Never understood evolutionary psychology and for that matter any kind of psychological or evolutionary theory because all such theories explain things post facto and don't have any predictive power. It is easy to cook up a theory to explain a whole bunch of facts and evolutionary psychology is one such theory so any time it comes up I completely ignore it.
Predictions: even in a society which has eliminated gender discrimination and doesn't impose any pressure to conform to stereotypical roles, there will be more female teachers and more male engineers, more women than men will quit their jobs to raise children, and males will be overrepresented among criminals, the homeless, and the very top achievers in most fields.
Granted that will be hard to demonstrate, because the very fact of any disparity in outcomes can also "prove" that discrimination still exists.
Evolutionary psychology already supports predictions concerning the mating behaviors of all other animal species; there's no special additional reason to make the theory more complicated by excluding us from it.
Do you honestly need a theory to tell you that all animals like to procreate and a lot of what they do is motivated by this goal? If there is something I'm missing let me know but I'm pretty sure that sums it up. I guess the great success of evolutionary psychologists has been to convince university boards that they deserve their own classes and grants. Other than that it is a pretty vacuous theory that extrapolates from the selfish gene theory.
I think this pretty much seems up your attitude towards that field: Without ever having read said book, I pretend to know what it's about and therefore deride the whole subfield of evolutionary psychology.
Sperm Wars is one of the books that has blown me away the most in my life, as it changed so many preconceived notions on why humans act the way they do. Please don't judge a book by its cover. And its thesis is of course way more interesting and complicated than you make it out to be.
I have read the book. I read the out of print edition at my local library and I have read at least 10 other ones on the subject of evolutionary psychology so don't tell me what my attitude toward the field is. If you want to learn what the subject is about and have your mind blown then I recommend "Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Introduction", then we can talk about my attitude. It is actually a book on the subject and not a collection of erotic vignettes interspersed with "insights" from evolutionary psychology.
Sorry, I misread you then. So please do tell me why you call them "insights" and what's wrong with evolutionary psychology in a nutshell - I'm genuinely curious. Also, Sperm Wars might be excellent material for changing preconceived notions of laymen in the field, but not so much for people who are well versed? Because despite recognizing that people want to procreate and that this influences human behaviour, the book puts forward several arguments I as a laymen wouldn't have recognized myself.
I call them "insights" because very little of what's said in Sperm Wars is backed by hard science and the rest of it is just surface level observations from evolutionary psychology, i.e. women prefer the best genes for their children but they want dependable partners to provide for those children but like everything else in life women can't have their cake and eat it too.
Highly recommend Sperm Wars. Interestingly, it was recommended to me from Tucker Max's reading list, who is the topic of the linked "The New Dating Game" article.
