformation, and anyone interested in psychology should not miss this book. However, once the authors have given an overview of behavior in the species homo sapiens, their theories cannot be translated to the individual. They have not taken into consideration the complexity of the human brain and the resultant behavior, especially the ability to symbolize. I felt like I was reading a book on how to assemble a Swiss watch using a pick and shovel

I've now read this book about 10 times over the past three years while teaching an evolution of human behavior course at the college where I'm employed. I was motivated to say a few supportive words about this book because I have become convinced of its groundbreaking importance in the scientific literature. After a decade of reading and studying evolutionary anthropology/psychology I find no other single book that so clearly and convincingly articulates the application of Darwinian thinking to modern human behavior. It is a perfect text to use with students as it not only teaches a wealth of information, but is also an excellent example of critical interpretation of data. Many of my students have commented on the power of this book to transform them into appreciative readers of science. From my own experience, it is one of a few books that transformed me from a standard social science undergraduate--mired in theoretical mush--into a more critical and thoughtful scholar. The other books that influenced me were by Sarah Hrdy, Don Symons, and later, Jarome Barkow et al. I encourage anyone interested in human behavior to read this book. Bring along a collegiate dictionary if your vocabulary is anything like that of my undergraduates!

Although nominally about the material designated in its title, this book is no mere collection of statistics, but contains wide-ranging discussions of evolutionary psychology, which Daly & Wilson use as the framework for an understanding of the phenomenon of homicide. So if the propensity to homicide is bred into the human race by millennia of natural selection, so also are other phenomena with which society struggles, like sexual harassment. I guess my point is that this book is about homicide and more. It's also lucid and even witty. It reads like a detective story, which indeed it is, but the culprit here is manifold rather than singular. The book will also furnish guidance to those who subscribe to the view that arrest, conviction, and incarceration will have only limited effects on the homicide rate, and that homicide be treated also as a public health problem. Daly & Wilson consider anthropological data from around the world and historical data as well to draw their inferences. In the most common type of murder the perpetrator and victim are young men who know each other and are in (ostensible) conflict over some trivial matter. But Daly & Wilson say that murder is the rare outcome of a common situation where two men face off against each other with each trying to appear more formidable and dangerous than the other. The (biological) reason they behave as they do is that such behavior causes them to acquire (or keep) control of the reproductive behavior of their women. Think about it: wimps, who allowed their women to be taken away from themselves, left no wimp genes in the gene pool. Of course there are a lot of other kinds of murders: children are occasionally murdered, sometimes by their natural parents, but more often by step-parents. It appears that there is a basis for the ever-popular myth (in many cultures, not just western European) of the evil step-parent. Husbands murder wives, but this seems to be a case of violence being used to control the wife's reproductive behavior, and the violence gets out of hand. When wives murder husbands (a rarer occurrence) it tends to be defensive in nature. Wonderful book! Very thought provoking.

This is a very intellectual discussion and exploration of sex and its role in evolution and behavior. It's well-written, easily understood, informative, coherent, and memorable. I read it in 1985 and remember much of its material.

I read this book in a college class. Mind you, I didn't read most of my college books, but I couldn't put this one down. It gives a clear, intelligent, remarkably well-documented, fascinating description of how sex evolved and how that evolution effects the behavior of everything from bacteria to modern social humans.

This book is very accessible to any reasonably educated reader, regardless of your knowledge of evolutionary biology. And each idea is punctuated with a fascinating example taken from nature.

Why do lightning bugs flash, and what controls the pattern to their flashing? Why are there two sexes? Why is a red sports car sexy? You'll learn the (evolutionary biology) answers to these and countless other intriguing questions. This book is a great lesson in evolution and a revealing investigation of why aniamls do the things they do, from an African hamster to... you.

