The most interesting bits on sex from "Human Nature: A Critical Reader" Laura Betzig ed.
Good — I have a solid picture of the volume's contents now. Let me give you a rich thematic overview of the sex-related material, which is genuinely the core of the book.
The volume is saturated with sex — Betzig herself notes that the book's Darwinian framework essentially treats reproductive competition as the master key to human behavior, and roughly eight of the classic papers study reproductive competition and mate choice directly. Here's a walk through the most interesting clusters:
Mate preferences and the Buss revolution (ch. 18–19)
David Buss's study testing evolutionary predictions about mate preferences across 37 cultures is the centrepiece of the "modern societies" section. The basic finding — that women weight resources and status more heavily than men, while men weight youth and physical attractiveness more heavily — had been predicted from Trivers's parental investment theory, and Buss claimed cross-cultural universality for the pattern. His self-critique ("Just another brick in the wall") is interesting precisely because he doubles down rather than retreats: he frames the study not as finished science but as foundation-laying for evolutionary psychology as a field. The ambition is programmatic.
Sexual fantasy and the Ellis/Symons chapter (ch. 20–21)
This is one of the richest pieces in the book. Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons argue that sex differences in sexual fantasy reveal design features of the mind rather than cultural scripting. Men's fantasies are heavily visual, involve more varied partners, and show much lower emotional involvement per encounter; women's fantasies are more narrative, relational, and emotionally textured. The method is clever — fantasy, unlike behavior, is relatively insulated from social constraint, which makes it a better probe of underlying psychology. Symons had already argued in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) that male and female sexuality differ so profoundly they might as well be different biological phenomena. This chapter is a more empirical follow-up. Their self-critique ("Unobtrusive measures of human sexuality") pushes toward using even less reactive methods — porn consumption patterns, personal ads — to study desire without self-report distortion.
Courtship stages and the parental investment model (ch. 22–23)
Kenrick, Sadalla, Groth and Trost examine how selectivity varies by relationship type. The finding is counterintuitive enough to be memorable: women are not uniformly more selective than men across all contexts — the sex difference in selectivity is greatest for long-term relationships (where parental investment is highest) and shrinks or reverses for short-term ones. Men become much more selective when they're thinking about permanent commitment; women relax some standards for brief encounters but maintain others (physical dominance, genetic quality signals). The self-critique ("Where and when are women more selective than men?") refines this further into a contextual model that cuts against crude Venus-Mars dichotomies.
Rape and psychological pain (ch. 24–25)
The Thornhills' chapter is the most contentious in the book and remains so. Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill and Randy Thornhill argue that the psychological trauma of rape is not uniform but varies in ways predicted by evolutionary theory — specifically, that women of peak reproductive age suffer more, and that married women suffer more than unmarried ones, because the fitness consequences (suspicion of paternity, loss of mate investment) are greater. They are treating psychological pain as an adaptation, not just a byproduct. Randy Thornhill's self-critique is genuinely interesting — less a retreat than a clarification that the claim is about the design of the pain response, not about rape being adaptive for the rapist (a distinction critics frequently collapsed). This is the volume's sharpest illustration of how Darwinian reasoning generates predictions that feel cold even when they might be true.
Purdah, paternity confidence, and dowry (ch. 29–30, 35–36)
Mildred Dickemann's classic on purdah and veiling is extraordinarily ambitious — she treats female seclusion across Islamic, South Asian, and Mediterranean societies as a male strategy to guarantee paternity in contexts of high polygyny and intense male status competition. The argument links bride-price, dowry, virginity requirements, and physical sequestration into a single Darwinian framework. Her self-critique ("Cleo unveiled") is wonderfully self-aware about the limits of applying optimization logic to historically embedded institutions.
Gaulin and Boster's piece on dowry as female competition (ch. 35) flips the usual frame: rather than dowry being men extracting resources from a bride's family, they argue it represents women competing for high-quality husbands in polygynous or effectively polygynous systems — investing resources to secure a mate who will invest in offspring. Their self-critique asks the sharper question: when is a husband actually worth fighting for, economically and reproductively?
Polygyny, inheritance, and historical power (ch. 31–32, 37–38)
Hartung's work on polygyny and the inheritance of wealth argues that biased inheritance toward sons in polygynous societies is not arbitrary but tracks reproductive payoff differentials between sexes — a wealthy son can father vastly more children than a wealthy daughter. Betzig's own chapter on Roman polygyny (ch. 37) and its companion ("Why a despot?") is her home territory: she argues that extreme political power throughout history has been used primarily for reproductive access — harems, concubinage, and differential reproductive success for dominant males — making despotism essentially a mating strategy writ large. This is the Betzig thesis in miniature, connecting the micro-economics of sex to world history.
Hrdy on mothering, infanticide, and fitness tradeoffs (ch. 39–40)
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's chapter on delegated mothering — wet-nursing, abandonment, infanticide — is perhaps the most morally serious piece in the collection. She treats maternal behavior not as uniformly nurturant but as conditional on reproductive and resource circumstances, which makes infanticide legible as a tragic optimization rather than pathology. The self-critique ("Mainstreaming Medea") is superb — Hrdy explicitly takes on the cultural discomfort with viewing maternal ambivalence through a Darwinian lens and argues the discomfort is itself ideologically motivated.
Taken as a whole, what's striking is that the book is less about human nature per se than about demonstrating that human behavior can be predicted successfully using natural selection theory — which is both its strength and, to critics, its limitation. Sex is the primary arena where evolutionary predictions are most testable and most confirmed, which is why it dominates. Betzig makes no apologies for this: she thinks the Darwinian framework has genuinely solved the deep problem of why we do what we do, and the sex chapters are her best evidence.
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