Quotes from David M. Buss

Identifying evolutionary origins of nefarious behavior in no way justifies or excuses it.

As one woman noted, "The best way to get over one man is to get under another."24

The modern proliferation of porn consumption, in short, has escalated both conflict between the sexes and the harms of female-female competition. The technology behind porn is modern. The sexual psychology it exploits is evolutionary ancient.

Female choice about when, where, with whom, and under which conditions they consent to sex is the deepest and most fundamental component of women's sexual psychology. It is a fundamental human right. Although men have coevolved strategies to undermine it, that freedom of choice should never be compromised.

Most sexual predators are people we know in settings we normally inhabit -at a party of a friend, at the department of a date, or in the sanctuary of our homes.

A woman's happiness increases when the man brings more economic resources to the union and shows kindness, affection, and commitment. A man's happiness increases when the woman is more physically attractive than he is, and when she shows kindness, affection, and commitment.

No human is without imperfections. Drawing attention to them magnifies their importance, especially if attention is drawn to efforts to conceal or disguise a weak spot.

Given the prevalence of snake fears among humans and our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees, it is reasonable to believe that those who were indifferent to dangerous snakes were more likely to die and less likely to become our ancestors.

Fears are like physical pain. Although they feel unpleasant, they help us to avoid the events that interfere with our strategies of survival.

In light of men's emphasis on fidelity in a committed relationship, displays of fidelity should be paramount in women's tactics of attraction. Faithfulness displays, such as honesty and trustworthiness, signal that the woman is pursuing a long-term mating strategy and that she is doing so without deception and exclusively with one man.

Men's affairs are more likely to be purely sexual; women's affairs are more often emotional.

Men's banter, when it does not center on sports or work, often revolves around the appearance and sexual availability of women in their social circles.

The centrality of fidelity shows up indirectly in the tactics employed by women to derogate mating competitors. Saying that a rival cannot stay loyal to one man was judged to be the single most effective derogation tactic for a woman to use in the marriage market. Calling a rival a slut, saying she was loose, or telling others that she slept around were in the top 10 percent of effective derogation tactics.31

People high in mate value, those who possess desirable characteristics, are in great demand. Appreciating their traits is not enough for successful mating, however, just as spying a ripe berry bush down a steep and treacherous ravine is not enough for successful eating. The next step in mating is to compete successfully for a desirable mate.

Modern men have inherited from their ancestors psychological mechanisms that not only give priority to resources and status but also lead men to make great sacrifices and take great risks to attain resources and status.

features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone, and features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level. These physical cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive capacity, constitute key elements of male standards of female beauty.

Women past and present face the adaptive problem of choosing men who not only have the necessary resources but also show a willingness to commit those resources specifically to them. This problem may be more difficult than it seems at first. Although resources can often be directly observed, commitment cannot. Instead, gauging commitment requires looking for probabilistic cues. Love is one of the most important cues to commitment.

Our ancestors had access to two types of observable evidence of a woman's health and youth: features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone, and features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level. These physical cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive capacity, constitute key elements of male standards of female beauty.

The effectiveness of playing hard to get as a long-term attraction technique stems from providing men with two key reproductive assets: desirability on the mating market and a signal that he alone will have sexual access.

Children strengthen marital bonds, reducing the probability of divorce, by creating a powerful commonality of genetic interest between a man and a woman.

Men worldwide want physically attractive, young, and sexually loyal wives who will remain faithful to them over the long run. These preferences cannot be attributed to Western culture, to capitalism, to white Anglo-Saxon bigotry, to the media, or to incessant brainwashing by advertisers. They are universal across cultures and are absent in none.

Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources.

The simple explanations that are so frequently proffered to explain murder—poverty, pathology, parents, media violence—fail crashingly at getting to the heart of the darkness, the underlying architecture of the murdering mind.

Los restos paleontológicos revelan pruebas fascinantes de agresión entre hombres. Se han hallado trozos de lanzas y cuchillos alojados en los restos de cajas torácicas humanas. Las lesiones de cráneo y costillas son más frecuentes en el esqueleto masculino que en el femenino, lo que indica que el combate físico era una actividad fundamentalmente masculina.