First, the book is very informative on the subject of step-parenthood as a risk factor for child abuse and neglect, and should be read by anyone interested in the subject. The authors do a respectable, if sometimes overly defensive, job of answering critics of their data. It is clear that anyone disputing this correlation is not only ignorant of the data, but blind to obvious trends in the society around them. It is an excellent introduction to the literature on the subject. However, most of the conclusions the authors draw from these data and the obvious correlation between reconstituted families and abuse are not supported in any way. The book suffers from the same problem as most (though not all) of the books in this series; namely that the authors are not evolutionary biologists, and do not have a thorough understanding of evolutionary theory. While they make a very convincing case for using step-parenthood as one of the most important risk factors for abuse, their attempt to explain it is hardly convincing. Despite the citing of numerous animal examples, they show no reason why this behavior would be positively selected in humans. To be biologically selected for in a Darwinian sense, this behavior would have to impart a reproductive advantage to the abuser, or a survival or reproductive advantage to the genetic offspring of abusers, over the population at large. There is no evidence of this being the case. On the contrary, given the social stigma against abusers, any biological selection acting on this trait would seem to favor non-abusive step-parents. It surprises me that, as psychologists, the authors ignored much more likely explanations, such as the fact that step-parents are entering a family that has suffered extreme emotional upset (divorce or death, etc.), which will put significant strain on what is already an artificial relationship, or that the genetic parent in this case is often likely to choose a new mate based on their own emotional or financial needs rather than on the needs of their children. The lower level of parental care is not necessarily a selective trait, it is simply the lack of activation of the positively selected trait of the parental bond. Since many reconstituted families never produce genetic children of the step-parent, there is always a reduced selection for any trait they possess. While I believe that, as products of evolution, we can and must understand ourselves and our societies in the context of Darwinian theory, I strongly feel that anyone seeking to do so must not ignore the fact that evolutionary theory is not simply "survival of the fittest", and is in fact at least as complex as their own chosen field of expertise, often not even understood by biologists outside the sub-field of evolutionary biology. While I believe evolutionary theory will ultimately revolutionize the social sciences, those wishing to apply it should either make themselves expert in it first, or seek the collaboration of those who already are, rather than depend on their own incomplete understanding of it.

A short, interesting booklet on the sociobiology of step-parents. Darwinism predicts step-parents will be less caring than biological ones, and this seems to be the case. The authors carefully distinguish research on other animals and humans. Certain to enrage a number of "social science" types.

Before reading this book, I was already familiar with Daly and Wilson's work from Wright's Moral Animal, Pinker's How the Mind Works, and others, so frankly, this book did not contain a lot of new ideas for me. By no means do I intimate that The Truth About Cinderella is not worth reading. Definitely, definitely, read this carefully, especially if you harbor any doubts about the validity of their findings, as they very neatly refute critics.

The authors provide an ingenious explanation for the prevalence of evil step-mothers in fairy tales: Mama's telling the bedtime stories. Much as I admire this explanation, I wonder if there isn't more to it than that. Let us leave fairy tales aside, and look at history, which abounds with stories such as that of Duke Wen of Chin/Jin (7th c. BC). As a prince, he was forced to flee for his life after his brother, the crown prince, had been coerced into suicide by his father, at his step-mother's connivance. You can probably provide similar stories. Now, please tell me a story about the mother who puts her own child to death at the step-father's insistence.... Does this reflect a sexist bias in historical records? Perhaps Daly and Wilson have tacity answered this question in another context: "the payoff coming in the form of an increased chance to sire the mother's next baby." Kids are easy (and fun) to come by once you've got a woman, so maybe earlier kids can be sacrificed to keep the woman (who may have cost a pretty penny) compliant.

To their discussion of why step-families do generally work out after all (I call attention to the ubiquity of infanticide, as shown by Marvin Harris in Cannibals and Kings), I wish to add my speculation. Due to our big brain, human birth has always been a dangerous event for women. I suspect step-families were far more common in the paleolithic than now. Men outlived women ¡Xprobably outlived several wives. We know from the archaeological record that old people, unable to fend for themselves, were taken care of ¡Xobviously, by the young and healthy. What I suggest, without a shred of hard evidence, is that young men who looked after old men were aware that one day they might find themselves dependent on the younger generation. It made sense for them to tolerate step-children as well as their own gene-bearing children, because some old-age insurance is better than none at all.

Finally, I would like to add that Weidenfeld & Nicolson's Darwinism Today series is thought-provoking, pleasingly designed, and well-printed, just the thing to stuff into your pocket to take somewhere to read and ponder.

Have fun!

