What are the best books on evolutionary psychology?
I’d like to divide three classes of reasons to read a discipline:
1) You are curious and want to begin reading by something 100-500 pages. I’d go for Pinker’s 1990′s “How the mind works”
2) You want to screen the whole field, by reading something 500-1500 pages. I definitely recommend David Buss 2004 “The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology” which defeats the usual SI recommendations on the field
3) You want to know the state of the art of the field, so you really need something that is very recent, say from the last 2 or 3 years at most. This is me. Please help me if you know what should I read. 300-1500 seems a good interval.
Just for a comparative, in Cognitive Neuroscience, 3 would be 2009 “MIT The Cognitive Neurosciences IV”
Post your opinions on what 1 2 and 3 should be for Evolutionary Psychology.
Oh, and if you like Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (a field so new I don’t know any of the 3) please post yours too...
Ummm....
Back in the day we had a big discussion, I voted for this book, I think Vassar was against it because no one else had read it. Great to see it there!
It would be nice if you added this to the thing we have that’s like this.
I didn’t because this does not go according to the rules, also I’m suggesting different reasons for reading the books than those stated there. But thanks :)
For 1., I read Robert Wright’s “The Moral Animal”, and I found it to be quite good. I didn’t read “How the mind works” so I can’t compare, did someone read the two and can tell which is “best” and why ?
(How do I delete comments?)
Thanks for making this, I was vaguely disappointed that the “best textbooks on every subject” thread didn’t have an evpsych section, and I didn’t expect to get a response were I to ask for a recommendation there.
What are these?
See e.g. here, in particular:
Barrett, L. et al., eds. 2002. Human Evolutionary Psychology. Princeton University Press.
Buss, D. 2005. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Wiley.
There are also pages for Intro and Auxiliary reading; I’ve also heard an old one, Tooby and Cosmides’ The Adapted Mind, recommended.
Ah, thanks. I can’t navigate my way around the new SIAI site...
Well, one would think they’d be here, but actually nope.