Thornhill and Palmer (TP) review tons of evidence on the nature of rape. The plusses of the book are (1) they show that rape is a sexual act directed at obtaining pleasure rather than being an expression of male power; (2) they show that as predicted by evolutionary theory, males are evolutionarily adapted to rape, whereas females are not. These are terribly important facts, and they go against the accepted wisdom in contemporary sociology and some brands of feminism; but the accepted wisdom has no empirical basis whatever, in the authors opinion and mine as well. The minuses of the book will appear trivial to those who believe in the accepted wisdom and are shattered by its demise. But they are important nonetheless. Most important, TP view males as touting up the costs of raping (pleasure, possible reproduction) against the costs (getting caught and punished). If the benefits exceed the costs, the male rapes. This ignores all forms of interpersonal interaction except the brute physical. For instance, the 'cost' of causing harm to an innocent victim, the 'cost' of seeing a victim helpless and miserable because of your actions, the 'cost' of having the self-image as a sexual predator, and the like, are simply not part of their model of human motivation. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that people are self-interested in the way depicted by TP. Males who use TP's cost/benefit analysis are better described as psychopaths or sociopaths rather than normal humans. This is because in the course of our evolution, humans have picked up fundamental prosocial traits. When these are absent in a person, the person is an abnormal, pathological case. In short, an alternative to TP's characterization of rape is that rapists are males who have abnormal personalities (including but not limited to psychopathy) the allow them to act out on urges that all males have but in most are countermanded by basic human sympathies. TP do a disservice to evolutionary theory, which they use to portray humans as a sorry lot of selfish brutes. The fact is that evolution produces morality and beauty, sensitivity and love, just as much as rape, murder, and indifference.

Nature, and natural selection, are not PC. We and all livingcreatures exist because of this process. It is impossible that ourenduring behaviors have not been shaped in some way by natural selection. This does not mean that all human behavior does not occur within an environment, which is crucial. Genetic determinism does not exist. That said, I don't think that Thornhill and Palmer have shown that humans male have an actual adaptation to rape(may instead be a by-product of male sexuality). I think that this book should not have been written at this point. The evidence is not there, which is not to say that it will never be there (to be fair, the evidence for social scientist's theories is even more flawed). More research is needed, which the authors concede, but it is somewhat damaging that this book was written before having this sort of proof. If the hypothesis has not yet been supported, why write a book about it that attempts to be comprehensive? This book does a good job of explaining the position of evolutionary psychology/sociobiology and of illustrating the ways that is has been misrepresented to support a feminist/cultural anthropologist political agenda that seems to not be interested in basing itself in science. It is amazing to me that most people cannot comprehend the obvious- the mainstream refusal to understand the difference between ultimate and functional causality or the naturalistic fallacy is a formidable obstacle. Nature is amoral. Humans have a capacity for morality. If rape is shown to have some biological basis (which it must), this says nothing about excusing men for their behavior. We can all agree that rape is wrong and something that we must work to prevent. Studying ALL of the reasons that compel men to rape, is crucial, and finding the ultimate, biological reason is the best way of all we have to learn how to prevent human rape. END

As a woman, a feminist, and a sociologist by training, I still find nothing offensive in this book. Thornhill and Palmer have tackled one of the most sensitive and inflammatory topics that exist and it is only natural that they will receive a lot of knee-jerk reactions to it. However, this book is well-written, well-researched and thought-provoking. Whether you ultimately believe their theory or not, T and P will make you seriously consider some of your assumptions about rape.

I'm not sure if some of the other reviewers have actually read this book, because nowhere in it do the authors assert that women are to blame for their rapes or that they provoke them through sexy clothing. They do suggest that sexy clothing might be one of many factors that lead men to rape and that women may CHOOSE to use this knowledge when deciding how to dress for certain situations. Why this particular issue is so offensive boggles me. I have had many people suggest that I take a women's self-defense class to help me avoid and/or survive an attack. But that suggestion in no way implies that if I *don't* take a self-defense class I am somehow responsible for causing my own rape. Similarly, women can arm themselves with the knowledge that how they dress may have an effect on how some men behave towards them, without being responsible for that behavior in any way.

I'd advise anyone interested in this topic to read the book carefully and thoroughly. Does the book prove that rape is an evolutionary adaptation? Of course not, but it certainly offers some compelling evidence and an interesting alternative to current theories on rape.